Thing #16: Registering completion of the programme

Even though we could be accused of mis-selling under trades descriptions in that we have slightly fewer than 23 tasks in our programme, the time has come to wrap up for this year.

We hope you have found the programme useful, even where you were already aware of a technology and have had some insight into using Web 2.0 at work.  On September 8th we have already held the date for a joint team meeting  where we will celebrate both 23 Things and premiere our summer multimedia projects. The prize draw will be held to win an iPad, courtesy of Ex Libris, our library systems supplier and all completing participants will receive a gift voucher for Amazon, also donated by Ex Libris, to whom our thanks.

Your final Thing is to write a reflective blog post of the programme as a whole: your high and low lights, your favourite and least favourite technology (and why), what you think you will use most from now on.

If you haven’t yet managed to complete all Things, now is your time to catch up and register your blog in our registration form  (naturally created in Google docs).  All blogs which have an entry for each of the 16 Things will be eligible for the prize draw.

Thing #15: Social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Wikipedia defines social media as ‘…media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. The term refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.’

In the context of 23 Things take some time to review some of these services, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Whilst you can find and catch up with friends and colleagues on facebook, you could, for example, use these applications to do research by locating experts in a given field, find pages where you can ask for help, answer another individual’s question, or simply network with colleagues.

Find out more from these YouTube clips:

 

Getting started on facebook, LinkedIn and twitter

1. Go to either facebook or LinkedIn (LinkedIn is more aligned with your professional world) to build your network.

2. Create an account

Optional: Learn how to make the most use of your Facebook page

Twitter is similar to facebook and LinkedIn. However, this ‘microblogging’ service only allows posts of 140 characters or less. These updates are known as ‘tweets’. Where you have friends on facebook or connections on LinkedIn, twitter has ‘followers’ who subscribe to your profile and receive your updates.

Updates can be posted via computer or mobile device.

View the Youtube clip:

 3. Go to twitter and sign up

4. Customize your site

5. Find friends and/or colleagues, and ‘follow’ their tweets

Which social media site do you find most useful for personal use?  Which one could/do you use on a professional level?

Consider the University of Sussex Library’s page as an example of facebook and twitter use in an HE library context.

Follow the University of Westminster to keep up with latest news on twitter and facebook, where all updates will come to you with link as ‘tweets’ and as ‘wall posts’.

You just have to click the relevant buttons to add UoW to your twitter favourites (‘Follow’ button) or be a fan of our facebook page (‘Like’ button). Consider in your blog whether you find social media the communication form of the future, or technological hype?

Thing #14: Create a podcast

1. Create a podcast

Podcasting is online publication of media (sound and/or vision) files using a subscription method or simply a kind of on-demand radio. Podcasts can be listened to via your computer, phone, downloaded to an mp3 player etc.
Audacity is an example of a free (open source) audio editor that can be used to create and edit .mp3, .wav or .aiff sound files

Task: Your task is to create an audio or video file – a 3 to 5 minute introduction to yourself.  You will need a microphone and a program that can record audio. A tool to record audio is the open source program Audacity. 

 

Post this file to your blog  or upload it to your university Google account:

1. Click on the ‘Documents’ tab in the top left hand section of the page
2. Select ‘Upload’ and then ‘files’
3. Find the video/audio clip you wish to share and click ‘open’
4. Upload Settings: You are asked to set preferences. These are not applicable to videos – simply select ‘Start upload’
5. You should then see the file listed at the top of your documents list
6. To share:  Click on the file to open. A share option is located at the top of the window.
7. Click ‘Share’, select ‘share settings’ and then click ‘change’
8. It is easiest to share by selecting the option ‘Anyone with the link’. Then click ‘save’.
9. You can now copy and paste the link into an email.
10. Once you have uploaded you can send the link to your students or colleagues and begin sharing.

To create a podcast in Blogger follow the instructions here:
http://google.about.com/od/googleblogging/ss/podblogger.htm

or in WordPress go here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting

Using Audacity

Make sure the computers sound settings are correct.  In the control panel choose settings then ‘Sounds and audio devices’ and ensure the speaker is not set on ‘mute’

1. Click on the ‘Audio’ tab and in the sound recording section, make sure that the microphone is set as your default device
2. Click on volume and set it to the highest, click OK and close the windows
3. For a sound check click the microphone icon and speak and adjust the input volume accordingly
4. Ready to record – Click the record button and speak – to stop recording click the stop button
5. To save the file from the File menu select ‘export As MP3’ (widely supported across all media players and computers), name your file and save
6. The ID3 tag enables you to save metadata information about the recording

If you want to create a vodcast (video podcast) you can capture video to your computer by using Windows Movie Maker.

You will need a webcam, which may be built into your computer (these can be borrowed from AV or Kevin Lawley who  can also advise on formats).

Thing #13 Create your own website using Google apps

Following on from the last task, you are now going to create your own web pages using the University’s Google apps

Task – To create a small website on a topic of your own interest

1. From the intranet, click on the University of Westminster Google apps link and sign in to reach the home page
2. Click on the sites link, then create new site button
3. Choose a name for your site, the example below shows the name Alice’s French Grammar
4. Now choose a theme, which will dictate the layout and colours of your site (you can change these later if they don’t work out)

Creating new pages for your website

1. Create additional pages at the top level by clicking on the create page button
2. Now set navigation options so that the navigation is carried out  automatically
3. Create and name another new page at set this at the top level of the hierarchy
4. Create a third new page and nest this beneath one of the existing pages – check the navigation panel to see how this is presented

Embedding video in your website

1. Click on the HTML view of the editor
2. Open a new tab and go to YouTube and search for a short video relevant to your website
3. Copy the embedded code from the YouTube page to the html editor view of your web page

Adding an RSS feed

1. Add a new page at top level called news
2. Now go to Insert>More gadgets and search for BBC RSS news

Adding gadgets

1. As with Thing #1 you can add gadgets from the Google apps menu
2. Share the link to your website with other 23 Things participants

Thing #12: Online applications

At the University of Westminster we have the Google docs application available to all staff and students. To locate this, look on the intranet homepage in the left hand navigation under the Applications heading.

Examples of documents you can create online are:

Documents

Minutes of meetings – these can be taken on a laptop in the meeting then posted online for corrections/feedback, which can be done collaboratively by those people with permission to access the document

To allow multiple users to contribute simultaneously to a document, such as during ideas generation sessions or as part of task and finish group

Allow students to collaborate on exercises/problem solving in real time

Learning materials/training exercises can be circulated very quickly across a team then used as the basis for lessons in PC labs, avoiding the use of paper

Presentations

These can be created and uploaded instantly with links to online resources such as Youtube/Slideshare. This is a quick way of making presentations universally available without purchasing web hosting

Spreadsheets

These are often used for project planning (RAID logs), data sharing (Library Search configuration logs) and other collaboration, especially in our teams at ISLS.

TASK
Choose one of the following:

1. Use Google docs to generate and capture ideas in a group meeting or virtually, this will allow all ideas to be collected, shared for discussion and recorded all at the same time.
2. Upload an existing presentation which is used for a workshop/training session such as Library Search/orientation and use it instead of giving it out handouts or create/adapt your own mini presentation to demonstrate something you know to be of interest/use to students. Share it with other 23 Things participants/ local colleagues as appropriate.
3. Use a Google spreadsheet to record all the tasks associated with a project you are planning to undertake. Alternatively look at some of the existing RAID logs within Google docs application

Thing #11: Technorati

Technorati is an Internet search engine specifically for blogs. It indexes the blogosphere and helps you discover posts by category and through search.  It also includes the latest news, popular books and music.

Technorati has a rating system for each blog’s popularity or as it prefers “authority”, that is the number of links from other blogs during the previous six months. Technorati also looks at tags authors have used to describe their content to categorize search results, showing recent ones first.

According to Wikipedia by June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Task

a)    Explore Technorati first by clicking on the link blog directory and choosing the group(s) that interest you most

b)    Click on the Top 100 link and see those rated by Technorati’s authority ranking, which is updated daily

c) Click on the posts button in the top banner and choose a topic to do a search on within Technorati e.g  iphone 4

d)    Click on the Join link to register, submit and publicise your 23 Things blog

http://www.technorati.com

Thing #10: Tagging and folksonomies

Delicious is a social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize them.

Many people find that real power of Delicious is in the social networking aspect, which allows you to see how others have tagged similar links and also to discover other websites that may be of interest to you.

Managed user generated tags are often referred to as a folksonomy

You can think of it as peering into someone else’s filing cabinet to see how they organise things, but with this powerful bookmarking tool linking each filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at Delicious and contribute some links and tags of your own.  Go to Delicious and find out how to install bookmarklets.

Coming next … technorati

Thing #9: Make a search engine

The aim of Thing #9 is to create your own search engine

Rollyo is a Yahoo!-powered search engine which allows you to register accounts and create search engines that retrieve results only from the websites and blogs you want to include.

You can also share your  engines with others and HTML is available to post a mini search box to your own website. With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines – called Searchrolls – and explore, save and personalize those created by others.

Rollyo requires no programming skills. A WISYWYG editor guides you through the process:

• Select up to 25 sites to include
• Add tags so your search engine can be found easily
• Choose a relevant category for the Rollyo directory
• Make your search engine private or public as you like

Let’s roll …

Thing #8: Be your own librarian

The aim of Thing #8 is to create a personal library of your books

Navigate to the librarything website and set yourself up with a new account. Then use the “Add books” tab to begin to add to your library.

LibraryThing is a social cataloguing web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogues and book lists.  You can catalogue personal collections, keep reading lists, post book reviews, and chat to other users who have the same books. After a user catalogues books, he or she can tag them, add/correct cover pictures, and use social features. When a book is tagged, it can be viewed when other users or books use that tag.

The primary feature of LibraryThing is the cataloguing of books by importing data from booksellers and libraries through Z39.50 connections.

Another feature, “Members with your books”, shows the names of other people with the 50 most similar libraries to yours. When viewing another member’s profile or library, the system shows how many (and which) books are shared between you.  

If desired, you can leave a (public or private) comment on another’s profile. One can also add the member as a friend, to a private watch list, or as an interesting library

Thing #7: Tag clouds

The aim of ‘Thing #7’ is to have some fun with Wordle, the tag cloud generator.

 A tag cloud is a visual depiction of topics (tags) on a website. Tag clouds are usually single words displayed in different fonts and colours to show the importance of each tag. The size of the text is reflected in the amount of times the word is used in the text box. If you use a word several times the size of that word will be bigger than words that appear less frequently.

Tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a related content so the choice of tags used is important and should clearly represent your topics and target audience.

Websites such as Flickr use tag clouds to enable users to find other images related to the tag. Users can see hot tags from the last 24 hours and the most popular tags of all time.

Task  – Create a tag cloud using Wordle

1. Go to the Wordle website: http://www.wordle.net

2. Click on ‘Create’

3. In the ‘Paste in a bunch of text’ section, type in as many words as you can that relate to your experience of 23 Things so far. To prevent two or more words being separated in the image, put the ~ (tilde character) between words that go together

4. Click on ‘Go’

5. Play around with the different formatting options available (Edit, Font, Layout and Colour)

6. Click ‘Save to public gallery’

7. Give the tag cloud a title and username, then click on OK

8. Copy the code displayed at the bottom of the page, and paste it in your blog along with your views on using tag clouds.

Read the FAQ section to read more about how to add the tag cloud image to your blog.

Internet librarian, Phil Bradley, also recommends Tagxedo, so you may like to play with that too