Youtube

I'm pretty familiar with YouTube. I've been in many situations (as I'm sure everyone has) when I'm forced to watch videos other people find funny, and when I force others to watch videos I find funny. (Everyone watch the Drunk History series. They're only like 7 or 8 minutes long and awesome.) Some of the time I find YouTube to be a little annoying because not everything people video is worth watching, but most of the time I find it to be an amazing concept. Just as blogs allow individuals to become authors, YouTube allows them to become directors.

I think that YouTube can be very beneficial for libraries. I know from experience that most students in an academic setting have no clue how to find books, let alone electronic journal articles in their school's library. I also know that most will not ask a librarian how to do so. I would think that creating how-to YouTube videos illustrating how to find materials in the library would help those students tremendously.

Looking for library videos on YouTube immediately brought me to an episode of Mr. Bean that features the man himself going to extreme lengths to avoid the legendary library taboo of making noise.

Podcasts

Living in the iPod age has made me very familiar with podcasts. As I think I've said before on the discussion board, it's come to the point where I prefer to listen to "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" or "This American Life" over music.

Looking through podcastalley.com I find a lot of podcasts that I would be interested in listening to such as "The Signal" which talks about the Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity, and maybe "Mail Order Zombie" which reviews all the straight-to-DVD zombie films that are produced.

Browsing through the most popular podcasts, I didn't find many that were directly, or indirectly, library related. There were, however, a good deal dedicated to comic books. As graphic novels rapidly become the material used for successful movies, I think that they also deserve a lot of attention from libraries, especially public libraries, because this is the medium of literature that the young generation seems to enjoy. There are, of course, many podcasts like "The Book Report" which are sort of book clubs--often with live interactive discussions.

Flickr

My experience with Flickr was a pretty straightforward one. I have never used it before, but I have used sites like Photobucket, and it proved to be very similar. Using the photo uploading capabilities of Facebook often also has prepared me to be familiar with how a site like Flickr works.

I posted a photo of myself and a few members of my family at the Harry Potter part of Universal Orlando this past August.

When it came to posting photos having to do with libraries, I have been unable to actually get to a library so I improvised with photos I already possessed that had any connection to libraries. I hope this is okay! I posted a photo of a sign at NUI Galway that I took while spending a semester there in undergrad. The sign points the way to the University's library in both English and Irish. The other photo is of my aunt's dog reading Wuthering Heights--proving that literature is important to both humans and canines alike.

My Flickr Page

7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits

My family always jokes that I should just stay in school forever. I'm going on my seventh straight year of higher education since I began undergrad. I love learning (just as much as I dislike working?) and going to class to learn about a subject I'm interested is a privilege. Listening to the 7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits helped me admit, once again, that although I love to learn, I can be resistant to the conventional student role. The habit I think is easiest for me is accepting responsibility for my own learning. I know how I learn best and I like to shape my role as a student to get the most out of any lesson in life. The most difficult habit for me is viewing problems as challenges. I think of problems often as crises and fail to remember that they may be learning opportunities. I can get frustrated easily.