Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Thing 23! Yahoo!

Well, I made it. There was a point when I thought I never would, but here I am. Thank goodness I'm not afraid to ask for directions along the way when I travel through new territory.

When I started out I set a goal of becoming more comfortable with emerging technologies. I feel I've accomplished that goal somewhat. What I'm still a bit uncomfortable with is this style of learning. I can be very independent and self-responsible, but I really enjoy learning from a living, breathing teacher instead of a machine. I made it through the maze, but this still isn's my preferred learning modality.

I think the thing I enjoyed the most was playing with creating my own radio station on Pandora. The things I'm most likely to use again are the skills related to blogs and wikis. I feel sure I'll be called upon to participate in them in my work as an LA, perhaps on a team or in another learning opportunity.

Stuck in OverDrive

I hit a snag with this thing when I found out that CCPL computers are not authorized to download from Overdrive or NetLibrary. I was also a little frustrated by the tutorial on the Overdrive website. The first direction tells you to go to the homepage of "my digital library" and shows a web page with that title. I assumed this was the name of a website and spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get to it.

Luckily a co-worker took pity on me and explained that I should go to CCPL's website, click on the EBooks link, and then I saw the Overdrive link referred to in the tutorial. All of that just to find out that I couldn't get access to it after all.

I spent some time looking through the catalog on Project Gutenburg. Most of the authors and/or titles that I searched for are not included. It seems to be mostly classics or scholarly works. I was surprised for example that "To Kill a Mockingbird" wasn't included.

At this point I feel a little dubious about how useful this tool would be for me personally or professionally.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

podcasting 2.0

OK, here goes another try. I tried to paste the URL for a RSS feed I located on podcast.net onto my blog. It didn't show up as an active link. I was able to link it to my bloglines account though and that worked just fine.

podcasting

http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/index.xml

Baby Hummingbirds Part II

Posting a video - take two! Let's see if it works this time.

I found another beautiful video - this one made by an ametuer. It shows the activity of two babies with their mother.

Crossing my fingers...

Another lesson

Well, I just learned that you don't know if a video will work on your blog until after you post it there. I guess I'll go fishing for another one and hope it works better.

Attenborough - Hummingbirds

Amazing! Beautiful! What outrageously gorgeous creatures these hummers are...not to mention folks like Jesse who provide for them. I chose this video because of my fascination with hummers. Every spring I look forward to the first sighting at the feeder outside my diningroom window. I enjoy watching them all summer and plant my flower boxes especially for them. I'm always a little wistful when they take off in early September.