The Happy House: Applause

Well, I never would've believed I could finish all the exercises, EVEN the online image generator, which gave me a box of choclates (below) with a little help from Image Chef. Some of these features are really cool and great for me --del.icio.us and librarything, for example. And I even got to Ancient Rome on Rollyo and found out how useful it could be to have all the searches in one place. I've got really good at blogging! And if I ever need to post a video to YouTube, to show you my dog running around the yard at my new house, I'm sure I can find out how. With other things, wikis, online word processing, rss feeds, podcasts and ebook downloads, I see the educational system changing faster day by day. Research will be a new experience. Libraries will have to change with 2.0, and we all need constant updating (monuments as we are) or constant playing with the marvels of the internet, to keep running in the same place. It's true that Flickr and I did'nt see eye to eye: I found out my computer needs broadband and in my new house I'll have a whole new connection to the internet. Thank you, State Library, for making Learning 2.0 available to us. You know one of the most fun things? Was telling a colleague at work about librarything and watching his eyes light up. A lot of people didn't take this course because they were too busy. Well, I was too busy moving house, but I've done it anyway! Sorry, have to go pack some boxes now...

Vertical Houses

Archive Boxes

My exploration of eAudiobooks led to even more fascination. Besides the many printed books you can download from Project Gutenberg (including some in languages such as Finnish and Tagalog), you can download audio books in various formats both by human spoken and computer voices. The most interesting thing I did here was explore the links on this site. One link led to the Internet Archive and since I have lots of archive boxes to move myself, I wanted to know what they were archiving. Lots: including moving images, video games, software, and vlogs...so I found out that a video log is like a blog on film. And I found out about the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. With this site, you can type in a date range and surf an archived version of the Web---well, as much as the Alexa web crawler could find at the time. This is truly Time Travel! Science fiction come real: return to 1992 and see what the Web says then. The Internet Archive contains more text than any library in the world, including the Library of Congress. Project Gutenberg is already being used in university courses instead of textbooks: I downloaded a lot of original documents from the Reformation last year. This is going to have serious consequences for publishers, just as audio books and podcasts will change the way media is produced and consumed.

Moving from UK to Canada

The podcast journey was enlightening. I searched on podcast.net and very quickly got turned off anything church related because the American religious right has a truly frightening presence on the Web. From sheer numbers and tech literacy the rest of us are going to have to learn about 2.0 and get a more moderate position out quickly! I think a number of enterprises of society have been gravely uninformed about the speed of uptake and importance of these new internet styles, and that's why I'm taking this course even though I have a lot to do moving house. I searched instead for Canada, and got a podcast on 'Economics and Social Justice' from CBC radio. When I tried to put the URL into Bloglines, it said 'no files found', so I instead did a search for feeds and got CBC radio feeds. I was so pleased to see the series there: The Best of Ideas. When I added the feed to my feeds list, I was thrilled to discover that at the same time I could get rid of the BBC news feed which by now has accumulated 200 unread items. I feel so much less guilty!

YouTube in the box: Mighty Mouse

I moved ahead to YouTube before my computer gets put into a box and transported somewhere else. Because I have a dial-up connection, I thought I should try something simple instead of a movie, so I searched for 'cartoons'. Some of the most popular cartoons seemed to be 'Banned Cartoons' -- one of these had 163,637 hits --- which gives us all a hint about instant popularity in the library. I remember when the book 'Little Black Sambo' was banned from the San Francisco Public Library, and now here it is featured as a banned video on YouTube. (So you can watch it, after all). Mighty Mouse: Wolf! Wolf! was the only public domain cartoon the poster could find. (Is poster? right?) And it attracted vivid comment from the spectators who all had an opinion. Example: "Mighty Mouse's costume looks pink here. That's not the way it was. It was yellow and red'. (It does look pink). Maybe I should get out my clunky analogue video camera and film my moving house day. A vertical house might look good on YouTube.

Changing Boxes

I looked at Technorati and discovered 9,149 results for Learning 2.0 in Blog search. It even breaks them down on a per day basis with graph. But the blog directory put this 15th on the top blogs list, and a lot of these were about Web 2.0. The tags could be as specific as Web 2.0 or a vague as Internet, and I wonder how many decades of thousands the last as a tag would produce. Obviously 2.0 is the way to go. Library 2.0 talks about 'constant change in a development cycle' rather than upgrades. Upgrades are about monuments that get refinished. This exercise really spoke to me because one reason I'm moving house is to be closer to my church. (St. Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne: fantastic 16th century music, try it, you'll like it). The ideas of 2.0 for the library relate equally to the church: simplicity, interactivity, user participation, collective intelligence, self-service, new and re-identified content. And access to Everything!!! The Anglican national synod recently empowered 'free expressions', a way to 'take our services to the patrons'. It's about getting integrated into 'daily patterns of work, study, and play'. And adapting to 'radical, fundamental change' in people everywhere. My house, needless to say, is about to radically change: next week. Keep you posted.

Out of the box

Psalm 131

...neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.

Wow, I got my zoho writer doc to come across to my blog!!! I must really be learning something! I went and looked at the awards list and I selected to look at craigslist which has all kinds of cool features. When I looked up Sydney on craigslist I found that I could rent a room with a view in Bondi for $500 a week or alternatively I could have a ski lodge in Colorado for $1750. (It's cheaper to stay with my brother). So when my house becomes an empty box and all my posessions are in storage I can box up enough for one room and live in luxury. How much room does $500 buy in Sydney, I wonder? The way house prices are going, I fear it might be a very small room.

Moving Houses Wiki

Wikis are a fantastic tool for teaching and learning. If we had more wikis like the Deakin University icebreaker scheme there would be less need for everyone to move houses. One reason I'm moving is because I'm located so far from Melbourne Uni, and those of my fellow students who have tried the online learning programs have been grateful in the end to talk to real people! In spite of commuting from Bendigo, Ballarat, or Geelong (or East Gippsland). I'm convinced that wikis are the way of the future for education. Incidentally, I found out why I couldn't upload any photos. My computer firewall has blocked all my photos. Somehow I stumbled on this fact while trying to create any kind of a photo blog page. So I will have to confess dismay on all things photographic and hope to make up for it with my personal charm. Meanwhile, my house move has three weeks to go. I now begin to compile a change of address list of over 100 items. And a postal vote, at the new address, since the election is the day after I move. I think a moving house wiki would be a real benefaction.

Delicious Boxes

Librarything and Delicious are just the things for someone who's packing boxes all the time. I put lots of books into Librarything and then I put them in the boxes. That way, if they disappear, I can still find them on the internet! This is cool. Delicious is just as good. I can put all my favourites out there on the net and pick them up from anywhere. Now I'm going to try to put an image on this page---an image of almost anything--- because mentally I'm still in the image stage where I packed my visa card into a box and still don't know where it is. They had to give me a new one. This time I'll try to get a picture off the net, because the ones I saved onto my computer refuse to come to this blog. Nope. I tried to cut then copy or paste but the computer is just not interested. I will try a new post and do only one image. One little one...If it would just come out of the computer box and onto the screen!

I Achieved Something, I'm Not Sure What

Sorry, folks, I thought I achieved something, but now Blogger tells me it can't accept my html from LibraryThing because one letter is missing. Why didn't it tell me that in the first place? I set up a nice account and added some books to it, and was all set to copy and paste to this blog, but all that happened was the html came across, looked like it printed out, and then failed. These are the disappointments of the Net. Where was I to put this html? In a box? What box? Where? I DID look at the image generators, honest. They had a strong appeal to young teenage boys, I thought. Given that I couldn't get the html from LibraryThing across, I fear I have failed this section also. It's like Mount Everest. I know it's there. Rollyo, will no doubt be of use to those who like total control. Search boxes within search boxes. How much information are we in fact handing over to large corporations as we roll?

House Boxes

Wow, I have managed to create a yahoo account and a flickr account and I think I downloaded a picture. I was going to add this nice picture of a box-type house in San Francisco to this blog, but alas I see no way to upload it. Nevertheless two very strong guys arrived at my house today and took away two rooms of furniture, about 50 pictures (seriously addicted to consumption; that's two a year), and another 30 boxes or so. Plus the contents of 3 sheds and one garage. You would not believe how strong they are. I can't even shove this stuff along the floor, and they just pick it up and haul it out the door! I hear they're weightlifters in their off hours: for recreation and a change from houses. I shall now return to Flickr and see if I can work out how to show you this very interesting, box-style, warehouse view of San Francsico, where I come from (why I am in Australia is a long story). I chose this house-box-warehouse because that's what my house has become: a warehouse. Don't hold your breath. I know the picture's on my computer somewhere, but that doesn't mean it's going anywhere.

Better Boxes

RSS feeds are like boxes within boxes. From packing so many boxes inside boxes, I can see how useful this will be in that distant day when I master this technology. For the moment, Bloglines won't let me add the public URL because it's telling me to do something strange with javascript instead of just adding the URL with no nonsense. It also turns out that the Age newspaper apparently has no RSS feed although there it seems to sit on the Age website. I conclude that Bloglines hasn't moved house yet effectively, and I'm still playing with boxes. Mainly boxes that are supposed to have URL's in them. Still, I have benefitted by knowing that RSS feeds exist and what they do, although the BBC World News feed is likely to provide more news over the next 24 hours than I'm likely to read in a lifetime. Back to real-life boxes. I have just packed all the videotapes, a reminder of what happens to technology and how fast it ages.

Technology in a Box

This week we blog about technology. I think my blog should be coloured blue. I can't seem to hear the podcasts either at home or at work, and flickr has so far defeated me. But, I have packed lots of boxes! The ones with the computer books in them are on the bottom of the heap. I have the feeling I will finish 650th out of 650 in this course. But, I have mastered logging in to this blog. Don't laugh. It took me 3 days to figure this one out. You wouldn't believe that I'm also doing an honours year at university. Naturally, in an un-technological subject. But I have faith that, when I've moved house, my computer will move with me. So I persist. Maybe I'm not the only one making baby half-steps. Maybe there are others out there who share my confusion. We might succeed in learning something, if we keep at it long enough.

A Moving Dream

How many times do you move house in a lifetime? Moving houses is a special kind of time. It's a transitional time of uncertainty, confusion, and boxes! Lots of boxes. I'm moving house after 25 years and I have more boxes to think of than I can well keep track of. I wonder if it's better to hold the dread garage sale or simply give away a lot of accumulation of accretion of accumulation from over the years. So far I have opted for the relatives and friends route, with the remainder of the overflow headed for charity shops. I still have 100 wine boxes full of books to move! Surely moving is a strange seascape. Not a landfall yet.