23 The end or the beginning....

We've made it! Didn't think it was going to happen, especially as the end was drawing near but we pulled out all stops and made a big effort. It has been a worthwhile journey and we have learnt lots which we didn't know before - particularly liked Bloglines, Del.icio.us and Zoho Writer and the image generators are a bit of fun. We could see ourselves playing around with these. The most annoying thing about the learning program was the amount of time it took - 15 mins per day was wildly innacurate. By the time we listened to a podcast, read articles or watched training videos and then explored a site, 15 minutes had turned into an hour or more! And then there was signing up to all sorts of different sites and remembering logins and passwords. For those of us who don't like to subscribe to a myriad of sites this was a bit of a barrier to overcome too.

Anyway we have come through the other side and feel confident in our knowledge of these applications and can even boast that we now know more than a certain teenager in the household....!

As this is our parting post we thought we would add another photo of us as we are very cute.

22 eAudiobooks

We had a bit of a browse around the eAudibooks site and although there's nothing there that we fancy listening to ourselves we can see that it's a great way to supply titles which may be out of print. The other great advantage is that there is no worry on the part of the borrower about having to return their items! We could see real uses for audiobooks in the area of travel guides -instead of lugging several travel guides on holiday relevant bits out of several guides could be loaded onto one's iPod and listened to at leisure while touring. Don't know why we always think about things in a travel context!! Anyone would think that was all we wanted to do!

21 Podcasts

We have had a look around both Podcastalley and Podcast.net and can see that there is a lot of interesting material out there waiting to be listened to. We had added a Rick Steve's travel podcast to our Bloglines earlier when learning about RSS feeds but have now added a podcast called Talking with Tallis : Listen to conversations with thought-leaders spanning Web 2.0, Libraries, and the Semantic Web - should make riveting listening! Checked out some Book Review podcasts and even heard Nancy Pearl delivering her weekly book review - libraries could certainly make links to these sorts of podcasts available to their users. Also, there is great potential for libraries to make podcasts of their in-house programs e.g. Storytimes, Book talks, Author talks etc. and thus reach a far wider audience than those who physically attend.

20 YouTube

It's easy enough to search on YouTube and I suppose some may see it as worthwhile pastime but ho hum once again who wants to sit in front of a screen all their life?? We can't really see any real application for it in a library setting but maybe we're just not visionary mice. We found a natty video of a singing mouse who gets his cheese but unfortunately comes to a sticky end - we did debate amongst ourselves as to whether we should post it, but, ahh what the heck. However embedding the html text wasn't quite so straight forward and we were grateful for the Help page on YouTube.

19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

We are fast running out of time to complete our learnings so we didn't spend a lot of time exploring but went straight to the award winners. Naturally the travel category caught our eye and from there we spent a bit of time exploring Realtravel - looks good and we think we may spend a bit of time in the future browsing this one. Handy for the keen traveller who wants some inside information on travel destinations and hotels etc. There is the opportunity to develop your itinerary, search for the best hotel and flight deals and read other traveller's blogs for tips. There's different ways of searching too - by destination or type of holiday e.g beach, safari etc. Check it out!

18 Web based apps

We like it! Having never heard of these type of applications before this was very exciting. The best feature is being able to access a document from any computer. The toolbar was straight forward enough and actually even easier to use than Word, although at times it was a tad slow to respond due to the internet connection - need to explore working offline to see if this changes things. The concept of being able to share documents and have others make changes to a document could be really useful.

17 PBWiki

Well we added our blog to PBWiki Learning 2.0 wiki and think it worked - except the brackets are stil appearing??? Don't know about that one...
Had a play and added one of our recent favourite travel spots.

16 Wikis

Wikopedia has been a firm favourite with a certain younger member of our household for quite a long time so we do know a little about wikis. Some of the uses which libraries have been putting them to are quite interesting. Our pathfinders could be presented in this way and maybe a review wiki around the book of the month?

6 More Flickr Fun

It seems we didn't do this bit so had to take a bit of a back track. We had a look around FD Toys and had some fun making a magazine cover - very natty! And here it is:

15 Library 2.0

Many of the fun sites and tools we have been using for the first time in Learning 2.0 are commonly used by the youth of today, and this is why we need to understand what they are and think about how we may be able to use them to communicate with and attract young people to be virtual if not physical users of our libraries. This being said, the traditional library as a community space and our traditional services such as HLS and adult and children's programs, should not take second place to the latest techno trend. We need to be adept at providing services and access to information in the best possible way to suit our varied clientele.

14 Technorati

Well... er what can we say? Technorati is probably cool for those who like to blog and search for and read other people's blogs but quite frankly we found it a very boring looking site. We get the concept but really there's got to be better things to do than search for blogs!We have had fun with a lot of the learning 2.0 exercises up until now but Technorati is not for us.

13 Tagging and del.icio.us

We can see real uses for this, one of the best being able to access our favourite websites on any computer. Also great for finding new sites tagged by others with the same interests as us - whether it be hobby or research related. We particularly liked the Discovery resource Social Bookmarking in Plain English - it was a very useful but simple visual explanation of del.icio.us.

12 Rollyo

Well we think we have mastered Rollyo and do see that this could be quite useful to have a search engine comprised of a very specific set of sites which cover one's area of interest. We have created a search engine to help us look for our next Villa stay in Italy - not only are we well read mice but well travelled too.
Adding sites to make the search engine in Rollyo was pretty easy but we were glad to have the instructions on how to add our searchroll to our blog, otherwise we would have been stumped!

11 Library Thing

We really liked this one - gave us a chance to catalogue some of our favourite reads (well read for mice, I hear you say?). Particularly like the Suggestions feature and will use it to find similar books which may appeal. You can find our library at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/suesa

10 Image generators

This is more like it - we definitely see how we could be creative and have some fun playing with images. As we are very pressed for time we'll leave the fancy stuff for later and make do with this indulgence. You can whip up your own at

http://www.glassgiant.com/chocolate_bar/

8 & 9 RSS Feeds

Well it's been awhile since our last post but life has been busy. Finally got around to playing with RSS feeds and OK it's easy enough to do once you create a Bloglines account. It obviously has its uses for those who like to be glued to their computers but frankly I think we'd end up 'marking as read' most of the info just to clear it out! Did have trouble trying to add photo pages from Flickr. One of the training modules did explain how to do it but It didn't work for us - this is where frustration sets in and we decide that it's easier to remain simple mice rather than technorodents. Had to get help to show the list of feeds on our blog - wasn't a simple process.

Here we are, Ruby on the left and Phoebe on the right.
And putting this photo on the net would not have been possible without the digital camera - a wonderful invention. We were a little slow on the uptake at first and needed some convincing that a digital camera was the way to go, but now there's no stopping us! There's no limit to the number of photos we can take of ourselves, and if there is the odd dodgy one (most unlikely, given the subjects), one click and it's gone!

Phoebe and Ruby have fun with Flickr

Yeah, right! We mice may be able to blog but that doesn't mean we dig it. We know the world is a better place because we have shared our existence with everyone out there and it may be thrilling to have our 5 minutes of fame, but really, is 500 new blogs created over the week a great achievement or just 500 more bits of useless info (sorry to all those who have posted words of great merit) added to the internet??? But tsk tsk, our cynicism is peeping through.
Anyway, tried to play around with Flickr and s'ppose it has some useful applications. We found a very cute manx mouse included in someone's collection of photos. Isn't he adorable!
Thought you might also want to have a read of our favourite poem 'To a Mouse' by the bard Robbie Burns - so sweet of him to write a poem about us timorous little creatures. Obviously this has nothing to do with Flickr, but what the heck, we're having fun with links!

We are two adorable mice and our names are Ruby and Phoebe. We are extremely well looked after and live in considerable luxury. I am Ruby and I am quite fat because all I do all day is eat and sleep. Phoebe, my friend, is a manx mouse so she has no tail. She is a lot smaller and thinner than me because she is a real gym girl - always pounding away on the wheel. You should see her go!