Thing 18 (12+ Things and counting)

Overall I feel that this has been a great exercise, I wish I had had more time for it, and although I promise myself to complete, I doubt I will without the kindly prompting from the 19Things team. So thank you all for a well run and fun learning opportunity.

I see it's a month since my last post. That's because I lost my blog through changing emails and have spent quite a bit of time finding it (and many other missing tools).

The good news is that I made excellent use of the protopage and have made it part of my working life. It was a great help in transporting valued links and useful resources between jobs. It's a fully portable way to save favourites and I find all the treasure trove discovered while doing something more important can easily be stored for later consideration in sticky notes. This has been a great resource.

I really like the MyLibrary page and thought the feeds and saved searches were great but I still haven't received any alerts. This may be a consequence of changing locations and emails but I feel I haven't seen the full functionality yet.

Pubmed search was a good refresher - it seems to have changed every time I look at it!

Can I count a quick look at Mendeley and Zotero for thing 17? I need to spend more time to get to grips with them and don't really think I qualify

I haven't looked at 14 and 15

Thing 13 - Library Thing I know I set this up (probably twice) before, was quite impressed and then went away and forgot about it. Problem was probably that I didn't find a work use for it and tend to go with Amazon wish list for personal use.

Blogging doesn't come naturally but it is a good way to reflect and will be part of working life so it was a good opportunity to get started.

Wiki[d]media images

I like the landscape around my home. I hope you can see why

Picture by: David Martin [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons



The licensing information is so complex and so hard to understand that I am even less sure than when I started on how to use 'free' images. I have relied on google images for personal use before and told people that they should check the copyright and licensing requirements. I generally recommend free-to-use sites and recommend that people acknowledge the source - I just didn't know how difficult that is. I had heard of creative commons and hoped that I would never have to deal with it. Can you just see that head in the sand!

Browsers

I was determined to do my 19things at work just because that is where I would want to make use of the 'Things'. However........ it takes up time that I feel should be more productively used and of course progress is limited by the old issues of outdated technology and restricted access. IE 7 and outlook is the local standard with local restrictions on 'History'and content. We have privileged access to Firefox for accessing SWIMS outside of the trust network. So I've done my best with Mozilla Firefox and added bookmarks and folders, no problem. I think I am going to have to give Google Chrome a go at home as the import bookmarks isn't an option at work. I'm probably not the only person who finds a really useful website and fails to bookmark it. At work these are automatically deleted after the current session so there's no way back which I find very frustrating maybe doing the importing bookmarks at home will give me a backup I can use - here's hoping! Tabs OK, I didn't know I could do that. It works outside the network but I can only shuffle them on the work browser but not bring one forward and then reset them. Shame that might have been useful.

Teething trouble sorted out

Thank you for advice on using blogger. I was using internet explorer 7.00 in the hospital network and found that even when hovering to see the rollover identification, the invisible icons didn't respond to clicks. I have found that accessing it outside the hospital network using Firefox means I can see the icons and now I am going to try last week's 'Thing'. It feels as though it is working as it should - all icons present and correct, images clear etc. I am going to have to put some time in to catch up. The only thing I'm wondering is how the restricted access will affect blogging for work purposes?

Wordle and QR code

These were an easy way in to social networking as I had looked at them before, although not used them again. The instructions were nice and straightforward. I enjoyed the wordle and feel it's main use could be telling me what is the main emphasis in my text. This was the result of wordling my notes on a brief presentation on library resources: pity you can't see it to comment. The QR codes are visible everywhere but I have never felt inclined to follow up. I have not got a smart phone so I asked my son to check that mine worked. I can see that it is a quick marketing tool and I can see that it is very easy to use. My question is - do people use them? They appear on advertisements, food labels, mailshots, as well as in our library, so has anyone got a record of reponses?

Setting up the blog. This one of the 19things felt like a test whether of me, the process or the technology in the trust, I'm not sure

Definitely out of my comfort zone with a page that has invisible icons and no help button. I am using the HTML screen to see what happens. All the invisible buttons seem to have disappeared and I am left with 'old fashioned' typing. I hope someone will comment to tell me what I could have done.