Now that you’ve blogged till your fingers have bled, made strange new friends in facebook, shared your personal family photos, and learned that del.icio.us is more than just a word to describe chocolate cake, its time to evaluate your experience.
Seriously folks, evaluation is a key component to any CE course. Please take a few minutes to tell us and MLA about your experience.
Now that you have had a chance to learn about mashups, sit back and think about the future of mashups and libraries.
In the future do you see mashups influencing (directly or indirectly) the library’s online resources such as database, integrated library systems, or other online tools? If so how, and what types of enhancements might be added?
Submit your thoughts and comments to this blog, hopefully we can think of some interesting ideas and generate some fun discussions.
Post your question in the comments area below. There may be a slight delay comments are being moderated to protect against spam. Remember to check back in the Comments for the response to your question.
Whoo hoo! You made it to the last week! Give yourself a pat on the back.
Time to think about mashups… You might be familiar with the concept of “mashing” two things together to form something new. The most common examples come from music and video. For example, here is a mashup commercial of Dolly Parton and Elvis in a car together promoting tourism in Tennessee. I doubt they were ever riding in that car together but through the miracle of modern technology, Dolly and Elvis were able to share a car ride through Tennessee.
Let’s get back to the technology and our Learning 2.0 journey. A mashup is a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source into an entirely new application. Content used in mashups generally comes from a third party via a public interface or API.
An API, or application programming interface, is a set of standardized requests which a software program uses to ask another program to do something. APIs are used by software developers in their source code of their program to open doors of other applications. Remember the UAB Catalog Search Application in Facebook that we tested out in Week 3? API is the reason that application (and many more) exist.
Some examples include:
The Codex Map database combines a book’s ISBN number with Google maps to allow users to browse for books by setting/location.
Rollyo (Roll Your Own Search Engine) allows you to search only those sites you select by creating custom Searchrolls – eliminating millions of hits that unrelated to your particular search focus.
This money track application from Politicalbase.com takes political contribution data from the Federal Election Commission and combines the data with Google maps to display current campaign contributions by state.
Qlock mashes up world time and Google maps to give you an interactive map indicating the exact time in any location in the world.
So why would you be interested in mashups? I am glad you asked! Here are some mashups in medicine and libraries:
HubMed - An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database
Go-go Google Gadget - John Blyberg: Google gadget to be used on personal Google pages that displays the hottest items at the library, newest material, your currently checked-out items, and your requested material.
eTBLAST - eTBLAST: A text similarity-based engine for searching literature collections (to find journals publishing similar research interests, etc)
Explore some different examples of Mashups via the winners of Mashup of the day’s Mashup awards: http://mashupawards.com/ or search for a Mashup that interests you at Programmable Web: http://programmableweb.com/. If you need help finding something, try looking at the Most Popular Mashups for suggestions.
Write about the Mashup you found on your blog.
Exercise 2 - Head over to Rollyo and do the following:
I am taking you to the “Explore Searchrolls” page to just search Rollyo. Type “librarianblogs” into the search box
Click the librarianblogs Searchroll. This is a Searchroll that will search select librarian blogs.
Search for “privacy”
Browse the results and write something about what these bloggers said about privacy in your blog.
Oh yes… it is time to remind you to submit your progress for Week 7 and since it is YouTube week it was way too tempting to not make you watch another video.
Here is the URL to submit your progess in case you don’t have it:
Now that you’ve found all of the funny videos on YouTube, listened to your favorite radio show as a podcast, its time to reflect and figure out is any of this stuff useful for libraries or is it just fluff?
Imagine posting instructional library videos on YouTube. Now imagine you have many instructional videos. So you make a channel and your patrons can subscribe to these videos and receive them as they are made. Is this a viable use or still fluff? Even if it is not fluff, is the video quality good enough for instruction?
Post your question in the comments area below. There may be a slight delay comments are being moderated to protect against spam. Remember to check back in the Comments for the response to your question.
Welcome to week 7 of our 8-week Web 2.0 discovery experience. At this point you have no doubt added several new words to your vocabulary. No, not words of frustration from these exercises, Web 2.0 words! This week’s words are “Podcasting” and “Online Hosted Video”. Podcasting is a method of publishing audio (and sometimes video) files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a RSS feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost.
Think of your favorite NPR show… What do you need to listen to the show? You need a radio to hear the show and you need to know the radio station that broadcasts the show. By the same token, to listen to a podcast you need a podcatcher (radio) and you need to know the podcast’s RSS feed (radio station). The most popular podcatcher is iTunes, but there are alternatives such as Juice or Odeo. Both iTunes and Juice require that you download a client on your computer. Odeo is a Web-based podcatcher which could come in handy if you are unable to download and install software on your computer.
Discovery Exercise:
Podcasting
1. Browse the podcasting directory site podcast.net (http://www.podcast.net/) and Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com). Don’t worry about subscribing at this point. Explore the categories and locate the Heath section. Take note of the topics available.
2. Explore one of the podcast sites below for Health Sciences. Listen to a podcast online.
3. Create a Odeo account
4. Within Odeo search for any topic that interest you (you might try library, health, or technology)
5. Click on one of the results that you find interesting.
6. Click on “Subscribe”.
7. Click on the “My Audio” tab. You will see your section along with the latest “show”. Future shows will be delivered here as they are made.
Online Hosted Video
Topic Introduction:
YouTube is the largest player in the web 2.0 video field. You can do more than watch 1970s TV commercials, or Local Commercials. In fact you can subscribe to channels developed to provide health information.
Look around YouTube for videos you find interesting and remember it is free, anyone can post a video so viewer beware. If you look hard enough you might find someone you know in a video on YouTube.
Discovery Exercise:
1. Search YouTube and find an example of a library using YouTube.
2. Find a video you like and want to share on your blog.
Blog Exercise
Write a blog entry discussing how you felt about the experience of using YouTube and what you think about this service. Do you see any potential uses for Podcasting in the library? If so what and why?
Advanced: (optional)
Try using the YouTube embed code to post the video into the body of your blog, this will require you to switch to the edit HTML code tab in your blogger account. Here are some more detailed instructions:
Over these past few days you all seem to have had a good time with online photo sharing. As Week 6 ends, remember to wrap things up by writing your blog post and submit it to the tracking form.
Instructions on how to do this can be found at http://sns.mlanet.org/snsce/jing/posting.html.
Rikke and I have enjoyed being yourinstructors this week
Now that you have been sharing your photos with colleagues, friends and family, it’s time for you to reflect. The reflection question is an optional part of the week, designed for you to take a step back from the ‘doing’ and think about whether or not this particular 2.0 tool is useful to your library.
Contribute to the discussion here by posting your comments to about photo sharing. Some questions to consider:
Do you think that photo sharing services could be useful for you? Why?
