#10 - Image Generators

This was a new one on me. The only thing that puzzles me about it is why our employers ever let us see these things. Don't they ever want to get any work out of us?

Anyway, I played with the magazine cover image generator at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php. What I generated was a magazine with myself and my wife Linda on the cover. It was taken at Evening in the Stacks - just last winter, I believe.

#9 Son of RSS Feeds

I started this section by playing around with the Bloglines feed search. I searched for feeds on the current rivalry between the Airbus A380 and the Boeing Dreamliner, found what I was looking for, and subscribed to them. I did the same for Feedster, Topix,Syndic8 (which seemed a bit cryptic for my tastes) and Technorati. Interestingly in most of them I found an interesting item titled, Airline bans A380 mile-high club and/or Singapore Airlines Forbids Passengers From Doing Hanky Panky In Their New A380 Planes Who says computers are dull?

Finally, I subscribed to the Merlin RSS feed. It was a piece of cake to do so.

# 8 - RSS feeds

I've dealt with RSS feeds before, when they became an AquaBrowser feature. They were useful for getting notification that one of my wife's favorite authors had just written a new book and that the library had placed it on order.

Once I set up my account I set up a feed with a political blog I rather like to look at. It's written by an old curmudgeon - in other words, a person I can identify with. I also set up feeds from three of my fellow staffers. These shall remain nameless.

As for the "select three from below" part of the assignment, I subscribed to the Unshelved Librarian feed, one graphic novel reviews feed from Library Journal and two graphic novels feeds (one adult and one teen) from the Reader's Club. Since I'm buying graphic novels these days, these should prove quite useful.

#7 Create a Blog Post About Anything Technology-Related

Well isn't this one easy?

For me an "anything technology related" topic for this week is a game. "Oh! How frivolous!" you may say. So what do you think I do in my spare time? Read wiring diagrams? (Actually, I've been known to do things like that too.)

However in this day and age games, while often frivolous, do not necessarily need to be.

That wasn't always the case. Early electronic games (anyone remember Space Invaders?) were little more than exercises in hand/eye coordination. From what I can see, most still are.

Needless to say, I'm lousy at them.

The particular game I like to play is called Civilization. I've been playing it off and on for years and, interestingly enough, getting worse and worse at it.

What the game is about is, literally, building a world wide civilization - starting with the first settlement of a nomadic tribe in 4,000 B.C. and ending with an advanced civilization in the Twenty First Century. You start by building cities. You need to connect them with road and, ultimately, rail lines. You also need to grow your economy by building farms and factories, libraries and research institutes. All the time you are doing this you also have to keep the neighboring countries from attacking you. They will, if you let your guard down. Sometimes, of course, there are reasons why you may feel a need to attack them. If you do, though, you better win. This game is merciless to losers.

So why am I getting worse at the game? Well, it happens that each successive version of it has gotten increasingly complex. Nowadays, it's a bear just to survive the assorted challenges it throws at you.

So why should any adult care?

They should care because games of this sort have a huge, and mostly untapped, educational potential. Not too many of us, of course, will ever be called upon to spend six thousand years developing our own personal civilization but there are other problem solving skills we can develop while playing "simulation" type games such as Civilization. To take an example look at a fairly old game - SimCity.

What was SimCity about? Urban planning and zoning. The planning and zoning policies it had a player implement were a bit on the simple side but computers are getting more and more powerful and programmers and getting more and more adept at what they do. The ability to create and run much more sophisticated simulations will do nothing but grow.

Even now, fairly specialized computer modeling and gaming is heavily used in disciplines like science and engineering. The focus is pretty narrow, though. The potential isn't. Looking at the increasing ability of computers to create whole worlds for people's amusement, it doesn't take a genius to realize that we are not too far away from a time when computers will be able to create other, even more realistic worlds, for people's education.

#6 Flickr Mash-ups & Third Party Sites

I discovered that I had done half of this task before I learned what a mashup might be.

A while back I was playing around with Flickr and clicked on the Map link at the top of the page. I placed some pictures I had snapped around the house on the map and then forgot about it. Then I found out what a mashup is and discovered that I had done one. So to do this assignment, just for forms sake, I added a few more pictures, one of me in California and a pair of others in New York. To see them, go to the map attached to my Flickr account.

On a roll now, I fiddled around a bit with the Flickr Color Pickr mashup. This mashup was both fun, fascinating, worthwhile and (ultimately) kind of depressing.

The fun is pretty obvious. Play with it for a bit and you will know what I mean.

Fascinating and worthwhile are also obvious. Imagine being able to search by color and shape. Not only is this one a new one on me, it does lay some serious portion of the groundwork for combining text, shape and color in online searching. For someone who spent the first two decades or more of his online search career (did I just indicate how old I am?) doing text only searches - since this was all that the computers we had in olden times could do - this is truly revolutionary.

Then there's the depressing aspect of it all. This kicks in because this particular mashup reminds us (me anyway) that, even though we may not glow in the dark, there actually are people out there who are so brilliant that they do. How do they think up of this stuff and who needs to be reminded that the rest of us can't?

Finally, I played a bit with montagr, which made me feel a little better. I didn't have great luck with it but I didn't care much, since I'm not particularly fond of photo montages. After all, there's enough clutter in life as it is. Why take perfectly harmless photos just to make more of it?

Flickr

For this post I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make it (by my standards) short.

Flickr is another one of those things I first heard of this past spring at Computers in Libraries. Shortly after the conference, in order to figure out a bit about it, I set up a Flickr account.

You can see it here: Joe's Flickr Account.

It seemed kind of like cheating, though, to use an account set up months ago for a current assignment. So a week or two ago I uploaded a bunch more photos and started adding captions, tags, etc. I've still got a ways to go before I finish all of this editorial work but there's still a lot here - about four and a half pages of photos. Some are pictures of family, others are pictures of my wife's sewing projects, others of my own assorted projects and, finally, there's a bunch of "around the house" photos. I've managed to create three sub-collections of pictures and would have made more except that you only get three for free.

This was another one of those assignments that was quite a lot of fun. If learning at school had been this much fun I might have stayed awake in class a bit more often.

Lifelong Learning - Is ignorance really bliss?

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow employee and mentioned that my first job had been as a soda jerk in a drugstore soda fountain. Even then (I think it may have been sometime during the administration of Grover Cleveland), I was a heavy user of public libraries.

The library I used, though, was as yesterday as my first job title. It had books. It had magazines. It had musical recordings too (on 33 1/3 LPs, of course). But databases? Audiobooks? Videos? Computerized circulation systems? Computerized anything? Don't even dream it.

By the time I went to library school things had changed. Not much, though. The library at my library school still had a card catalog but the university itself may have had an automated catalog (of a sort) and databases did exist. In fact my class went on a field trip to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Library once, just so that we could see what an online database looked like. You can't believe how fast a 300bps computer terminal with an acoustical coupler seemed back then.

So look at me now. A decade ago the Howard County Library hired me to buy reference books. How many reference books do you think I buy these days? Not many.

These days I mostly buy electrons. I buy online electrons, streaming electrons, downloadable electrons. You name it. If it's an electron, somebody will discover that we have a need for it and will tell me to buy it.

This gets back to the subject of this post. In the real world that we actually live in these days, ignorance is only bliss if your particular flavor of bliss also goes by the name of "unemployment."

After all, what do you think my job prospects would be if I was still a professional soda jerk or if my resume claimed that "I'm really good at filing cards in the card catalog"?

This is where the concept of lifelong learning kicks in. Back in my grandfather's day an eighth grade education taught Grandpa pretty much what the old boy needed to know to function in what then passed for a modern society. Only once did Grandpa need any significant job training after the eighth grade - when Uncle Sam issued him a Springfield '03 and told him to go out and fight Kaiser Bill.

It doesn't work that way anymore. In fact, these days, the most important skill you can learn in school is to learn how to learn. This is so because almost everything else you learn in school is certain to be obsolete within a few years of graduation.

In a lot of ways 23 Things is the real face of modern education. Aimed at the already graduated, it isn't a degree program. Rather it is a modest, incremental little "courselet" that updates the skills of the already educated and prepares them to deal with things that didn't exist when they got out of school.

Which gets me to the whole point of this particular exercise. In looking over the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners we are asked to, "write down which habit among the 7 & 1/2 that is easiest for you and which is hardest."

Except for one, all of them are actually pretty easy. That's largely because of habit number 7 1/2 - "Play." If you let it be, learning actually is fun. Habits number two through seven come with the territory to those who allow themselves to enjoy the process.

It's actually Habit 1, "Begin with the end in mind," that's the hard one. This isn't because it's hard to begin with an end in mind but because it's in the nature of learning that learning frequently brings you to many places beyond the one you thought you were going to.

It sounds like I'm laying it on a bit thick here. I'm not. Can you imagine what an absolute bore our jobs would be if we were still futzing with card catalogs and if microfilm (of all things!) was still the hot new technology? All the new toys we get to play with these days are an absolute blast. What could be more fun than getting paid to play with them?