Vermont’s 23 Things

Way back in my first e-mail about Vermont’s 23 Things, I referred to it as a winter learning opportunity. My vision certainly didn’t include entering Week 10 with the snow still flying.

So, to take our mind off of the still increasing snow banks, let’s sit down with some hot chocolate and look at free web-based online productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, presentations, project management, and web conferencing) and the most recent Web 2.0 Awards list.

Welcome to the wonderful world of wikis! This week we’ll be turning our attention to a great web-based tool for multiple-participant projects. Plus we get to see another Common Craft video!

For this week:

17. Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that libraries are using them.
18. Create a wiki or add an entry to a Vermont’s 23 Things sandbox wiki.

This week, we’ll be looking more closely at del.icio.us and Technorati, two Web 2.0 applications that take serious advantage of tagging (we’ve already looked at a few -Flickr, LibraryThing, and blogs all use tags). Tagging allows you to associate keywords with online content - webpages, pictures, posts, etc. It is considered a folksonomy - an unstructured categorization scheme. We’ll also be reading and blogging about a few perspectives on Library 2.0.

Hello all you followers of Vermont’s 23 Things!

I hope you are feeling refreshed after the Catch-up Week.

Did you enjoy playing with photos and images in Week 3? Then you’ll enjoy this week’s exploration of more image-related tools with Thing 12: Play around with an online image generator.

Do you love books? Thing 13: Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your books. Don’t forget to take a look at http://www.librarything.com/wiki.index.php/Help_in_Haiku

For those of you who have just stumbled on this blog: it’s still not too late to participate. Spend some time with the first few things, create a blog to record your
Vermont’s 23 Things thoughts and adventures, and send me (mara.siegel@mail.dol.state.vt.us) the link to have it added to the still growing list on the Participant Blog page.