In closing...

I was happy to find that I already knew about a lot of the stuff that we covered on Learn & Play. And I thought I was so behind! But I really enjoyed learning about the stuff I didn't know about. The only problem was finding the time to do it. We are all stretched pretty thin these days, and some of the stuff wasn't always easy, especially when it messed up, like the wiki sandbox.

I'm especially excited about Google docs, Google reader, wikis and blogs. I've discovered lots of cool blogs, though they tend to be more about personal interests than professional. I'm even thinking about starting up our own family blog.

I think the most important thing to come out of this is that we'll have a common language now. We can talk about wikis and blogs and podcasts to our colleagues and customers and we'll know what we're talking about. I think that's the biggest loss for the people who didn't do it--this whole CML conversation that they've missed out on. It's also been fun (even though I'm late to the game) to go through this all together, as a system. I think it's been extremely useful. Hooray us!

MOLDI

Wow, yes, as everyone has pointed out, what a horrible acronym.

I'm very familiar with MOLDI, and have recommended it to friends who live in Mt. Vernon when they're going on a car trip.

MOLDI will be MUCH more useful to me personally now that it's compatible with Ipods, since I have one and have a long commute. In fact, I was thinking about ordering in some books on cd for our upcoming holiday travels, but I think I'll try Moldi first. CDs are so often scratched up, and they're easy to lose on a long journey. And my ipod will remember where I stopped in the story, too.

I think it's so important that we offer this to our customers. I hope it continues to get better & easier to use. A lot of customers are very frustrated by all of the stuff you have to download. I'm not even going to try it from work because I know it will be a total pain--I do my downloading at home.

Podcasts

Once again, I'm amazed that people have the time in their lives to even search for podcasts, let alone listen to them all...

My husband is a techie and a Mac user, and we have an ipod, so I am intimately familiar with Itunes. It is awesome. The great thing about itunes (and most mac products) is how intuitive it is--heck, I just stick a cd into my husband's laptop and it automatically downloads it, without me having to do anything at all. How cool is that?

I poked around on the podcast search tools, but I didn't really find them very helpful or easy to use. I am much more likely to go to a site I know and trust--particularly NPR--and download podcasts from there. Other news organizations as well.

Posting podcasts of booktalks and other presentations is an excellent use of this technology for CML.

YouTube is awesome

Well, of course I know YouTube! Youtube has become a really important thing in our culture. Just look at the Jeremiah Wright video that surfaced on Youtube. And also that amazing video of the baby wildebeast who was caught by lions, then crocodiles, then escaped them both! I heard that National Geographic has now made a film about that, and it's the first example of a film being based on a Youtube video.

We've also watched things like news shows we wanted to watch but missed, and the tv station's website does a crappy job of it. Especially during the election--i think we watched one of the infamous Catie Couric interviews of Sarah Palin on Youtube. We also use Hulu to watch some tv episodes of the office that we've missed.

I saw an entry on a colleague's blog about finding old Sesame Street clips on youtube! I would love to look at stuff like that for fun, but I just have no free time right now.

CML power tools

I was already familiar with most of the things on the power tools page, but I explored a few I hadn't heard of: MAKE, for example, has some cool stuff on it, but it's kind of wacky and not organized well, it seemed to me.

I think the library toolbar is great. What a great thing to provide for our power users! We should be right up there on their toolbar with a google search box and all the other cool stuff.

Web 2.0 tools

I ended up looking through the entire list of award winners--I was surprised to see that I knew lots of them. I guess I'm more savvy than I thought! All of the ones that were possibly work-related I was already familiar with.

I took a look at Backpack, an organizational tool. It looked interesting--but really, we deal with SO much information, and so many multiple projects, especially at the management level, that it would just be more cumbersome to have to put them all in a separate place.

I was interested in the calendar aspect of the site--but since Google is, as we know, The Company That Does Everything the Best, I will use Google calendars instead. My husband has been nagging me to do this for a while so he won't forget when he's supposed to take Leah to choir practice and that sort of thing, so I guess it's time to do it.

I was also interested in the games site--zango?--that has all kinds of free games. My 10-year old is always looking for online games and god knows what she's stumbling upon. That will be a good site to check out.

Wiki Sandbox is frustrating

Well, I kept trying to get into the CML sandbox, so I requested access and kept getting an email that said, in a kind of annoying happy voice, "Guess What! You already have access to this wiki! Isn't that awesome??!!" or something like that.

But then I'd click on the link it gave me right there in my email, and it says, in a not so very nice voice, "You do not have access to this wiki. Go away." Or something like that.

After this happened several times, I gave up. OK, so obviously I shouldn't have waited until the last day to do a bunch of the things, but hey, I'm busy.

But I won't give up on Wikis! I still look forward to using them in our library system.