Thing Eighteen!

18. YouTube & Other Online Video.

I have enjoyed YouTube for awhile even though I do not spend too much time there. Yesterday I was interested to hear in the news that Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota and his opponent Al Franken were the first Senate candidates to participate in a YouTube challenge, and enjoyed viewing "Got a question for Al Franken and Norm Coleman?". I added the Coleman/Franken video to the Thing 18 post. We enjoyed hearing the first debate of the Senate candidates at Farmfest in August, and saw Al Franken at the Minnnesota State Fair on the weekend that Senator Coleman took his daughter to college.

Some of the first YouTube videos I watched were on libraries and librarians such as the popular Grand March of the Librarians mentioned for Thing 18. I did not recognize any Minnesota librarians. At a conference that I attended we saw examples of libraries successfully incorporating YouTube for contests and promotions. YouTube provides a useful avenue for teens to use libraries. A Vision of K-12 Students Today and the video response on YouTube were thought-provoking to watch.

For our annual "Faculty Duty Day" this year, we were addressed by MnSCU Chancellor James H. McCormick on YouTube in a presentation of 5 minutes and 57 seconds.

I found YouTube useful for sending a link to our book club members to see Jeanette Walls and her mother after reading The Glass Castle last spring.

My sister sent a message after she posted a video on YouTube of a Bill Clinton appearance in Minnesota.

In Thing 18 I learned that a Minnesota native is responsible for YouTube. Cheers to St. Paul Central High!

Thing Seventeen!

17. ELM Productivity Tools.

At our library I make extensive use of Proquest, Ebsco products, and NetLibrary. When we do class presentations, we instruct and encourage students to use them. NetLibrary is a great resource for our students to have access to current books.

Because I am more familiar with the higher academic resources, I concentrated on searches using the Gale Discovering Collection geared for students from grades 8-12 and did searches in MasterFILE Premier tonight. After hearing Nancy Pelosi on NPR this noon, I did a search on her as well as on other names and topics. I must admit that this was the first time that I logged on the ELM Portal on my personal computer at home using my public library barcode number. My barcode number from my college id. card has been in my memory for years, but I never even thought of using my public library number to access ELM databases from home. Searching different databases gave me a new perspective of the many resource available to us in Minnesota.

I had not tried the Page Composer or RSS Feeds in ELM yet, and was surprised by features that I did not even know were available. Besides doing an account and a new folder, I also saved an article to my Del.icio.us account. The search for images is easy to do in the EBSCO databases. Tonight I spent a lot of time on Facebook as I wanted to have a "head start" on Thing Twenty so that I have something to report by the time I reach that THING. I will return to Thing Eighteen soon to do more exploring.

LATER: I returned to ELM on 09/14, and had time to work more with the search alerts feature, a very useful one.

Thing Sixteen!

16. Minnesota Library 2.0.

Assignment Calculator & The Research Project Calculator.

Thing 16 provides great tools to assist students with assigned projects. I was familiar with them, but now looked at the teacher resources and links provided. Last semester I did a "fake" assignment where I was given reminders based on the dates that I submitted. I am not sure if many students or faculty members at our college know about these tools, so think that we could promote them in the coming year when we do class presentations. Many of us are "last minute" people, so need prompts to aid in deadlines.

If I have projects to do in the coming year, I may try using the tools again. The 23 Things project would even be a possibility to do with reminders for each project so all are done by the deadline.

Thing Fifteen!

15. Online Games in Libraries.

The topic for our annual Minnesota (ARLD) Library spring conference at the Arboretum at Chanhassen in 2006 was "Games Librarians Play: Discover Your Inner Geek." Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire gave fascinating presentations. I was not an online gamer, so Thing Fifteen is a new experience.

In the June 2008 issue of MINITEX Reference Notes, Kristen Mastel gave a good account of a session she attended on Digital Gaming in Libraries. (Midwest Library Technology Conference.) I added a link on the sidebar of this blog for Thing Fifteen to a Macalester College Library orientation game.

I was in Puzzle Pirates just long enough to see what it is like. The only other creature in my first room was a rodent. When I left there, I went to a room where I tried on clothing. I could not buy any because I had no booty. My information is saved, so I can return sometime if I decide to become more of a "gamer".

After Puzzle Pirates, I decided to try Second Life. At first my e-mail address was said to not be valid, but I have now received my registration confirmation, so will be interested to see what adventures await . . .

Thing Fourteen!

14. LibraryThing.

A few years ago, I established an account with LibraryThing, and just entered a few sample titles. After learning of the Shelfari site, I started entering books there last October, and currently have 144 titles. While LibraryThing is more geared to library folks, there is a charge after 200 books, while Shelfari is free. My Shelfari bookshelf is on the bottom right of this blog.

I opened a new account with LibraryThing, and added books that I had read this summer. Now I was excited to read that the founder will be at MLA. I plan to attend in November.

LibraryThing would be useful for student use to do lists of book titles. When I checked out the LibraryThing blog, the fist title I noticed was The Making of a Surgeon, a book I read years ago, and have listed on my Shelfari site. The author's daughter was at Girls State with my sister.

Of the five books that I completed reading this summer, 5,276 readers have added The Memory Keeper's Daughter to LibraryThing, but I was the first one with Hidden Heritage. Look for my five favorite books this summer near the top of this blog next to Thing Twenty-Two.

Thing Thirteen!

13. Try out an Online Productivity Tool and look at others.

If I did not already have an iGoogle page, I might have selected PageFlakes or MyYahoo! Although they have the same functions, they have different features and appearances.

The Ta Da List would be useful for the many quotes that I have saved in a thick file and written down in several books. That could be a project for next summer! I also looked at Remember the Milk, and read that Scrybe is not taking any new members. The list of Top Ten Productivity Web Sites included some that I had already browsed.

Later: On 9/14, after trying several countdown clocks, I decided to go with a "plain look" from Widgetbox. The Election Day countdown clock was added to my blog until Election Day, 11/04/08.

Thing Twelve!

12. Digg and other social media sites.

With the Olympics beginning in a few days, I had fun looking at the Olympic logos from 1896 to 2012 on Digg. My mother talked about the 1936 Berlin Olympics because she was excited to see hero Jesse Owens at the University of Minnesota afterwards. I remembered the 1984 Los Angeles logo because my sister and her husband attended and gave me a mug.

I am not too thrilled about Reddit where the current top listing is on Paris Hilton's comments on a John McCain ad. With the coverage of such topics in other media, I don't plan to spend much time on Reddit to rank news stories that I am not concerned about . . . Newsvine had the same top story tonight, but I like the site's organization better. At Mixx, I did not even see any listings for Paris Hilton, but enjoyed an article on the 7 Myths of Crowd Psychology. Newsvine and Mixx have local news listings, but there was nothing exciting for my zip code . . .

StumbleUpon was new to me, and fun to browse. I have had accounts with the New York Times and Washington Post for several years, so am familiar with their sharing features and most popular articles. Even though I am happy to learn of the other sites mentioned in Thing Twelve, I will probably continue to use the newspaper sites more. I did add a link for Newsvine to the sidebar for Thing Twelve so will try to check often to be more familiar with the site.