1. My favorite discovery exercise was online productivity exercise I Had never used an online word processor before and I think it is one of the most useful web 2.0 type resources in the whole program. As I mentioned in my post for that 'thing' I believe it could be a very useful resource for patrons who have trouble moving data around.
2. This program has not affected my life long learning goals. I already had goals before this program and I still have them after.
3. My favorite take-away from this program was Pandora.com an online radio station that you can program by telling it what kind of music you like and do not like. Personally, that was my favorite part of the program.
4. To improve this program I would recommend a more careful consideration of the 'things' used and/or how one is directed to look at them. There is a difference between familiarizing ones self with a professional resource that may be used to help staff field questions, or may be useful to staff and patrons, and poking around a site like youtube, that you familiarize yourself with to help patrons navigate the site. I think that discovery excesses could be more carefully tailored to each purpose. Such as giving staff a question to answer using the site, or a specific topic to search. Having a reason to use a site or application in a specific manner would help familiarize a learner with it in a much more real way than just asking us to poke around.
5. I would chose to participate in future programs if offered CEUs.
6. 23 things, a bunch of moderately useful stuff you might not have heard of yet. (Hows that for marketing?)
-M
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Week 9 Thing 22 e-books and e-audio books
Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of audio books. I just don't pay attention to sounds the way I pay attention to written words. I end up letting the sound be background like I do with music and I concentrate on something else because I feel like I'm not doing anything when I'm just listening to a CD.
I also hate reading large bodies of text on a monitor. when ever I have an article or something to read online that's longer than a couple pages I print it out. So needless to say, all e-books and e-audio books are not high on my interest list.
That being said, I did find and download several audio books of the Maryland Consortium site. (the two sites listed for the 23 things do not appear to be available for Cecil County) I found several titles I was interested in, and three that I could download without a wait on a hold list. Project Gutenberg looked like it would have been a good resource when I was in school as it seems to have works with a more scholarly feel to them. I will have to look around more some time I am in a brainy mood.
I have one very real complaint however.
I INTENSELY dislike the fact that I have to download a special media player to listen to the books on cd. I already have 5 or 6 media players. I don't want a 7th. I want to use winamp or iTunes to listen to my book on tape. I'm sure they can figure out all the petty little 'you can't transfer or save or whatever this file' into mp3 format so I can listen to it like I do every other piece of audio I get off the net. Forcing users to download a special player limits the use of theses e-files as people at public computers (for example IN A LIBRARY!) may not be able to install programs on the computer they are working at. Mp3 format is so standard that almost any machine you can find today already has at least one program that can play these kinds of files.
Mp3 format. It's not to much to ask.
That's my 4 cents on the matter. You can keep the change.
-M
I also hate reading large bodies of text on a monitor. when ever I have an article or something to read online that's longer than a couple pages I print it out. So needless to say, all e-books and e-audio books are not high on my interest list.
That being said, I did find and download several audio books of the Maryland Consortium site. (the two sites listed for the 23 things do not appear to be available for Cecil County) I found several titles I was interested in, and three that I could download without a wait on a hold list. Project Gutenberg looked like it would have been a good resource when I was in school as it seems to have works with a more scholarly feel to them. I will have to look around more some time I am in a brainy mood.
I have one very real complaint however.
I INTENSELY dislike the fact that I have to download a special media player to listen to the books on cd. I already have 5 or 6 media players. I don't want a 7th. I want to use winamp or iTunes to listen to my book on tape. I'm sure they can figure out all the petty little 'you can't transfer or save or whatever this file' into mp3 format so I can listen to it like I do every other piece of audio I get off the net. Forcing users to download a special player limits the use of theses e-files as people at public computers (for example IN A LIBRARY!) may not be able to install programs on the computer they are working at. Mp3 format is so standard that almost any machine you can find today already has at least one program that can play these kinds of files.
Mp3 format. It's not to much to ask.
That's my 4 cents on the matter. You can keep the change.
-M
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