Saturday, August 11, 2007

Meredith Farkas in American Libraries Magazine

Meredith Farkas wrote an article entitled, "Why Be Transparent?" for the August issue of American Libraries. It yet again reinforces how important blogs can be to a library. She discusses using the comments element of a blog to get user feedback. This issue of American Libraries also has a library 2.0 manifesto.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Final Project

If anyone cares to offer any words of advice for my final project, it is a wiki and a blog. The wiki is far from done and if anyone wants to contribute, the password is math123. Thanks!!!

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

The realization that gaming is one of my hobbies

I spent the beginning of my summer trying to conquer Ball Revamp 4 on Yahoo Games, it took me about a week. I was very proud of myself. I hadn’t realized how much of game junkie I am until I read the Johnson article and listened to Jenny Levine speak about gaming. I am one of those people that dreams in Tetris, JT’s Blocks, Soduku, or what ever other game I am currently playing.
My earliest memories are playing Frogger and PacMan with my mother on Atari. This was followed by Nintendo playing Mario Brothers, Tetris, Castlevania, Metroid, Contra and Duck Hunt with my brother (we were never into Zelda). We also spent a considerable amount of time trying to get that stupid robot to work with Gyromite. We then got a Sega Genesis, and my time spent playing the Sonic games which now comes in handy when I babysit (although the Aladdin game was my favorite). The kids have one of those controller games that has all three Sonic games built into the controller. They can’t believe I know how to get all the Chaos Emeralds-this earned me huge points with the 8 year old. I also have a Playstation which I will occasionally break out to play Skull Monkeys and classic Atari games. My friends have a Wii and it is addicting!
Somewhere along the way in the late 80’s, we inherited a ColecoVision Adam from a neighbor and aside from the 3 games that came with it, it served as my way to word process things through the mid-nineties until the last of the printer ribbon ran out. My parents were not into technology, we even had a Beta player (which I am pretty sure is still in their shed), but I was and had access to computers (for academic purposes) at school. When we got our first computer in December 1995, we entered a new realm of computer games. We tried Myst, and I adored SimCity and SimTowers. We have been gaming ever since. Yahoo Games has been a favorite of mine for a while and I continue to play many of the free games. I usually block the chat feature as often it is someone asking you to look at their pics.
As I think about this more, I was playing computer games like Oregon Trail in elementary and middle school. I have been playing video games my whole life which makes me sort of resent the fact that I am not a digital native. I know that my access and exposure to technology is way more limited to technology than kids today, but it has always been a part of my life. Also, I would never list gaming as a hobby, or when asked what I like to do I would never answer that I am a gamer. However, it is clearly something I like to do very much. I guess I always thought of a gamer as someone who spent hours online playing World of Warcraft or other such games. I am may not play World of Warcraft, but I spend quite a bit of time playing games (of course this is not happening right now with school). I will now have reply when someone asks me what I like to do besides go to school or buying shoes. Or maybe I should find a new hobby.

Beside Yahoo Games I also like Pogo and PopCap games some of which are linked through Yahoo Games.

Google vs Yahoo Groups

I have used Yahoo groups to stay connected to my math cohort from my education grad school program. We are only a group of 8, but it is a way for us to stay connected. We had originally intended to use it as a place to share lesson plans, but so far that has not materialized for the group at large (although 3 of us do share material). We use it to mostly send out emails about updates in our lives. Based on my superficial comparison of Google and Yahoo, I feel that Yahoo groups is easier to use and more organized. Google kept booting me out and the only advantage I see to it is the ability to set up an individual page otherwise I found navigating it confusing.