SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 6--Flickr "Services"

Truly, the assortment of mashup "services"/"tools" available which interact with Flickr is astonishing... and I only took time to look at a few of them. I played with the "Flickr Color Picker" for about two minutes, and looked at some "trips" on the "Travel Planner" for about fifteen, read about Mappr, played with "retrievr" once... all interesting, but not that compelling or useful to me.

Then I went to "BigHugeLabs -- Home of fd's Flickr Toys" and discovered delivr (""Delivr might just be the biggest e card site on the internet with over 3,000,000 images to choose from to create a free ecard.") Now that I'll use personally! Immediately sent a couple to my wife, including a beautiful New Years e-card which will be great to send to friends & family if/when I ever get around to writing my (supposedly) annual personal newsletter.

But the idea of making an ersatz magazine cover especially appealed to me (thank you Helen Blowers/CSLA SLL 2.0 Team for suggesting it!)... and it's something I can share with LJHS faculty in an email, suggesting they consider having students create their own "magazine covers" for individual/small-group "magazines" of student writing (research projects or otherwise). So I used fd's Flicker Tool "Magazine Cover" to come up with the one you see up top--I'm actually rather proud of it. For about 15 seconds I considered paying $4.00 to have it printed as a poster and mailed to me so I could hang it in the library, but it's probably a little too sarcastic for that and I didn't want to spend more time and energy (and the $4.00--probably before postage) creating and tracking yet another login for another Web site. If you want to see it larger (or download the largest image file of it from Flickr so you can use it yourself--feel free), click here.

After creating it I was able to save it to my hard drive, then I added it to my Flickr collection. Rather than try to include it with this post the way I did the photo in the previous post (creating the blog post from within Flickr), this time I'm going to add it to this post from Blogger, uploading the photo file from my hard drive. I'm hoping this works better than adding a Web-hosted photo from within Blogger did.

Hooray... it worked! ...Well, sort of. The text trying to wrap on the left of the image doesn't do it right--leaves a big gap underneath the first few words, but oh well. Next time I want to include a "large" image with a post, maybe I'll try the "None" alignment option and see what happens.

SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 5 (more)

Students using reference BOOKS!
Originally uploaded by Browsing Isn't Surfing

Since adding a Flickr photo using Blogger's tool didn't work right, I'm now trying it from Flickr by using Flickr's "Add to blog" tool. "becca" Commented on my blog that she wasn't able to get a photo to display in Blogger using Blogger's tool, either, and suggested I try this.

I didn't try just uploading the photo file from my hard drive (in Blogger), because the whole point of this little exercise seems to be to do it using these this more-"Web 2.0" directly-from-Flickr-toBlogger tool (becca had this take on it, too).

About to click "Post Entry" in Flickr. If this works, you'll know it because this post--plus the photo in all its glory--will be in my blog! (Wonder if the caption--in addition to the title--will also show up?)

SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 5--Flickr browsing

I almost titled this post "Flickr surfing"... but then you would have thought I was referring to the process of browsing through Flickr photos, wouldn't you? See how you are? ;) It's pervasive, now a part of the language of our Net culture. *Sigh*

Since the next Thing (#5) involves using Flickr, and I wanted to replace the stock image that runs along the top of this Blogger template with a photo of someone surfing anyway, I searched Flickr until I found a decent photo of someone surfing, then edited my blog's template to add it. I was pleased to be able to find a photo of someone surfing my home break, Swami's (at least according to its Flickr tag--and it does look like a Swami's wave). I did have to fire up Photoshop Elements and crop it vertically so it would be more of a band across the top rather than this huge photo you'd have to scroll down past just to get to the rest of the blog. Thank you, "Rick C San Diego" (evidently Rich Clark per his Flickr URL ) for posting this photo--and tagging it with "Swamis" so I could find it--on Flickr! (No, that's not me in the photo... no one's taking pictures of me when I surf.)

I guess what I've done satisfies Thing #5 Discovery Exercise a., but I may do Exercise b. if I have time. I think I have some photos of my library on my hard drive here at home somewhere...

Yup. OK, created a Flickr account (yet another account at another Web site! another login to record! Aaaugh!) and posted the photo. It's of a class last Spring working on a research project in the Reference room, using reference books (what a concept!). Virtually all have their heads down and it's a pretty blurry photo, so I'm sure none are individually-identifiable so I don't have to have parent-signed consent forms from any of them. Now to see if I can post it as part of this blog entry.

Rats! Didn't work. And now when I'm trying to edit this post to do it again, the Add Image icon in the Edit Posts toolbar doesn't bring up the Add Image window as it did before. Hmm... maybe my computer's tired? Back to the drawing board. For now, I guess ll just have to insert it as a URL here. That at least works.

Hmm... Tried again, and something very strange is going on. There's a very faint, almost completely "blank" space at the top of this post... looks like a faint "frame" of some kind. There were actually two of them, but I was able to delete one of them and leave only the one. Since I specified the photo be to the right, with the text wrapping on its left, the first line of text in this blog is "wrapping" around this faint frame... right where the photo should appear. and when you (I) click on that frame, it does switch the browser window to the Flickr-hosted photo of the library! I'm stumped for now.

SLL 2.0--Week 1, Things 3&4--Create blog & avatar; start posting; register

OK, got the blog going. Coming up with a name for it was a challenge: CSLA wants me to end it with something SLL 2.0-related, but if I'm going to be using this as my blog after completing the 23 Things, I'd rather not have end with some cryptic (to non SLL2.0-ers) "sll20" or "library2" or "tl2" (Teacher Librarian 2.0) stuff. I'd also like it to be somewhat unique (of course), and represent me somehow. Remembering my long-standing annoyance with the term "surfing" having been given a second meaning in the early days of general Web popularity, I decided to use "browsing isn't surfing" (http://browsingisntsurfing.blogspot.com): the phrase states my case, and anyone who's curious can read my first post where I explain it. Although it's a bit much to type, I figure it isn't too difficult or tedious, fairly easy to remember--and hey, you only have to do it once; that's what bookmarks and RSS are for!

Re. the titling of each post with something CSLA SLL 2.0-ers can easily recognize and relate to the "Thing" it's about and evidence of, that makes all kinds of sense (I am a librarian, after all). Though it's a bit more work, I vow to do it--for them--always. After all, one/several of them are going to actually take on the task of reading my posts and logging my SLL 2.0 progress... on top of their "day jobs" and the rest of their life! Thanks, folks!

Creating the avatar in Yahoo! was kind of fun--though I was surprised they didn't have one of a surfer. But then, since I haven't been in the water for months, I'm not really much of a surfer anymore <:-( . Since I've joined the community of the Seaside Center for Spiritual Living and am undertaking some spiritual growth, I figured the guy sitting in the lotus (which I can't and don't try to even approximate) would serve for now. I'd like to put a great photo of a breaking tube along the top of my blog page--and the template I chose looks as if it should allow me to do that--but don't have the time right now to go hunt for one and play with that... eye candy has to take a back seat to creating custom business cards for three people, printing and slicing, and wrapping... Christmas Eve is tomorrow!

Registering my blog w/ CSLA is a must-do, however... Done. A minor glitch here, though:
I tried clicking on the link behind the text "CSLA 2.0 Team" toward the bottom of the "#3" page (http://schoollibrarylearning2.blogspot.com/2007/02/3-week-2-create-your-own-blog-avatar.html) that points to "www2.blogger.com/CSLA2team@yahoo.com" but it only opens a "Not Found / Error 404" page. So I emailed directly from my email client (Eudora) to . That email hasn't been kicked back yet, so hopefully it got through.

SLL 2.0--Week 1, Thing 2--Lifelong Learning & the 7-1/2 Habits

OK, ran through the "lifelong learning" slideshow and dutifully created my Learning Contract with myself. The content of the slideshow contained little new to me, but it didn't hurt to review it... and it was good for me to lay out a schedule for myself of which Things I'm going to complete by when. If all goes well, I should be able to finish by the middle of March.

Of the 7-1/2 Habits, the easiest for me is probably to accept responsibility for my own learning. The hardest? Probably the last one (number 1/2): "Play!" When do I find the time? (Rhetorical question, of course.)

SLL 2.0--Week 1, Thing 1

This is a great program/tutorial, and I'm ashamed I haven't gotten on it and dove in before now. Jacquie Siminitus first invited me to be one of the initial CSLA members to go through it back in early 2007--and I agreed and had every intention of doing so--but work (in a library with zero support staff... now still only one library tech. 3 hrs./day) and the rest of life overwhelmed me and I'm just now getting to it.

I'm amazed when I think of the time and effort it took Helen Blowers and everyone else (including CSLA members) to create this. Very impressive! Where ten years ago many of my technology skills were pretty leading-edge, I've just not been able to keep up--I've only read about but not actually used (or at least created or edited) wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc. While I'm still not convinced they're all absolutely necessary for teacher librarians--or classroom teachers--in our day-to-day teaching of students (like videoconferencing, I tend to think of them as solutions looking for problems), I do think they're rapidly becoming a part of the world of many of our students--and adults--and we need to be "literate" enough to understand, navigate with, and use them ourselves. I expect this will be my chance to come up to speed in this regard.

"Browsing Isn't Surfing"... Whaaat?

In case you're wondering...

I first discovered the Web back in about 1991 ('92?). At the time I had a bleeding-edge, 14.4K modem, and an account on the old CORE (California Online Resources in Education), a toll-free dialup Internet connection provided free to California teachers. Mostly I was just reading and posting to LMNET, a listserv for "school librarians," but then I discovered this thing called the World Wide Web. At the time it was not graphical (at least not that I knew of): when logged onto CORE, I could type a command that would bring up a screen full of monochrome text (a Web page) with some words or phrases highlighted (silver letters in a black rectangle instead of black letters against silver on my also-bleeding-edge notebook computer--an actual computer the size of a three-ring binder I could place on my lap!). Using the arrow keys on my keyboard I could move the cursor to a word/phrase, hit , and a new page which was "linked" to that word/phrase would (slowly) scroll into being. Hypertext, with links to pages from all over the world (though there weren't such a mind-boggling number of them back then)! Wow!

As the Web became a phenomenon and began to be written about in the press, it wasn't long before I read the phrase, "Surfing the Web." As a long-time (since 1970) surfer (as in, riding ocean waves on a surfboard), this rankled me. I'd done enough Web browsing to know that the experience of typing URLs and clicking on links to jump from Web page to Web page, amazing as it was, was nothing like surfing. Paddling out, sitting in the lineup judging the swells, paddling for one, taking off, making the bottom turn, guessing every moment what that constantly-changing mass of ocean is going to do next and reacting to it with balance, speed, and the carving edges and shape of your board, deciding how long to continue and looking for an exit spot and maneuver... this is a completely different experience. Browsing the Web and surfing the sea are separate universes.

I figured some poor landlocked Webhead who'd never even paddled a board probably thought this would just sound really cool and so coined the phrase. While I vowed never to myself use the term "surf" to mean "browse" (the Web), I also realized this was already a battle I could not win, and that the term was just too cool-sounding for others to resist... especially when it continued to pop up in other articles and stories.

So when it came time to name my blog, I figured this will be my little revolt. Semantics may be for sissies (or old farts like myself), but I can't resist.