What I Learned Today…

Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.

Monthly Archives: July 2006

Learning Styles

July 7th, 2006

I’m reading “Teach Beyond Your Reach” by Robin Neidorf. A lot of the content is more than I need to know in my job, but it’s pretty darn interesting.

I just finished reading about learning styles. Robin points us to a quiz at learning-styles-online.com that let’s us determine what type of learner we are. I’m mostly a Logical, Solitary, Aural learner – what about you?

Here are my results:

These are the results of your inventory. The scores are out of 20 for each style. A score of 20 indicates you use that style often.

Style Scores

Visual 6
Social 9
Physical 9
Aural 12
Verbal 9
Solitary 11
Logical 13

Pretty darn interesting. Robin recommends you use this to find out the learning styles of your students before teaching a course – what a great idea!!

 

Joys of Owning a House

July 5th, 2006

At least that’s what Tom (from Tombrarian) said to me today.

This is completely not library related – but I need to vent – feel free to read on – or not.

Yesterday I went into my basement to do a wash and found that my basement was flooded – not with water from the rain – but with sewage from the power room we have down there. Turns out my 50 year old house has never had the sewage pipes cleaned out – and now my basement is a disaster area. I’ve had 4 different sets of workmen in my house today – the township (here to tell me it’s my responsibility and not theirs), the sewer people (to clean the clog), the cleaning crew (to rip apart my entire basement – walls and everything to sanitize), and a plumber (to rip out the bathroom fixtures so that the cleaning crew can come back and finish their work).

The smell in my house was horrible as you can imagine – and my semi-finished basement has been restored and it’s unfinished original self. This fiasco is going to cost me more than I want to think about to clean and rebuild.

This is how I spent my first day after vacation – not at work – at home with men coming in and out of my house. Oh! And I forgot when I was with workmen #3 my puppy decided to jump up on the couch and climb onto the TV tray I had out and ate my lunch! Can you believe it??!!

Well that was my day – hope you all had better ones.

Real Life Stores in Second Life

July 5th, 2006

I just read on the business2blog that Amazon is informally working on a way to let people open shops in Second Life and sell real goods.

Some engineers at Amazon are informally working on linking Amazon’s APIs to the virtual world Second Life. If that were to happen, it would mean that Second Lifers could then open up virtual shops selling real-world goods (via Amazon).

Looking for Instructors

July 4th, 2006

I am a board member for the Upper Darby Adult Evening Program. We’re a non-profit organization that offers night classes to Upper Darby and area residents. Upper Darby is in Delaware County, PA.

We’re in need of more classes/instructors and I’m emailing everyone I can think of. I figured I should probably post my request here too. If any of you know of any experts (friends or colleagues) in the area who’d like to teach a course once a week from Sept to Nov can you forward this message to them – or send them to this link: http://www.udaep.org/teach.php. It’s a paying gig – not much, but it’s money.

We’re looking for a photography (digital or otherwise) class, an art (drawing,painting,etc) class, a dance class, foreign language courses, a cooking class, even a course on how to find things at your public library – or anything else you can think of. This might even be a good job for a college Junior or Senior with an expertise in a subject area – and it will look great on their resume.

Business Card

July 1st, 2006

I’ve heard a few speakers say that you should include your IM information and blog address on your business card – but what about designing your business card to match your blog?

I haven’t ordered this card yet, but my sister gave me a hand designing a new personal (not the one my library gave me) business card.

What do you think?

New Pages

July 1st, 2006

I added a few new pages – and updated some of the old pages. For those of you who only read this blog via RSS, you may not have noticed. On the right menu of this site I have included a link to an About Me page. I used to link to my bio on the Jenkins site – but that is skewed towards what I’ve done for the library – and I’ve done a lot more than that lately. I also updated my Resume (under About Me) and added a Publications and Presentations page. There’s not much clickable on this last page (except for my Computers in Libraries article from 2005) – yet! I will be adding my presentations from LITA and IL when I have them – although these will mostly be me browsing through our Intranet to give you a feel of what we did – and not a static PowerPoint presentation.

So if you want to stop by the actual page – feel free to check out these new pages.

Another Article

July 1st, 2006

I mentioned that I was writing another article last week. Well I finished it and sent it in – I don’t know yet if it will be published, but I thought I’d share some of the ideas with you all.

I decided to take 2 routes. Route 1 was deciding to get someone in house to handle your library programming projects (versus a contractor) and Route 2 was how to actually handle the project once it has been offered to you. I am working on a HUGE application (as I mentioned before) at work and what better time to explain the process to others?

I went over some of the benefits of having someone in house – like the fact that they’re always there. I constantly have people stopping by my desk to ask me questions, ask for upgrades, explain what they meant, etc. This helps me with my programming and I think it helps the staff (the users) feel better about the project as a whole. With a contractor you usually only see them once in a while. We had one that only came in one a month to talk to us – and even then not everyone had time to talk with him. Most recently we had a contractor who we have never met. All communications were over the phone and only 2 or 3 people participated in those conversations even though 20 or so of the staff would have to use the application.

Why did we have contractors? Well the first one was before I learned PHP and the second one was there because our IT team (me included) could not figure out how to achieve the result we were looking for. So, even if you have a programmer in house, you may still have to hire and outside consultant, but it will be less frequently (I hope).

I talked about planning the project – meetings, flow charts, more meetings. Which is interesting because I’m reading The Accidental Library Manager right now and Rachel suggests that you have as few meetings as possible and keep the on point and on schedule. I agree with her 100% – but it just never seems to happen that way when you’re talking about changing the way people have worked for 5 or more years. Plus, you as a programmer have no idea how people have been working for the last 5 years, so you have to spend time sitting with them and listening to them until you understand what goal they need to reach – the staff of your library is now your user – I repeat that a lot.

Well I hope you all get to read the entire article, I included some stuff here that I didn’t get to fit in – so you got a sneak peak and the bonus features.

Where have I been?

July 1st, 2006

Last week was my birthday so I had some time off of work and then some time catching up at work.

I’m also on the board of directors for our township’s adult education program and we’re desperately trying to build onto our class offerings, but unlike the other area night schools, ours is not supported by the school district. So I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to come up with class ideas and finding local businesses we can contact.

Lastly, I was working on moving the LITA National Forum Wiki over to Wetpaint. I’ll be honest, for a few days I was worried I had made the wrong decision. My first shock was that Wetpaint didn’t allow me to see the code for my page. I emailed my contact and he said they wanted to make the site accessible to everyone – which I’m totally for – but I responded by reminding him that almost every WYSIWYG editor I’ve ever used allows you to see the code so that you can troubleshoot. The next shock was that there wasn’t any functionality to add a table – and without the ability to see the code you’re stuck with what you’ve got. So I emailed again and learned that tables will be available within the next couple of weeks.

Despite these two problems, Wetpaint has some interesting functionality. First (although I haven’t tested this out) it has structure. What do I mean? Well, I mention in my article about our Intranet that I wrote our wiki software myself because I wanted to be able to have an organizational structure – this page goes under this page – an understandable site map. Well Wetpaint has that. It also has a menu to all of the pages so that you don’t have to rely on links from one page to another.

So, my first thoughts were “Oh no! What have I done?!” but now I’m going to stick with it. And next time I’ll make sure to play with the product beofre I accept a tempting offer to move everything. There is a ton of potential there – and remember it’s much newer than the other sites out there so it’s still growing.

Please update your links/bookmarks and if you’re attending the conference I hope you participate in this wiki, it will really help a lot of new people who will be attending the conference.

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