Techno Iolanthe

Well I decided to play around with Mango Languages from the Web 2.0 awards and have found a wonderful, useful and extremely easy to use site for learning languages. I played around with the French lessons and it was a great refresher course and would be great for first time learners. There is a lot of repitition of phrases and how they are used but it switches between having to translate between English first and French first so you really get to learn the phrases. I can see how this would be great for learning how to speak a language.

I had been introduced to Google Docs fairly recently but both that and ZohoWriter seem to be very useful tools when it comes to creating and editing documents online. I will definitely be using these in the future for documents that I need.

I am sure everyone has heard of Cuil by now, but I figured it would be a good blog. I have been messing around with it and find it fairly useful and easy to use. I like the way it returns searches and links them to other possible searches. I think this alone would make it a good tool when trying to find information about an overall subject from the beginning. I hope other people enjoy it as much as I have.

Wikis are probably one of the most fascinating ideas to come around in a long time. When looking at them you have to take the information with a grain of salt, but they are surprisingly accurate when it comes down to it and give you a good starting place for research. They also would be great when trying to flesh out ideas in a committee, everyone could post their ideas and see how they get fleshed out more by other people. One interesting thing, if you don't happen to have an internet connection in a meeting it is easy to have a wiki on a memory stick so you can still access it during the meeting to make changes.

Reading some of the articles got me to thinking about some of the things we had been talking about in the meetings about the building expansion and what we need to change about the library to make it more of a priority for the university as a whole. I think libraries in general need to start rebranding themselves. It is great and all to have these wonderful technologies for the learners but until the learners realize that it is there and that people who work in a library aren't generally your hair in a bun librarian, they won't see a need to visit the library, much less support it. If we can change this idea of what people think of libraries (or rebrand the library if you are thinking in business terms) then I think that in the future libraries will once again become the biggest hub of learning, like they should be, not just a stopping point along the way.

So Technorati seems like a site that could be rather addictive, because there is always more you want to see on it. I have been crusing through some of the blogs about different subjects and it seems easy and quick (most times) to link to different subjects/tags. I could see how it would be easy to spend a lot of time there.

I can see how Del.icio.us can be a very handy internet tool. It is easy to learn and use. Here's a link to mine.

Today I was messing around with Rollyo and I believe it could be very handy for when wanting to search many sites at one time on a particular subject. It is easy to make your own roll for searching. Here is mine.

Well today I have been messing around with LibraryThing, it can be useful when trying to find similar books to what you like, or if you want to keep track of what you have read.

I have been playing around with RSS feeds, Google Reader in particular, it is pretty interesting. Makes it much easier to find any info that I am looking for, and updates are easier to get. I found a few library related feeds, which seem to be interesting. I think topix is going to be a good site to know about as it is related to Richmond in general. It also has world and national news, which is great.

Well I have been playing around with some of the features of blogger, I have added links to other blogs by people from the library, hope you enjoy.

I have to say Flickr Color Picker fascinates me for the simple fact that if you are in a certain mood you can just click a color and find a picture that fits that mood. Pretty cool:

I have been playing around with flickr today and have to say I prefer Picasa to it. Either way here is my flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iolanthe78/

Well after watching/reading the lifelong learning info I find that most of them I already do, it made me begin to wonder how many people in our field already have a tendency to just do those things automatically because learning is important to us.

Hi! Welcome to my blog, I hope you enjoy some of my musings.