Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Thingy 21

I am not a gamer and I can imagine if I ever tried to play a serious online game I would be useless, my hand eye coordination is pretty bad in real life to say the least. I tried to send a penguin to space online once, but he ended up belly flopping into the water, hopefully he was happier there!. Gaming is a very interesting topic and I found the lunchtime talk great. I can see how a whole generation of people who are gamers in their social lives will learn certain skills that I certainly don't have. However I don't believe at the moment there is any place for gaming in libraries, again I think it is crossing the boundary between education and social life. Also to design a really good educational game you would need to bring in some one who really knew what they were doing. I can imagine students don't really want to play a game to learn something, it would be better if the learning was something they didn't realise they were learning like the hand eye coordination, I am sure that could be expressed in far fancier language but hopefully you get my drift!

Monday, May 11, 2009

Thingy 20

Twitter not for me I'm afraid. My life is too boring to constantly update people on what I am doing, something like Twitter would just make me depressed as I would start to feel I should be doing more with my life. I registered, sent one message to Sinead, who is sitting beside me, logged off, never to return to Twitter again! I would rather leave people with the illusion that I lead a very exotic lifestyle

Friday, May 8, 2009

Nearing the end of the road, thingy 19

You can't run. skip or jump these days, without someone being able to throw a message at you in some sort of format before we know it we will be getting personalised messages over the radio and TV. In saying that, I was going to set up an instant messaging service for the library, using meebo. I had the code for the little box and all. However the problem is time, if you are going to offer an instant messaging service in the library, someone would have to be instantly sitting there to answer the message, while you could limit the instant messaging hours, it would be hard for anyone to sacrifice the time. Instant messaging is handy in a social context, only realised recently they offer a type of instant messaging service on facebook if two friends are on line at the same time. Then again you could always text, phone, or email the person, I suppose the advantage of instant messaging is that is what it is, instant!

Thingy 18

I have had a facebook account for a while now, I had never used it for work just for social stuff. I don't really see a place for social networking sites and academic libraries, I could see library staff setting up a social network amongst themselves but not with users. To me it is a bit like the library wanted to have a presence in a pub, when students are doing social things, I doubt they ever think of the library. However I am not really a social network type of person, I lost interest in facebook fairly quickly even as a social place, so maybe it is just me. The one thing I really dislike about facebook are all the applications, you seem to have to download an application for everything. Someone recommended Ning as a good network for work colleagues and that doesn't seem to have as many applications.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Number 17 thingy

I am excited about downloading my first audio book, except you seem to have to pay for them all. When I am not feeling so tight, I am definitely going to download one. I heard a lady from South Dublin libraries speak at a library seminar about the audio books that they had introduced into their public libraries, I have to say she was a brilliant speaker and was really enthusiastic about the whole process, so looking forward to day UL gets a few.

I'd have a fair bit of involvement in the electronic books that we get here in the library, generally in terms of access problems. Electronic books are handy for academic study but I don't think I would enjoy reading my own books online. Also ebooks don't look so nice, I always dreamt of having loads of lovely book shelves in my house, doesn't matter if I never read any of the books, they look good! Superficial or what!

Thingy 16 and counting down!

Luv the podcasting! I have never downloaded a podcast onto my iPod, but I have listened to them on my computer. Dead handy if you want to hear something that was on a radio programme. I'm sure some lecturers do podcasts of their lectures, students are so lucky these days!

Thingy 15, a near escape!

Just cheated on this and followed what Sinead Justine and Claire did, like the voki site, good fun. Near escape though, I published the voki link on the library news website, thankfully I realised my mistake in seconds, bit of a panic though, convinced a million users were looking at the library blog at that exact second, wishful thinking me thinks

Friday, May 1, 2009

My 14th Thingy experience and this one is making me hungry

Plenty of cookies in the digital hub! I'd luv if cookie monster came to UL accompanied by the Swedish Chef, wishful thinking me thinks.

I have hardly ever used YouTube, i.e. I never really gone into the site itself, only really look at it when people send links around. Definitely could be used in a library context, for orientation videos and stuff, in fact we could all go mad uploading videos. Though if I find photos of myself hard to look at it, don't think I could face videos.