21 Reflection

This is it. Time to reflect on what was the most beneficial at a professional level.

- RSS feeds (some are included in this blog and some were added to the Accounting subject guide.

- the wiki and the ability to trace the being the various alterations over time.

- Delicious is a fantastic application. I no longer need to update and export my favourites, they are always available and searchable by keyword.

- the Yahoo pipes. Although I have yet to make one myself, I think they could be used in a variety of ways. I'm thinking of the "Find your feet" orientation web site under construction. For example a pipe for finding buildings locations at RMIT together with some description. Thus a foreign student would only need to type REW or building 86 and the map would pop up. (I could not find building 86, no matter how long I looked at the campus map).

- YouTube There are some very interesting videos. The library should develop their own or borrow from others, since this generation is more visual than print oriented. The videos on how to make a basic yahoo pipe allowed me to grasp the idea quicker than any description on paper. TeacherTube is also a source of very interesting clips.

This video, on Gary Pearce's Tertiary Learning and Teaching subject guide, should be compulsory viewing for library and teaching staff.



- SurveyMonkey is being used across RMIT libraries to survey staff and analyse the result and is simple to use.

The blog directory getblogs.com provides some kind of order in the endless proliferation.

Applications I will not used, although it is useful to know they are available include:
- Social news . What does it take to get to the front page of Digg? shows the vacuity of some applications.

- Buzzle. On the day I visited Buzzle Breakings News & Reports section I noticed that all the articles were sourced from The Guardian! I could not find mention of this fact anywhere on the website. Are readers aware they are reading from the one source?

That the Internet is unpredictable was obvious on a number of occasions. Blogs URLs posted a few days prior had disappeared by the time my post was published.

- 43 Things Although I do make lists, my online calendar and paper based agenda have suffice so far. I do not need an email reminder to know what must be achieved by a certain date. Now I must revisit some of the programmes I subscribed to during 21 lunges and delete my email to stop those pestering reminders.

- FaceBook. I know some libraries have a facebook profile but I have yet to be convinced of its usefulness. The language is too "chummy". What is wrong with the library website? After all we are in academia. As an individual I will delete my entry on Facebook, if possible. I have no interest in putting private information on the net.

All in all this was very instructive for me, even though I will not use all the programmes available. I definitely feel more at ease with technology and this alone is very satisfactory.

16 Yahoo Pipes addendum

Below are 3 links to Yahoo Pipes:

Most interesting Flickr Images (without flowers)
This pipe creates a feed of the most interesting flickr images, minus the boring photos of flowers.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/steeev/AOrPItX32xG2NDmFmLokhQ

Autour 2 Yahoo!
Pour tout savoir, en français, de Yahoo! avec les blogs et communiqués de presse officiels de Yahoo! France, les actualités de TechCrunch, les favoris commentés de Olivier D. alias ze kat, et les articles de Katheline en direct du Québec.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/oliezekat/autour2yhoo

New York Times thru Flickr
This Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/danielraffel/vvW1cD212xGMiR9aqu5lkA

Youtube video to learn how to make a pipe (not allowed on RMIT computer):

20 Web 3.0

Second Life. An interesting educational application of second Life was explained to me by an RMIT IT instructor. William Angliss uses Second Life for bar tending students. They practice cocktails in Second Life until they get the right mix of flavours, colours and appearances. When they have achieved mastery in the virtual world they get to play with the real things, thus avoiding costly waste of supplies.

Definition of Web 3.0 by Robert O’Brien:
Web 1.0: Centralized Them.
Web 2.0: Distributed Us.
Web 3.0: Decentralized Me.

Web Guided by Common Sense
Entrepreneurs' "goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide,... with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands."

An Introduction to Web 3.0
"With Web 3.0, machines will be able to perform tasks requiring human intelligence, reducing our time and effort on the Internet dramatically. Web 3.0 is a precursor to the fully semantic Web"
Is the following sentence grammatically correct? Web 3.0 contributes extremely to the development of the current Internet.

ZCubes "is a web platform where you can seamlessly create web pages when you browse, create drawings, paintings, documents and spreadsheets, all on the web, without having to switch between different applications."

ZCubes "transforms Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole. Documents created using ZCubes are Semantic enabled, thus taking a step forward to the Semantic Web".

Information gleaned on the internet indicates that much effort is being deployed towards developing web 3.0. It may take time and some set backs but why doubt that it will eventually come to be? Zcubes is a platform with multiple applications, unlike the different systems looked at for the 21 lunges programme, requiring a multiplicity of membership and logins.