BP8_RILS_Link_to_Comments

Follow this Link to my comment on Jeff's Blog.

Follow this Link to my comment on Jennifer's Blog.

Thank you, enjoy the well-deserved break everyone.

BP_RILS_Project

In this post I will be discussing the lesson plan for using LibraryThing as an educative resource for sharing and discussing books in an online setting and preparing them for formal gatherings.

Target Audience: 18 and older crowd, well suited for a community

Materials: Computer with internet access and interest in reading books

Objectives:

1. Create an interactive community through their joy of reading.
2. Share resources, references and ideas with one another.
3. Critique opinions in a constructive manner.
4. Interpret themes and motifs of books.
5. Discuss thoughts and feelings with valid reasons.

Procedure (steps to the process):

• Create a safe place online that can be accessed at anytime and anywhere for the members to be able to post freely.
• Start “springboards” for discussions based on book types, genre as well as a member lounge for casual conversation and a help board.
• Create parameters in which to grade or evaluate; such as logon frequency, number of posts, profile filling, length of book list, quality of contributions and etc.
• Frequently check to see participation outside of group, whether he or she is observing outside blogs, posting in other forums or talking more in social gatherings.
• Create a set time frame to track accordingly.
• Collect Data.

Web 2.0 Tool: LibraryThing. LibraryThing is a web tool that acts as an online book list that allows you to create, share and discuss books in forums or groups. It can be used by both teachers and students alike and allows users to swap books or show the books you own or have read and offers recommendations based on your preferences and bookmarks you tag.

http://www.librarything.com

Social Participation/Social Learning: Social interaction takes place through the replying and commenting to one another in the book boards and also in the "Lounge" area for more casual conversations.

Making Connections: Connecting through healthy discussion and reading, members will be able to analyze discussions and generate appropriate feedback that will ultimately benefit and enrich both the online and real life community.

Create/Produce: The end should be a growing community of members with the ability to discuss books and relevant subjects while providing thoughtful and meaning feedback with possible examples or links to other resources of information.

Assessment:

Reflection:

a. Group leader/educator will post a discussion that must be answered by all the members. This will act as a formal reflection upon the users. Questions will be asked; such as:

• Do you like the process?
• What do you not like about the process?
• Will you continue to use the program?
• Is there another way you can use the program?
• Any suggestions or improvements you would like to make to the process?

b. Group leader/educator is recommended to keep a journal of the process and look over it to see how or if the members progressed during the time period. Take a moment to think about the overall process. Ask yourself if this was successful and what improvements you can make to the process.

Here is a video documenting the process. Here is the direct link to the video.

The project seemed to fail with the lack of community participation. I will personally continue with it to see if anything improves. Perhaps an observation past the set scope will serve me better. Other reasons why it might not have worked was the time frame, it happened during spring break and religious Easter. True within the five days maybe my expectations were too high and my aspirations were too hopeful. I didn't want this to fail, I wanted it to work and succeed. Further analysis is needed to fully label this a failure, so with lack of data this remains inconclusive and I will keep you posted if anything develops on the matter. Thank you and until next time, take care.

PE5_LibraryThing

Okay, delving more into the LibraryThing I explored the extent of the forums, group creation and the special Zeitgeist feature. LibraryThing does have a decent forum setup, but keep in mind the forum boards are referred to as Talks, so the terminology is a little different. The boards go on forever and make it easy to search for whatever you are looking for and also autosort them by most recent and activeness which some sites don’t do. Making a group is easy enough. It’s a very simple form that you fill out and then you have a new Group, which has its own Privacy settings that allow you to adjust that to your heart’s content. With Groups, it creates a space for people or classes and allows all their things be in a collective cyber space, this includes discussions, posts, mail, messages and pictures. The only thing that bugs me a little is that I can’t invite people, or at least I don’t see a button for it right off the bat. You can even posts pictures within the group or umbrella it under your own personal Gallery. It let’s me do more than I thought it could. Also, the tagging feature also allows me to search a combination of forums, groups, interests, books and authors with user driven keywords, not the stuffy Library of Congress keywords that group everything under a handful of terms. O! when you are searching the database of books, its not only searching its database, but also that of Amazon.com, Library of Congress and its seven-hundred other sources. Neat yea? This expanded search functions allows me to search for user and allows me to monitor their activities as they fulfill their RILS. So this isn’t just a source for readers, but for writers as well, as writers can create and edit pages about them and their works. It’s a great way to reach out to your readers and get feedback. Not just for seasoned writers but for new writers as well that want to break out and tell readers about their books. LibraryThing also handles promotions so you can even give out free copies of your books to people in the community; it’s a really neat feature. Speaking of features, Zeitgeist is a statistics feature that takes a whole summary of the site like the current total number of members, books cataloged, tags, talks, books given out and other measureable numbers that prove most interesting. LibraryThing will be most useful for my RILS with its ability to search by user, create a group space and have a way to supervise my members that doesn’t give me all the power, or make its doesn’t seem like I do. With its over one million members, LibraryThing can only improve and grow. I encourage you to take a look for yourself and explore all this wonderful content and build your own library to add to the other online libraries. Until next time, time care and enjoy the weekend.

PE4_LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/

This could quite possibly be the most exciting thing for a book junkie like me. It’s like taking all the best things from Facebook, iGoogle, and ebay! For someone that has a passion for books, one can easily get lost in it. I know I wasted a couple of hours building up my library. It’s as easy as typing the title of the book and then assigning the tags you want to give it. Just taking off the books from my favorite bookshelf, I quickly amassed a list of over one hundred titles. The only problem you can run into is finding the exact one due to various versions, re-releases and publication years, if you’re picky about that sort of thing. I was a little persnickety for my special books that were limited print, rare or antique. I have a few antique books, I’m trying to find some first editions of my top five favorite literary classics; “Alice in Wonderland”, “Sherlock Holmes”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, “White Fang” and “Catcher in the Rye”. So far I only have one, and it’s a first edition, original American print of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It was a most enthralling discovery I made while visiting a cousin in Richmond, I am eager about my return to the Black Swan Book Store. They have a third edition Alice in Wonderland in their glass case that I couldn’t get at the time, but I am hopeful it will still be there. There is just something about old books, and new books I can’t get enough of. On this site it also features a book lending section, not that the site is responsible nor would I participate in it, where other users that want to read a book and there is another user willing to lend it out, the search function makes it very helpful. It also features a comprehensive library and book store directory based on state, making it easy to find those tucked away antique book stores. The profile was fun and easy and when I added books to my account, it gives out excellent recommendations for future books to read. All of the books have the book’s cover image with its title making it easy to search for what you are looking for, if you’re a visual person like me that is. There is also a separate section for not just the book you are currently reading, but for the books you are currently reading. I tend to multitask and read several books at the same time, in addition to the research papers and schoolbooks I am required to read. It even has a section for where you can show what ebooks you have and are reading. The site also features cool widgets that help you browse the site easier, sporting an expanded search function that not only scans what you are looking for, but also has the intelligence enough to books that are similar even if they don’t match your keywords. Its all very helpful and I don’t know why I haven’t stumbled upon this before. Well, I’m going to keep browsing around some more, thank you for tuning in. Take care until the next post my listeners.

BP7

BP6

Follow this link to my comments on Jeff's blog.

BP5

Follow this link to my comments on Lara's Blog.

BP4_typingweb

http://www.typingweb.com/

Possibly one of the most overlooked aspects of online and E-learning, the skill of typing. Well, I for one have not forgotten this important art. People and students take advantage of this skill too often, but seldom continue to train themselves in its practice. Typing fast is considered to be a great trait to have and will aid anyone in this fast modern times. Whether you're typing up a newsletter, a blog or a short story the ability to do anything fast is always a great asset. Typingweb is a free online typing tutor with simple typing tutorials that help you learn the "home row" and the other parts of the keyboard. There are also fun flash games to help you build speed while having fun. In addition to that is also comes with a great Progress system that keeps in check how well you do by how many mistakes, trouble keys and words per minute. The statistics of the people or students can be linked to a teacher profile so he or she can see the results. Its all very neat and very free, saves you money on other expensive software. From novice to Professional typists, there is always something to work on. This site can even handle General to 10-Key Certifications, fully recognized by employers. This is practically your one stop shop for all your typing needs. Just create an account and start typing, its that simple. Please give it a try. Well that’s all I got for now, I’ll keep you posted if anything else develops.

PE3_iMovie

Hey guys! I finished my Lynda.com iMovie 11 essentials video and got my certificate. Chow was a great presenter and was very knowledgeable on this program. Near the end he began to compare iMovie with Final Cut Pro. The distinct differences is that iMovie is a movie editor for the masses like Windows Movie Maker. iMovie is user friendly that's easy to pick up and comes with a lot of nice pre made settings. I especially like how the majority of iMovie's actions are represented by its own icon and graphical representation. Final Cut Pro however is a professional piece of heavy duty industry software that does require a lot of training if you want to use it. Final Cut Pro offers more options and is able to export to other professional software; such as Apple Color, Soundtrack and Shake. I will say that iMovie makes it easy to just share your movies with Youtube and Facebook, where any time saved is always a good thing. The realtime viewing is also a plus, where with most video editing programs they require you to render everything out before you can just preview it. They both have their pros and cons, but its always good to have another tool in your arsenal for the real world, kind of like an ace in the hole if you catch my drift. Until next time, take care and feel free to leave comments. Thanks for viewing my post.

PE2_iMovie

At the end of Chapter 6, it's easier to see things better. The good things about iMovie (I hate comparing them) is that I don't have to render effects, transitions or really anything I do in the editor, which is really nice and convenient, versus having to render virtually everything I do in Final Cut Pro. The Precision Editor in iMovie is extremely useful as slip editing can help save a lot of time, Final Cut Pro doesn't have anything like that to my knowledge. The bad things about iMovie is that it's trying to do too much and the extra stuff isn't all that good. Trying to imitate Apple Color, they tried to allow the user to perform very delicate color corrections in the Inspector, which really need more fine tuning and easily blow out or distort the quality image. Its nifty that they included a green screen and blue screen option that allows you to do video composition and editing all in one software. The problem right now is that it just does it and it won't allow you tweak how it does it and the cropping tool only allows four points. I would personally use Nuke because of its many options that only aid in the green screen process. For the casual person for fun events or family activities, this is an ideal software, but professional iMovie doesn't give enough options that allow for modification and correction that other video editing and compositing software offers. I haven't gotten to audio yet, so I hope that it meets up to par or has something new to offer. See you soon with the suspenseful conclusion of the iMovie Practical Experience.

PE1_iMovie

So, I felt this would be a good place for the first post. I'm at the end of chapter 3 and so far everything is fairly "hum-drum" for a video editing software. Mac likes making fancy friendly user interfaces, but other than that I'm not too impressed. The next chapter doesn't look very interesting either. I'm waiting for the audio editing and the transitions sections. I don't know where the audio options are and the last thing that seemed promising was the Transitions and the Background buttons in the tool bar. I'm an avid Final Cut Pro user, so it will prove interesting to see how the other one stacks up. I mean don't get me wrong, iMovie is one of the industry standards but I haven't seen anything particularly special that sets itself apart from the rest. We'll just have to wait and see... I wouldn't be very good at what I do if I didn't broaden my horizons and give this program a good run through. That's what I have so far, you'll be hearing from me in a bit.

BP3_iGoogleScreenShots

Hey everyone. Not sure if I'm supposed to add something to this, but I am anyways. If you haven't noticed I like TMNT ^^. Who doesn't like martial arts and aquatic animals, lol. Anyways, hope you like it. Keep you updated as best I can, I'm out. See you later.

*TMNT belongs to their respected owners, cowabunga dudes.

BP2_Join.me

Hello, everyone. I’ve got a real ringer for you. I’m here to talk about “Join.me”, a web 2.0 tool that allows you to share your screen with someone else, or a group of up to 250 people. Pretty exciting right? You’re probably wondering why this interests people. Well, I’m sure everyone gets tired of assembling for meetings, or gets sick for a lesser sense. With “Join.me”, now you won’t have to worry about having a physical place for meetings. This web tool is fast and simple to use, with virtual no downloading. Share the code with your co-workers and presto, they are at a computer watching you present. It definitely takes the scary out of speaking in a room full of people who decide your future. “Join.me” maybe be a little scary, heck its like having a bunch of people watching over your shoulder, but no worries. This tool is anything but, its designed with the user in mind and it does what is says it does without all the bells and whistles. You share your screen with someone or anyone for that matter. It’s simple, effective and versatile for so many different things. So what else other than board meetings would it be good for? Well, let’s say your client or student is having trouble with a file on their computer, or something isn’t working right. Well, you could just share a ScreenFlow video, but where’s the feedback. There’s something to be said about showing someone how to do something versus watching a video on how to do it. With “Join.me” now we can show our student or client how to fix and address the problem while answering any more individual questions they may have. Not just with fixing problems, “Join.me” can also be used to teach your more “distanced” or online learners. When introducing new software or presenting a mulitmedia presentation, your students won’t have to wonder what’s happening and rewatch the video, but learn it the first time and be connected to it.

https://join.me/