Housekeeping

The sixteen weeks of Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks have come to an end.

Hopefully you have learned a few news tricks along the way. Even better is if you’ve discovered something that has enough personal meaning for you to incorporate it into your life’s routines.

However, if continuing to blog is not in your future, be a good citizen of the web and complete a bit of housekeeping before you move on to other things.

WordPress Bloggers: Login to your blog with your password. The Dashboard screen will display. Note on the right side in the blue area the words Settings and Users. Click on Settings and find Delete Blog among the options. Click on Delete Blog and follow the instructions carefully.

Blogger Users: Login with your password and click on the Settings tab. Click on Basic. Read the instructions carefully, then click Delete This Blog. Click OK to confirm your action.

Remember, it’s easy to start a blog, so if you change your mind later, you can always start a new one.

 

Week # 16 – May 6

It’s Bonus Week, the final week of Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. There are no new activities this week. Instead, this is your opportunity to go back and complete any outstanding activities and update your blog by May 13 to qualify for the grand prize drawing. Don’t forget to contact Pamela if you want some personal help.

Within a few weeks Four County Library System participants and nonparticipants will be surveyed to assess the success and failures of this project and seek input about what–if anything–might be done as follow up.

In case you are wondering, this blog will continue to be accessible indefinitely. However, in June the privacy settings will be changed to make it accessible via web search engines.

 

Week #15 – April 29

You are nearly done! This week there’s only one activity left, number 24 in our project list:

1. Use your blog to summarize your experiences with Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. Can old dogs really learn new tricks?

Think about all you have accomplished since January. Include in your post the surprises, the fun activities, the places you have struggled. What accomplishment makes you the most proud?

Of all you have explored, which new tools and skills have you incorporated into your life? Which ones do you expect to continue when Old Dogs ends? Think about your work as well as your personal interests and passions.

Also include in your blog what you might want to do next. Do you like this approach to learning? Independent of how you answer that question, have you had enough? Or do you want more like this? And if you might be interested in more, what topics might you want to explore? No promises, just curious.

If you have fallen behind, Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks doesn’t formally end until Week #16, May 6. All of the activities have now been posted, but there is still time to get caught up and be eligible for the grand prize, which will be awarded at the Four County Library System Annual Dinner. Just make sure you have both registered your blog with Pamela and have posted evidence of completing all activities on or before May 13. That’s the absolute deadline. If you need some extra help, please contact Pamela.

 

Week #14 – April 22

It’s podcast week at Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks, and there are 2 activities:

1. Discover some useful tools for locating podcasts and for subscribing to them. Listen to a podcast of your choice.

2. Blog how you are doing on this adventure.

What’s a podcast, you ask? A podcast is an audio file in MP3 format that is distributed using RSS. See all the jargon you’ve learned through this project? A podcast can be either a series of programs (sometimes called a channel) or a single audio program. Some people think of podcasts as radio programs not bound by a radio station’s schedule.

In case you are wondering about the word podcast, it’s a combination of iPod and broadcast. Pod is an acronym for portable on demand. However, you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts. They can be played on your computer or any MP3 portable player.

Now that Apple has developed iPods that play video as well as audio, some people use podcast for both plain audio and audio with video. The latter are also called vodcasts or videologs. This week’s activities focus on the audio.

Why podcasts?

The possible uses for podcasts is vast. For example, learn another language or listen to a favorite radio program, such as those from National Public Radio.

Libraries are beginning to use podcasts to promote and extend their services. The New York City Public Library has a collection of podcasts they’ve created to archive some of their programs for patrons. Similarly, the Library of Congress maintains podcasts from its annual National Book Festival. Many presidental libraries, such as the one for Truman, include podcasts on their websites. StoryCorps: Recording America is an independent oral history collaborative project archived at the Library of Congress. Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) is an international collaborative to provide programs and training for library staff and their patrons.

Because podcasts can be created without expensive equipment or specialized skills, public libraries are becoming producers. The Denver Public Library has a series of recorded story times on the web, and Seattle Public podcasts its author readings and other events. The Cheshire (CT) Public Library podcasts a “teen-driven culture magazine,” and the Lansing (IL) Public Library has detailed information for their patrons about how to find and subscribe to podcasts as well as links to their own podcasts, which include teen book reviews.

How do you find podcasts?

While you can use your favorite search engine to find podcasts, a more direct approach is to use a podcast directory. PodAlley is a popular site. Another is PodcastDirectory, which categorizes podcasts by such aspects as region, topic, language, and popularity. For library podcasts, explore Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki’s podcasting section has links to libraries engaged in podcasting and includes how-to information links.

Arguably the first and still the best podcast directory is the iTunes Store. Take a few minutes to explore this site. Although this is a store, there is lots of free content. However, you will not get very far unless you have iTunes loaded on your computer. It’s a free download that will manage your podcast subscriptions and organize the MP3 downloads on your computer. If you have an iPod or iPhone, iTunes will also manage synchronizing with those devices. Why would you want to use the iTunes Store and iTunes? For one thing, it’s where you can access the archives of SirsiDynix Institute presentations.

How do I subscribe to a podcast?

Once you become aware of podcasts, they are every place. Subscribe using the RSS skills you developed in Week #10. Or, if you want to isolate podcasts from your other subscriptions, consider using iTunes or another podcatcher, such as PodNova or Juice.

This week’s activities

By now you know how to find podcasts and subscribe to them. Make sure you listen to one to complete the first activity.

Then update your blog with a post on how Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks is going for you. Blog about your experiences recently. Which activities do you have remaining? Do you need to contact Pamela for personalized help?

 

Week #13 – April 15

It’s time for video!

Perhaps you noticed the New York City Public Library includes videos in it’s eNYPL collections. Do look at what’s available for download. However, this week our focus is YouTube, and there’s only one activity:

1. Discover YouTube. Find some videos that interest you and incorporate one into your blog.

At this point, it should come as no surprise that YouTube is yet another example of social networking. While not the only video hosting site on the web, YouTube is one of the first and most successful. It’s also an example of using MP3 format. You’ve already experienced YouTube as the host site for the videos used in Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. Unless you want to upload your own videos, there is no need to register on this social networking site.

YouTube is a phenominal success. It provides access to nearly 80 millions videos, and although “music” and “entertainment” comprise the largest categories, “education” and “how-to” are respectably represented. There are even InfoTubey awards announced at the Computers in Libraries conference for libraries that have “used YouTube to market their library or its services or enhance the standing of the library in the community.”

Start this week’s activity at the YouTube website. Click on the Help button to orient yourself. This is always a good idea when exploring new resources. Don’t forget: You need sound for videos.

Next, find a couple of videos that interest or amuse you. You can either use YouTube’s search feature or try your favorite search engine. However, be aware that it’s not always easy to identify the host for a video when it’s been embedded in another website, so you will want to limit your search. For example, Yahoo! has a button labeled Video immediately above the search box, and if you click it, your search will be limited to that format. If you then do an advanced video search, one of the options is to limit the site/domain to youtube.com. Google has similar functionality. From the main Google screen, click the More button in the upper left of the screen and select Video. Click on the option to do an Advanced Video Search and limit the domain to youtube.com. Try this with the exact phrase “National Library Week” and see what you can find.

While you are exploring, you may also want to sample some of these, which suggest the breadth and varying quality of what YouTube has to offer libraries:

Some library videos are informative. The Wizard of Oz – a Tale of Library Circulation promotes the services a library provides to its community, while The Adventures of Super Librarian highlights what staff have to offer patrons.

Videos can provide training for library patrons on such topics as how to place a hold or search the catalog. There are also training videos for staff, ranging from how to clean public computers or process newspapers to, for Sirsi libraries, how to use Standalone or display user holds. Another example, Our Library, Our Choice was produced by a library system in Illinois as an educational piece about Internet filtering.

If you prefer library humor, Library Dominoes is short and fun, although you may not want to share it with anyone who shelves books, and Short Pencil Saga is a personal favorite.

If library videos don’t appeal to you, try searching for a video about how to change your blog’s theme template. Be sure to include the correct hosting site (either WordPress or Blogger) in your search strategy.

When you find something you like, upload it to your blog. There is a button for uploading video near the one you used for images.

Although creating and editing videos is beyond the scope of this week, think about how you could use videos in your blog or your library’s website.

To conclude this week, the video below, The Machine is Us/ing Us, is about Web 2.0 and surveys many of the concepts you’ve been exploring in Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. It is one of the most popular videos in the blogosphere. If you like Michael Wensch’s work, you might also find Information R/evolution thought-provoking.

 

Week #12 – April 8

Finally! It’s time for digital audiobooks and music. Hopefully by now everyone has a card to use the collections of the New York City Public Library. If not, look back to Week #1.

There are two activities this week:

1. Find an audiobook of interest at the New York City Public Library and listen to part of it.

2. Find some music on the web that interests you and listen to it.

To get started, survey what The New York City Public Library’s website has to offer. Notice how this page is organized and the free players (software, really) that are required for the different collections. These players are necessary, in part, because the library’s vendors embed digital rights management into their products to ensure copyright compliance. Note, too, that in addition to audiobooks, the library offers eBooks. Don’t get confused. eBooks are in a digital print format that is read from a computer or compatible portable device. They are not audio.

Begin by taking the library’s digital media guided tour and then work through the tutorial. Allow at least 20 minutes for the tutorial, and make sure your sound is on. You will learn how to download the software required for these resources as well as how to find, checkout, and play them. You will also learn how to burn them to a CD-R, if that’s an option for the title you have selected, and how to transfer titles to a compatible portable device, although you don’t need one.

There is an important piece of information missing from these instructions. After 21 days, when the title is checked back in automatically and no longer accessible to you, it is still on your computer. As a matter of good housekeeping, you will want to delete the title manually and release that file storage.

After you have finished the tutorial, give it a try. Download the necessary software. Find an audiobook that interests you, and check it out. Listen to a chapter or two.

Before moving on to digital music, there are a couple of things that are useful to know.

First, there are two major formats for compressed digital audio: WMA and MP3. WMA is Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format. It’s the format used for the New York City Public Library’s resources, although that could change. WMA’s major competitor is MP3, which stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (where MPEG is the acronym for the Moving Picture Experts Group–aren’t you glad you asked?). However, all you really need to know is that MP3 and WMA are two different and incompatible ways to compress audio files so as to both minimize the amount of storage required and maximize sound quality.

The second thing to know about is DRM, or digital rights management. You may have heard stories about the original Napster, a file-sharing service and early example of social networking. Because of the legal battles that ensued over the rights of copyright holders and publishers to control access to their intellectual property, it is now common for sites to require registration before you can access their collections. That’s one reason why you need a card to use the digital resources of the New York City Public Library. Some sites, including the new Napster, also assess a small per-item fee.

Now for this week’s second activity. The easy way is to download some music from the New York City Public Library’s site, but notice their selections are primarily classical. They are also in WMA format. To find different types of music or to experience MP3 format, you will need to go elsewhere.

Some popular options include eMusic, a subscription service that starts at $9.99 per month and also has options for audiobooks, and iTunes, which sells songs for 99 cents each, although there is a link to the Free Single of the Week among the options in the lower right of the screen at the iTune store. Another audio site is Amazonmp3, which has a broad collection of music, including some that are free. All of these services require you to download and use their specified player. If you have a favorite emerging group, visit their website for links to their music. However, if none of these options appeal to you, use your favorite search engine to find something of interest.

If you find a good source for free digital music or other sources for audiobooks, don’t forget to leave a comment and share it.

 

Week #11 – April 1

What library doesn’t use clip art or stock photos? Or people in general, for that matter. At times nothing works as well as someone else’s art to catch people’s attention and add interest to your writing. Consider, for example, the Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks logo. Four County has a very limited budget, so it was a bonus to find a dog using technology in the Microsoft clip art collection.

This week we are going to look at clip art that’s freely available on the web. There is only one activity, albeit with several steps. If you want to do more, there’s a link later on to help guide you.

1. Explore the Microsoft clip art site and download an image. Upload it into your blog and write a post about your experience.

Before diving in, let’s think about intellectual property for a few minutes. Everything on the Internet belongs to someone. Someone has created it and made it accessible. Many people are flattered when others use their work. Others are not. Don’t assume.

If you find something you want to use, be sure to find out whether it is available for free and whether there are any limitations on using it. Often this means merely citing the source. Typically, copyright information is attached to an individual image, but it could also be posted for collections of images or the website as a whole. TechSoup has a useful article about copyright and the web.

As the web evolves, the Creative Commons movement is striving to revive a sense of copyright balance, compromise, and moderation. Do visit their web site for more information. If you decide to participate in the web more fully, you will probably want to apply Creative Commons licensing to your own intellectual property. For example, Flickr supports Creative Commons licensing.

Now let’s find some clip art. There are extensive collections of clip art (think drawings or similar art work) on the web. The Microsoft site is only one place to find them. However, its collections are extensive, high quality, well organized, and easy to navigate. This site is full of helpful information to help you find and use clip art. Notice today’s featured clip on the right side of the screen as well as the featured collections near the middle. Locate the search box in the upper left corner of the screen. Note that by clicking on the downward arrow to the right side of it, you can limit your search to clip art.

Explore the Microsoft site until you find a clip art image that fits the theme of your blog. Let’s ignore photographs for this activity. Look for clip art to use as your blog avatar or to illustrate a new post. When you find something, left click on the image to see its properties, including any use restrictions. If acceptable, check the box to Add to the selection basket. Follow the instructions carefully for downloading, which include accepting a licensing agreement. Make note of where your image is being saved so you can find it again.

Most of the images on this site are in WMF format (Windows Metafile Format) and will have to be changed to something else for blogging. For example, WordPress blogs support uploading only these file formats: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, and odt. However, changing a file’s format is easy. Find the file you have downloaded, and click to open it. This will also open your computer’s images software. Find the Save As button and change the file format to JPEG before saving.

The final part of this week’s activity is to write a blog post about your experience. Use the clip art you downloaded from Microsoft to illustrate your post. Remember to review Week #6 if you need a refresher in uploading files from your computer. Practice makes blogging images easier.

If you have extra time and want to experiment further, look for other places to get images, including stock photographs. TechSoup has an extensive list to help you get started, as well as tips on searching for images. One of the links is to From Old Books.

As always, before you grab an image to use, don’t forget to check on any use restrictions, and make sure the image format is suitable for your blog or other application.

 

Week #10 – March 25

Since Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks started back in January, we’ve been working with blogs. You may be wondering how Pamela has been keeping up with everyone’s blog. The answer is RSS feeds or , this week’s topic.

There are 3 activities, but don’t panic. This looks complex only because there are so many options. It’s really very easy once you make the choice in Activity #2.

1. Learn about RSS feeds.

2. Decide whether you want to experiment with RSS feeds through your browser or a news aggregator like Bloglines. If you choose Bloglines, set up your account.

3. Use Google to locate a few blog and/or news feeds that interest you and subscribe to them.

To get started, if you didn’t already, read about RSS on our Definitions page.

Why would you want to use RSS? Basically, it’s a time saver. Think about any websites you visit regularly. With RSS feeds, instead going to them to see if there’s anything new, notification comes to you automatically through a subscription. Whenever you see the orange RSS feed icon at the end of the address bar in your browser, you have the option of subscribing. Go to our intranet and check it out.

For a more entertaining explanation, watch this CommonCraft video. Don’t forget to turn on the sound.

In the video, Lee talks about using an aggregator (also called a newsreader) and suggests several different products. For Old Dogs, we are going to focus on Bloglines. In addition, RSS has become so mainstream that now it is built into the current versions of both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. For this week’s activities, choose which approach you want to try.

What’s the difference? Bloglines is separate from your browser. You go there when you want to read the news. In comparison, the browser approach integrates RSS feeds with your other links. Also, if you use more than one computer, you can access Bloglines any place you have Internet access, whereas if you choose the browser approach, your Live Bookmarks or Favorites have to be set up on each computer.

It may be a personal preference, but a product like Bloglines seems to work best when you subscribe to a list of RSS feeds, while the browser approach works best with just a few. However, you can use both. For example, consider using Live Bookmarks (that’s what Firefox calls them) to keep up with the local weather but use Bloglines for subscriptions to blogs you read regularly but not necessarily every day, like your colleagues’ Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks blogs.

If you decide to give Bloglines a try:
This tutorial will get you started. It’s low-tech, so you can print it for reference. However, since there are nearly 200 comments attached, be sure to use print preview first and make note of which pages you want. This tutorial also mentions subscribing to podcasts, a future Old Dog topic, so store that part away for use in a few weeks. After learning about it, don’t forget to set up your Bloglines account.

Once you have found a couple of RSS feeds that interest you, this video tutorial will help you subscribe.

If you decide to subscribe through your browser and use Firefox:
Firefox uses Live Bookmarks, which they define as “a special type of bookmark that acts as a folder to contain the links in a feed.”

To set up a Live Bookmark:

a. Visit a site that has a feed option. For example go to The Weather Channel and input your zip code to get their local weather page.

b. Look for the button on the right that says RSS/XML, and click on it. Firefox will return a screen with several options.

c. Find the RSS Feed Title you want; then click on the XML button to the right of it. Notice there’s a button for Bloglines users, too.

An alternative way of subscribing is to click on the orange RSS icon at the end of the URL in Location Bar (i.e., the box with the address at the top of the screen). Make sure you click on the orange icon and not the down arrow next to it. Firefox will open a drop-down menu with subscription options. The one you want is probably at the top (“Add ‘…’ as Live Bookmark). However, you may not be able to subscribe to your local weather this way, only the national forecast.

Once you have subscribed, notice the orange RSS icon and the label for this Live Bookmark on your browser’s Bookmark toolbar below the Location Bar. Click on it to open the options for that RSS feed.

If you decide to subscribe through your browser and use Internet Explorer:
This approach is a bit different.

a. Find a page with a feed to which you want to subscribe, for example CNN.

b. Click the down arrow next to the Feed button to see all the available feeds on that page (e.g., Top Stories). This button is on the toolbar between the home and printer icons.

c. Click the feed you want.

d. Click the Subscribe to this Feed button and when the new window opens, type a name for this feed, select the folder for it, and click Subscribe.

Once you are subscribed, find your subscription by clicking on the gold star icon (the Favorites Center button) and then click on Feeds.

How do I find RSS feeds?
Once you know what the RSS feed icon means, you will see they are all around you. Watch for them at the end of the address bar in your browser. There are lots of other ways to search for them, too. For example, go to Google Blogs, search for something that interests you, and subscribe. Or subscribe to your colleague’s blogs from our blogroll, The Generator Blog from last week, one of the ALA RSS feeds or blogs, your favorite network news, or anything else that catches your fancy.

 

Week #9 – March 18

This week we have two topics: social networking and Del.icio.us, a popular social networking site based on bookmarks (which are called Favorites, if you use the Internet Explorer browser). There are also two activities, one of which is optional:

1. Explore social bookmarking at Del.icio.us.

2. [Optional] Register for an account at Del.icio.us, experiment with tagging some web pages you use frequently, and then search for pages other Del.icio.us users have tagged with the same words.

After experimenting with Flickr, you have probably started to form an opinion about social networking and whether it has something to offer you. In case you are leaning towards the negative, consider that there are two perspectives.

One is personal. Often we start using a social networking service because it solves a nagging problem, and we ignore the social perspective. As you evaluate Del.icio.us, consider whether your list of bookmarks has become unwieldy. Is it long, in alphabetical order, and no longer effective? Or maybe you habitually work on more than one computer and discover you need a bookmark that’s on a different computer. Del.icio.us is one solution for these problems.

The other perspective emphasizes “social,” in other words, collaborating with others to create new tools and sets of knowledge. Search engines like Google retrieve information based on an algorithm that has (let’s face it) a marketing bias. Shared bookmarks give you access to sites that people like you feel are useful and worth accessing more than once. Del.icio.us bookmarks can also be set up for a designated group, such as by topic or for sharing in a training class, project, or work group.

As you complete this week’s activities, evaluate whether Del.icio.us has something useful to offer you, from either the personal or the social perspective.

To get started, here’s a video about social networking with bookmarks. Be sure to turn up the sound on your computer.

You may have noticed the crazy way Del.icio.us is spelled here, which is not the way it appears on the video. It’s rumored the dots are going to be eliminated. But not yet. Meanwhile, either spelling will get you there.

Next, read how Del.icio.us describes its services and pursue some topics that interest you.

Now for this week’s optional activity. If you feel Del.icio.us would be a help to you, become a user. The buttons Del.icio.us downloads to your browser makes it easy to manage your own bookmarks and also to share those others have made when you want to do that.

 

Week #8 – March 11

Rumor has it folks are falling behind and getting stressed about Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks. That’s not good.

So, this week there are no new activities. Please spend your time getting caught up.

It would help this Old Dog if you would contact Pamela and let her know how you are doing. Is there anything you need? Pamela has been making site visits to help upload photos and doing troubleshooting over the phone and through email. No problem is too small or insignificant. She’s learning, too.

Next week we will explore social bookmarking using Del.icio.us. Before then let’s all get caught up so that our blogs have 2 photos as well as some comments about how things are going on this journey.