Thursday, June 21, 2007

Week 10 (The End)

I plan on using my MP3 Player to listen to music for the most part. I would love to download podcasts to it if I can because I am sick of sitting in front of my computer to listen to hour long lectures from the Smithsonian. It would be so much nicer to listen to them while I'm taking a walk or possibly in the car (if it has those capabilities). Either way I'm really looking forward to having one since I never have before.
I'm not really big on audio books but I think it would be worth a shot to actually try to sit down and listen to one....usually I find it too hard to concentrate without actually sitting down and reading it.
I'm a little sad that Learn 2.0 is over. I learned a lot and found many sites in this course that I have never seen before and I had a lot of fun.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Week Nine

I think that it is a shame that people are still arguing about this topic. I have found that most of the people who are upset about free downloading of music are the big stars who already have more money than they know what to do with. I often hear them saying things about "I'm not worried about the money but what about independent artists?" I really don't think that independent musicians are concerned with a bunch of people downloading their music for free. I work for a few local bands in the area and for every show about 100 Cd's are burned of their music and then passed out to the public at shows. Smaller artists usually have websites where their music can be downloaded for free. For example, here is the band I work for, Rigid: www.rigidband.com (caution: If you don't really like Hardcore Metal then you may want to pass but the site is pretty cool). Also even major bands want fans to download their music for free. The band Weezer put every song up on the last two albums for fans to download and comment upon before the albums were even released. They still turned out to be high sellers for them.
Also, what is the difference between taping something off of the radio and downloading a song to my computer?
I believe in copyright laws that protect peoples music from being used or copied in ways they don't want but if it comes to just listening to their music for enjoyment, I think it should be free for anyone.

Friday, June 8, 2007

Week 8 (ocho)

The Flickr activity was difficult for me, which is sad since I'm the one who uploaded all the pictures for South Creek. I was easily able to upload my own pictures to the site, which you can find here:http://www.flickr.com/photos/8775823@N04/....however I found it very difficult to find all the pictures from ocls. I still haven't but I will keep trying.
I looked for artwork in Flickr and a lot of the pictures that I saw were really cool, artwork that I would have probably never seen otherwise.
Creative Commons is a great idea, being an artist I worry about posting my work online, I want others to see it but I don't want it to be blatantly copied. I think that I might look further into this and see if I can make it work for me.
As for this course,I really like online learning. It gives me the option to work at my own pace. I have used it for some courses in college and I always found it much easier to study and complete the course. I have helped a few people with learn 2.0. I'm a tech so I get a lot of questions especially about blogging. It makes me feel worthwhile which is very nice :) I'm not part of a team, I think that would make this more difficult, for me any way. i haven't spoken to anyone from another location but I sometimes read through random blogs, not knowing where they are coming from, not sure if that counts or not.
I am having a lot of fun in this course though and I must admit, I will be sad when it is over.

Week 7

I feel like I am learning so much in this course. I thought that I was pretty in touch with what was going on in Internet land but every week I keep finding new websites to learn about and use on my own.
Traineo did catch my eye when I looked through it. It seems like a site that could really help people. I don't know if I could choose four people to "motivate" me. I don't think that I would want my weekly progress sent to my Mom for instance. Would I really want to get a phone call saying, you ate this or you didn't do your 20 minutes of Cardio on Thursday. I don't think so but for some people I'm sure it is a great tool for them to use, but being nagged just isn't my thing.
Catster and Dogster. Cute web pages, kind of like Myspace for pets. I don't think that I would ever do this, even though I love my cat Ratt very much. I can't really see building him his own page and adding Kitty friends and writing a Kitty diary.....
Blufr.com...oooh trivia, I love it. My friends and I use to have weekly games of trivial pursuit, now I can study up so if we ever start again then I can beat them in half the time :P :)
Chug'd and Bottletalk, nice for those who drink Beer or Wine, I drink neither so I wasn't too interested in these sites.
The Puzzle player I will have to take a more in depth look at when I get the time, but it looked like it might be something that I could use to chase away some boredom at home.

Week 6

I really found the information from week six to be interesting. I thought that all of the url's regarding books and libraries were really helpful programs. I plan on using a few of them, especially Shelfari where you can create a virtual shelf with books that you are reading or have read to give ideas to other readers. The other programs that I thought were interesting were Elf (which could help cut down on a lot of fines for patrons. Maybe we should make some bookmarks to hand out), Guru Library (where you can do an inventory of your personal library, great idea for people who loan books and movies to friends on a regular basis), and Book Mooch (where you can swap books with other users). All of them are great ideas.
Looking through Propsmart and motormap usa was something that I normally would have never looked into. I don't see me using these programs very much, but I think that the information will be valuable to me as I will be able to suggest these sites to others.
I could however see using wikimapia, I think it is great to have users label certain areas of interest. I was able to find a lot of interesting little places in the area that I would probably have never found if it wasn't for the exercise. I wanted to add my own, but I couldn't really think of or find a place that would have been of any interest to anyone else, but if I find a neat secret area I may post it depending on how badly I want to keep the place secretive. :)
For the adventure portion I found del.icio.us to be a site that I might use. I like the idea of looking into other users favorites lists. It may give me some ideas for websites that I would have not normally found.