How much is too much?

Well, it's been months and months since I've posted here. I look at the link on my iGoogle home page every day, and think to myself, "The last post talks about spring arriving, and here it is the dead of winter. I really should write something. But what?"

Something that's been percolating in the back of my brain has to do with all the connectivity we have in this modern age. Take me, for example. I have six email addresses and three telephone numbers, one of which is, of course, a cell phone with text messaging. I'm on Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Twitter. I have a blog, (actually two), a Bloglines account to manage my RSS feeds, and a web page. I'm sure if I thought about it, I'd have other things I could list, too.

But how much of that do I actually USE? Well, email, for sure. And I use all six of those accounts for various things - one is for my friends & family, one is my "accounts" address - when you have to use an email address to sign up for things (like Facebook) which I check less frequently (though I DO check it) - one is my work address, one is for my youth theatre group, and the other is sort of part work-related/part personal.

As for the rest - I get on Facebook infrequently, because it's blocked at work (yeah, I know I have a filter override password, but I don't like using it for something like that) and it loads really slowly at home for some reason. Takes forever sometimes! I have almost never used LinkedIn, and I follow some folks on Twitter (Sockington the cat is my personal favorite), though I seldom tweet myself.

I do tend to use Ning a lot; we use it for theatre-related things. It's a great way to set up a communication network for the kids in our show casts (thank you, Stephen Miller, for that wonderful idea!). We can post schedules, pictures, videos, exchange ideas, send messages. Works great!

The RSS feeds are useful; I do check my Bloglines, but once again, I need to pare that down. There are some feeds on there that seemed like a good idea at one time, but I don't look at them.

Some days, though, I simply feel overwhelmed by all the technology and, paradoxically, guilty that I don't use it more efficiently and effectively. Perhaps that's why I was so intrigued to hear about the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine when I was listening to NPR on the way to work yesterday. Apparently I'm not the only one feeling overcome by the thought of being caught in the Web!

A moment away from the server

Just needed a break from rebuilding a software installation. I'm totally redoing the WebOPAC - moving it from one version to a newer version, and unfortunately, that doesn't just mean an upgrade of the software. It's a whole new install, and then each of the 40+ sites needs to be individually rebuilt, the links changed on the web page, their visual OPACs transferred from the old to the new, etc. Tedious work. The installation resisted me for a long time and didn't want to work properly, but I finally got it to see my point of view. It does, however, still occasionally stop working just to show me it can.

Random thoughts:
Yes, there is justification for my having a Wii. Truly. Educause says so.

Busy week last week; I was out of the office to work on the kids' theatre stuff I do every summer. This year we actually ran two productions, which went VERY well! The kids were fabulous and I think they had a good time. I did too, all in all, but boy, was I tired when it was all over! I'm not sure I'm recovered still.

Panda watchers everywhere are zeroed in on the National Zoo in Washington and the Atlanta Zoo (in Atlanta, of course) to see whether Mei Xiang and Lun Lun, respectively, will "bear" another cub this year! Pandas go through all the symptoms of pregnancy whether or not they are actually expecting, so we'll just have to wait for a birth or cessation of symptoms. I'm hoping that Tai Shan (Washington) and Mei Lan (Atlanta) will both have new siblings this year! The other two zoos in the U.S. that have giant pandas, San Diego and Memphis, are out of the running - San Diego's Bai Yun is still nursing Zhen Zhen, and Ya Ya, the female in Memphis, didn't go into estrus this year. Well, she's still young!


In the meantime, we can look forward to a 1 year birthday celebration for little Zhen in San Diego on August 3rd!

:-)

Phew!

It is HOT. Hot isn't so bad; it's humidity that really gets us here, and it's also humid. Yesterday we had some thunderstorms go through, and that helped very briefly, but here we are today, back to 95 degrees and 36% humidity. Poor Miss Triscuit Cat, who is 17 years old, really minds the heat, and it was pitiful to watch her over the weekend as she just stretched out on her side in a position strategically located between two open doors and didn't move for hours. Bill finally was able to get the air conditioners in, and she's now back to normal! The other two cats don't seem to mind nearly as much...

My sister and her husband came to visit this weekend, and brought their Nintendo Wii. I need one. I NEED one. And no place around here (or anywhere else, from what I can tell) has any. So I now have a nifty little gadget on my Google homepage called "Nintendo Wii Tracker." It keeps track of when the elusive Wii comes into stock online so I can check to see if I can actually get one. You've gotta love gadgets!

Rich just handed me an article called "Wii Love Learning" from the June/July 2008 issue of "Edutopia." It's a short article on some classroom teachers in Indiana who use the Wii in the classroom. Now, I can see that entirely. My sister brought her Wii Fit component, too, and it tricked me into actually exercising. Here I thought I was just playing computer games, then all of a sudden I realized that the muscles in my legs felt like I had really done some exercise, and I was sweaty and out of breath as well. So if the Wii can trick a couch potato like me into exercising, why couldn't it trick kids into learning?

Sounds like fun to me!

RSS Revisited

I love my RSS feeds. You can learn so much stuff quickly just by glancing at the little synopses that are listed under the headlines. If I see something that looks interesting but don't have time to really look at it then, I can either mark it to keep it new so it doesn't disappear on me, or else I can email it to myself to look at it later. I've got a nice little folder in Outlook to file those emails, and I periodically take a moment or so to check them out.

Like today, for example. I took a little time to look through the folder, and found a reference to Time.com's First Annual Blog Index. It lists 25 of what it considers to be the top blogs in the blogosphere - quite a range of different topics, too! People are SO creative with their blog names sometimes..."The Velveteen Rabbi," "Freakonomics," "Web 2.Oh...Really?" You have to love it! Now, I haven't read most of these blogs, but I do intend to check at least some of them out!

Maybe I'll go do that right now.

Fun toys

My friend and fellow librarian Jill sent me a link a little while back to Big Huge Labs. It's affiliated with Flickr; if you have a Flickr account you can link to it and create really fun stuff. Actually, you can create fun stuff without the Flickr account, but if you have one there are some cool features like being able to upload pictures and find them again easily.

So far I've played with the Movie Poster creator, the Framer, the Jigsaw puzzle, and the Lolcat Generator. I used my cat Pierre as the subject for this one:

He's such a goon! And he doesn't even really LIKE pineapple.

Happy New Year

Here we are - another year! There's something really exciting about starting over again, I think. It's almost too bad that school years don't follow calendar years, but then again, maybe that's okay - it gives you two fresh starts in a year!

I don't have too much to say, just felt compelled to start the year out with a post. Guess I'm really already a day behind, actually, but I'll justify it by saying it's the first day back at work.

In any case, though, here's a pretty nifty little gadget - if you haven't seen YouTubeCatcher yet, you must! Unfortunately, our filter here at work blocks it, but you can try this at home!

http://www.youtubecatcher.com

This 'n' that

So it's been a busy couple of weeks, but if you asked me what I'd done, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you.

Ever have that experience?

Tonight we have our last School Librarians of the Southern Tier meeting for the year. Should be fun; tonight's session is kind of like a "show and tell" for librarians. People share projects, tips, things like that, and it's always good to see what everyone else is doing. Gives you lots of ideas for the upcoming school year!

Now, if only we could remember them over the summer...

My frustration from the last post is gone; YouTube is back. Apparently there were several people who complained to the right ears; I was not one, though, because by the time I'd cooled down enough to feel I could voice my opinion rationally and actually had time to go find our technology administrator, enough other people had beat me to the punch. I'm sure there are other things still blocked that probably shouldn't be, but for now, at least, I'm much calmer and happier.

Frustration

Okay, so this morning I went to look at a trailer for a documentary about librarians that's posted on YouTube and found that YouTube is now BLOCKED. Not only blocked, but blocked without any administrative override.

Frustrated is not really the proper word to describe what I'm feeling.

Sure, there's stuff on YouTube that's not educationally appropriate. There's stuff on the entire Web that's not educationally appropriate. But getting rid of everything just because you might run into something is just wrong. It's the old "throw the baby out with the bathwater" thing, and it doesn't do the kids any favors in the long run. Everyone's telling us we need to teach kids to think critically, but how does filtering do that? It teaches them they don't have to think; we're doing it for them. They don't have to decide if something is appropriate, valuable, or worth seeing because the filter - or those who are choosing which sites to filter - decides that.

If you don't want your kids to drown you don't fill in the pool - you teach them to swim. What's wrong with that?

Let me add "disgusted" to "frustrated."

There. I said it. In public and everything. Now maybe I'll feel better...

This is fun!

I've always wanted an avatar, and this morning one of my RSS feeds sent me to Meez.com, where I created the avatar at right. Very fun! Not that I really look like that, but I do have blue eyes and and a cat. (Actually, make that THREE cats. )

This particular image links directly to the web, but you can export your avatar to a file and use it in other ways. Might be a fun thing for kids to do and put in one of those "all about me" PowerPoints, perhaps?

Hmm. Something to think about.