Final Thoughts on this Semester of Project Play

I have had a wonderful time Playing this semester. I appreciate all of the time and effort that Beth and Stef and Joy have put into making this a true learning experience for all of us.

The Seth Godin video is wonderful. It is a slightly different expression of the meaning behind one of my favorite quotes. The version I like is a quote from recently departed wise man Arthur C. Clarke: "Bring me into the company of those who seek the truth and deliver me from those who have found it." I think that "those who seek the truth" are the curious and "those who have found it" are those whom Godin calls fundamentalists. I prefer the company of the curious, and strive to be one of them.

I think that one of the tools that I have found the most useful through Project Play has been del.icio.us When this started I had an account, but I didn't use it much and I didn't "grok" why I should. But I use so many diffenent computers that it has become my mobile link list. I use it all the time.

And I have come to really appreciate tags. I used to dismiss them as undisciplined and unprofessional. Perhaps they are. But they are also very useful. Last night Pete referred to the keywords we use on Fox Cities Online as tags, and although I never thought of them that way before they most certainly ARE. Now if we could only figure out a way to generate a tag cloud out of the FOCOL database...

As I contemplate a future some day where my computer tools will have to be completely self provided these things that I'm learning about will be very useful to me.

Here at APL we actually do use a wide variety of these tools to make our services work better and our internal communications more effective. But we haven't deployed many in publicly visible areas yet. That's an area we need to work more on.

YouTube

I've seen cool things done with YouTube, and I do use it to find things that I hear about on the web or in conversation. I missed Obama's speech on race, for instance, and intend to go out and watch it on YouTube. I have little doubt it will be there.

And you can certainly find pretty much anything you're looking for.


In another blog I wrote of the flock of starlings I saw around my yard last week. This is a video of another amazing flock.

Screencasting

There are probably many uses for this in libraryland. Sara, our webmaster, created a really nice screencast of instructions for people adding events to our new online calendar. I found several of the examples in this lesson to be pretty slow to load and the first one, CuePrompter, never really seemed to be able to keep up with itself. As Stef mentions in her podcast, there can and probably will be a variety of problems with using this technology for a wide audience.