Communtication things 7

Modern communication is a funny thing. Have a child in high school or college and you are instantly thrown into the new methods of communication. Personally I have not spent time using IM and do not plan to do so. When I am done with work I do not want to spend time on my slow home computer talking to friends using IM. I still prefer that cup of tea around the kitchen table, calling on my cell phone or going for a walk and talking face to face.
Email is a constant part of my job and being the IT person I need to keep my emails coming in constantly and always on so if anyone is having problems they can get to me. I use email all day long in communicating with the branch librarians as I send them weeding lists, answer questions about the public computers. etc.
Texting is a part of my daily life since our son went to college. It is the only way to get a hold of him some days. I have also learned how easy it is to use to send family members quick messages.
I can see how these tools can be very useful in the library situtation when you have enough staff and equipment to them. Since our library branches are all small rural towns some places are still just getting good cell phone receptation. There is one small branch where my cell phone will not even work in the building and I bought a new phone that was suppose to work there. So there are still many limits to this new technology.
ONE FUNNY SIDE LINE: in 2001 I was in Tanazina on a mission trip and saw a goat herder out side of Arusha wearing the native Maassi blanket (worn like a cape) using a cell phone as he watched out for his flock yet when we got to our village the telephone was covered with a dollie because it seldom rang. In fact we only heard it once in three months.

Checking back on my things 4,5

Today I am caught up with my projects or waiting for others staff member to finish their tasks before I can move on with my current projects so this is a good time to get back to looking at this project. In reading through the list I can see that I have been doing a number of the things as part of my daily work.
I see that in my last post I uploaded a picture from our library. Since then I have been using a digital camera at home and uploading my pictures to my home computer. I choose not to put my pictures on Flicker. Guess I am a more private person. What I do though is send pictures to my husband's computer so he can upload the pictures of our son to his Ipod. I also have discovered that using a digital camera with an old computer does not work. It has filled my harddrive to the point of making other work slow and hard. I am planning to move all pictures to an external harddrive. So that is thing 4 & 5.

Time to move forward

It is time to finish this project and move forward with more things on a stick. I have several friends who's college daughters have been teaching their mothers how to work Facebook and it is time for me to learn how to use my account and all the new social network tools better and faster. This is a great place to play with all of these new things.

This is a favorite spot at our library for patrons to sit with their laptops.

Thing 3

Yesterday I was working on the RSS feed thing but could not get google to work for me. the sign-up page never came up. I do have a google account. So instead I tried the blogline and was able to sign up for an account there. I did not have time to search for more then one blog I wanted to read, hopefully today there will be time to check this out in more detail.

Thing 2 library 2.0

I have a teenage son who finds it funny that his old fashioned Mom is starting to know as much about the computer and the web as he does. It is great to be able to have the chance to learn about how the kids are using the web in their world. I can see so many possiblities for drawing in the younger people to our libraries by providing better computers. I also agree that libraries need to be ready for changes in order to draw in the younger people.

the new me as an avatar

Today I found time to create my avatar in Yahoo. It was fun seeing the images I could create and pretend to be.