This week, we have kept the activities to a minimum as we realise many of you are busy trying to catch up on previous weeks.
1. Gaming Activity
Find an online game, play it and blog about your experiences.
2. Virtual worlds and Second Life Activity
Attend the workshop or read through the handouts from the workshop. Create a Second Life account, download the software, create an avatar and explore Second Life.
3. Activity for whichever topic you choose
Finally – please also blog your thoughts on the possible applications in libraries and/or higher education.
Welcome to Week 10: Gaming and virtual worlds. This week we will be taking a look at gaming and virtual worlds.
Please note, you can choose to look at gaming or virtual worlds – you do not need to explore both of them.
1. Gaming
Due to the focus of this week’s workshop being virtual worlds and Second Life, we ask that you do some exploring of your own on the topic of gaming and libraries.
Ok, this weeks activities are fairly straightforward. The second one is optional.
1. Set up an account with Ning and join the Learning 2.0 Ning network
Create your own page. Try to build in some features you have discovered so far in the Learning 2.0 programme. You will receive an invitation to join the network via your hotmail address.
2. Create a Twitteraccount and tweet for a week (Optional activity)
Twitter is a social networking site (that is also referred to as a microblogging service) that enables you to update your contacts on what you are doing at any moment in time. It works in a very similar way to your status update in Facebook.
In this activity you are asked to post updates for a week and find some people to follow. Try different ways of using Twitter – from your personalised homepage (e.g. Netvibes), from your phone, from your desktop or from a Twitter client.
Well we have made it to Week 8 of the programme – this week we will be learning about and trying out social networking sites.
What is a social networking site?
Social networking as a broad term can refer to the entire ‘Web 2.0′ phenomenon, but what we will be focussing on this week are usually referred to as social networking sites.
Many of you will already using sites such as Facebook on a regular basis. Basically, they involve you setting up an online account, and then building a profile to reflect your interests. You then add friends or contacts who can see your profile and interests and vice versa. The next step is to add various applications and join various groups if you are interested in doing so.
Check out this Commoncraft video for a quick overview of social networking sites.
Features of social networks
1. Choose your social networking site
This often comes down to what your friends and/or colleagues are using. However each does have different features/strengths, for example if you are really into music then Myspace is more relevant. Facebook has a more generic appearance, where as Myspace enables you to customise your pages.
2. Sign up for an account, build your own profile, personalise your pages (depends on the service as to how much control you have over this)
As with most of these tools/services – you go to the web page of the service you want to use and sign up for an account (another password to add to your learning 2.0 collection).
3. Add friends/contacts, join a group and add any applications you like.
Some people like adding applications, join every group they can possibly find and send lots of invitations to you. Others just have their basic profile and don’t do much more with their account. It is completely up to you.
Each site has their advantages and disadvantages – if you are not using any of them at the moment, it’s worth taking a look at a couple to see what you think.
How libraries/universities are using social networking sites
There are loads of examples of libraries and higher education institutions using social networking sites in various ways. This could be to set up an institutional network, such as the University of Wales at Newport who have a Ning site up and running as do the University of Bradford, or creating a library catalogue search option, such as the World Cat search for their facebook application.
See the Imperial College Library del.icio.us account for more examples, try the tag socialnetworking or facebook. Or do some searching of your own and tag some good examples.
As there’s such a variety of options this week – we haven’t always given you more than one activity in each section, as there will be enough there to keep you going and hope that this may give you time to explore some other areas too.
Set up your own personalised homepage in iGoogle, MyYahoo, Netvibes or Pageflakes. Add some (gadgets, widgets, flakes, modules) including (if possible) one of the tools you have discovered so far in the Learning 2.0 programme (such as an RSS feed, your email account, your del.icio.us bookmarks, your Flickr photos).
If you want some extra guidance on setting up your homepage check out these videos:
1. Blog about what you think the potential is for providing services via mobile phones to library users in the next couple of years. Next, find out about how one of the technologies you have learned about so far in the Learning 2.0 programme is being provided via mobile phone.
2. Take a photo with your mobile phone and upload it to your blog. As an optional extra try looking at a website via your mobile phone and blog about the experience (and it’s success or failure).
1. Go to Google docs and sign in with your Google account details (if you haven’t already got a Google account, you will need to create one).
2. Create a new document or upload an existing document.
3. Share this document with others – ask them to make changes to the document.
This week you get to choose what you explore. Please pick three of the following applications and tools to explore further. Feel free to do more than this if you want to. Remember to blog about your experiences!
Personalised homepages (also known as start pages or personal portals) allow you to create your own web page/s.
They are made up of a number of customizable pages including a main ‘home page’ where you can add blocks of content (known as flakes, widgets, gadgets or modules depending on which one you use).This could be anything from your Facebook account to an email account to a newsfeed from your favourite television station.They can be personal, or you can make them publicly available to other people.
If you have the technical skill you can even write gadgets/widgets/flakes to put into yours and other pages.
The fun (and quite useful) thing about these is that you can collect together some/all of the tools you have learned about/used so far in the Learning 2.0 programme into one place, for example your RSS feeds, your Flickr photos, your Facebook account, your email account.They can be used for your own personal online information, for information focussed on a particular group of people or as a public facing website.
Choosing which one to use is the fun bit. This is usually determined by what you like the look of, and which other web services you use. For example if you use loads of other Google services, then iGoogle may make the most sense. Each of them has a different look, with the basic features being very similar.
You may wonder why we have included mobile phones in the online tools and applications section of the Learning 2.0 programme.
As mobile phone technologies develop further and mobile phone service providers provide more affordable mobile broadband, they become more likely to be used for internet browsing, in addition to more traditional uses of text messaging, picture messaging, taking photos and listening to music. This will also have an impact on how we provide services to our staff and students. Many of the tools we have talked about during the Learning 2.0 programme can be accessed via your mobile phone, though often there is a pared down version of the desktop/web based application. The plus is that they are portable, practically everyone has one and costs are going down.
Many people use Internet Explorer (IE) as this is the browser that comes with Windows. However it is worth noting that there are a number of other browsers out there that are better/different alternatives to IE.
Each browser has it’s good points and bad points – often it comes down to personal preference and how much flexibility you want. See Web Browser Reviews from Consumer Search for a good overview of the main browsers available. or the Wikipedia entry on Comparison of web browsers for more information than you ever wanted to know about browsers
The joy is that it is possible to customise your browser so that you get the most out of it.
Is a customisable open source browser from Mozilla. See Add-ons and extensions for further information on customising Firefox.
For a quick overview, see this promotional video of the latest release.
See this Screencast – LibEx for staff and students (from Kathryn Greenhill at Murdoch University) – for an example of a Firefox extension that puts the Library into the users space
One of the key features we have mentioned about Web 2.0 tools is the fact that they use the web as a platform. Rather than you having to download software onto a particular pc/laptop – you can access them anywhere, any time.
Google documents is a basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation package that you can access via the web. You do not need to download it – you can access it as you would your email or RSS reader. It enables you to upload and work with Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and other file types as well as download them back into the various programmes. It is great for collaborating with people in different places.
Watch this video for an overview of Google documents
A toolbar is a horizontal or vertical row of icons/buttons that enable you to easily click on/link to features of a particular programme, service or tool. It sits either within the programme, such as your browser or floast at the the top or on the side of your screen. The most obvious toolbar is the one that is located along the top of your browser/programme screen.
You can customise toolbars within your browser or programme, such as Firefox or IE or you can download or create toolbars for a variety of resources, for example the My Athens toolbar.
Customisable toolbars are becoming more popular, and libraries are using them more to get into the user’s workspace. For more library related toolbars than you ever thought could exist, see the Library Success wiki toolbars and extensions
The term widget has a variety of meanings depending on where it is used. Basically, a widget is a piece of code that can be embedded into any html page that allows a user to do stuff. For a simple explanation of what a widget is, see What is a web widget? from Widgets for Web 2.0.
See also this great 5 part video series on widgets
In the Learning 2.0 programme you will have encountered widgets in web applications such as WordPress and Wetpaint. As you may recall, they enable you to display content from other sources, such as embedding a YouTube video on your wiki page or you may have added widgets to your Word Press blog to enable the display of recent posts or your blogroll.
Put simply, a mashup is what you create when you take data from various sources and put them together. A very popular current use of mashups is integrating some kind of data with Google maps, for example creating a map of the location of restaurants in your area.
YouTube also has a good visual overview in this video
The fun thing about mashups is that you do not have to be an expert programmer/developer to build them. There are a number of tools available to create mashups including Yahoo Pipes and Google’s Mashup Editor to name a couple.
For those of you not attending this afternoon’s opening workshop, could you please complete this pre-course survey and email it to the Learning 2.0 team before you start the programme?
Just a reminder that our opening workshop is running on Thursday the 24th July from 3.30pm – 5pm in the Level 1 Training room 1 in the Central Library, South Kensington campus.
Please do let us know if you can/cannot make it if you haven’t already done so.
