This Thing is about using communication tools. Reading this Thing I realize that I have used a lot of them.
My library (well my place of employment) uses email as the official means of communication. Which means that I send and receive a lot of emails. Actually is better for me because I work such odd hours, so it really is the best way to keep up on whats going on in my library and with my colleagues. Thinking about email I often think that I have too many accounts. Is there such a thing? I have my yahoo, my google, one at work, one at school. So four different ones I check and need to keep track of.
Using other Web 2.0 tools for online reference I think is a good thing. At my part-time job I use IMing to answer reference questions and the students are always so excited that we are on. I think that its important to use what the students are using and to keep up with technology. Did librarians have the same questions when Telephone 1.0 came about? I wonder? Was good old Dewey concerned about taking reference questions via the phone? I really liked that IM video from the U of Buffalo librarians. Very fun!
Well I use to be a more active user of IM. I do not text message, probably because I don’t like talking on the phone (so I try to stay away from it), but I do like IMing. I think that its a real time saver to communicate via colleagues. And I like how you can tell if people are online right away. I am set up with Google Talk, yahoo messenger and AOL all via Moodle. Moodle is a great system to keep everything together and its free!
I attended the MINITEX webinar on ‘Web 2.0 Tools – Blogs’. I thought it would be fun to see what they had to say. It was pretty basic and I knew much of what they had to say. But still a good refresher. It would be a great resource for someone who knows nothing about setting up a blog. They set up their blog on Blogger. Their webinar on blogs was 18 minutes long. So not too long. I have done quite a few MINITEX webinars (the live ones) and they always do a great job! I have done webinars with other places, like with vendors- EBSCOhost and with SirsiDynix who always has very cool webinars.
I have seen people use Twitter before (and post things to their blogs) and while it looks very interesting, I don’t think it would be something that I would use at this time, so I did not sign up.