Week 10: Gaming and Virtual worlds

This week’s activities are very different because they are in a virtual world - Second Life. It was very new to me and it was great fun to have a try myself in the workshop session. Although it was a bit confusing at the beginning because there were a lot going on in front of your eyes, I got there in the end (Thanks for Katharine’s help).

The second life hospital in the Imperial College Island was very impressive. I think it is very useful for medicine students. They can have a hands-on experience in a similar environment of real life, which is said to be quite hard to achieve in reality. I think It is a very modern style to teach students in high education and satisfy their needs in more possible ways.

Week 8: Social networking

Last week’s activities were about social networking. I have set up my page on Ning (a social network) as required and become friends with a few colleagues on it. It was quite straightforward. I think Ning does not offer very complexed design of the page and various functions as other networks do, e.g. facebook, my space. Those are good to keep contacts with friends and keep them posted what I am doing, especially when we can’t see each other very often.  Also they are great to share photos and media files. I don’t know how useful this will be for libraries, but I guess it is a way to get closer to our users and exchange ideas in a broader environment.

Week 7: Podcasts and multimedia

I am falling behind:( Last week’s activities are about podcasts and multimedia, I found some parts are a bit tricky. For example, adding an audio to the blog, there were a number of ways to do it. But I wasn’t successful at the first time. I don’t think the instructions are very clear. However, the instructions for adding a video file are good, so I was inspired by that and then managed to add the audio file at the similar way.

Also I think there were a lot to do in terms of the activities, and finding a good audio and video files took longer than I thought.  But I have done them at last and now moving forward to this week’s tasks:)

Podcast

Classical music

Podcast

Splendid speaking

Libraries in 2010

Week 6: Online applications & tools

This week’s activities are about online tools. I get to choose three activities in which I am interested out of seven. I went to the self-paced session for these activities. I felt that I did not have enough time to try each one. But I managed to set up my ‘igoogle’ webpage: http://www.google.co.uk/ig?tab=mw&hl=en&source=iglk

I was familiar with some activities, such as uploading a photo from mobile phone to PC, toolbars, and Firefox browser. So I had a look at the widget activities and mashups activities. They seem to be quite technical. I think I have to spend some more time on these ones to get a better idea. 

In addition, I think the videos in this session are used very well to introduce and explain different terms and functions.

Week-5: Social bookmarking & tagging

Last week’s activities are concerning bookmarking and tagging. I created my own del.icio.us account. I have learned how to bookmark and tag websites to my account. It is so easy to use. Whenever I see a useful website, I can bookmark it to my account. Not only it is useful to store all the websites I use together, but also I can share them with other users and browse their bookmarks to discover resources.

Tagging is like inserting a keyword. It gathers all the associated sites into a group and you are free to give a name featured by the group. The only thing to remeber is that ‘Do not leave spaces between words in the name if you have more than one word.’

Catch up week

Last week was a catch-up week for all the things we have learned so far.  I feel it was very useful because it allowed me some time to catch up and practise more. I was a bit pushed before last week since I work part time. Now It is great that I have done all the activities I was supposed to do! Also I had a go with some optional activities, which helped me to learn a few more functions and useful tips!

It is sunny again after the morning rain. I am looking forwards to a nice day and week 5’s activities!

3rd week – RSS

RSS is very new to me. It was great to have a go on the self-paced section last week. I now have loads of feeds coming in every day, a bit overwhelmed, had to delete some similar ones, because I got too greedy at the beginning… Oh well, it is a clever idea to gather all the infomation you want to see on one page so that it saves time of visiting different websites. The information comes to your door instead of being found. But the flaw is that you don’t always get what you want, or it ends up information overloaded… ‘I don’t have time to read all these’…  It can’t satisfy everyone, I guess.