TAAllan

Final Reflection
Once upon a time in a place not far from here, there lived a newbie Library Manager, this Library Manager was a bit scared and nervous about the new technologies taking over her precious book lovers’ with their shiny new gadgets, widgets, and templates!  This Library Manager decided to go out on a quest [...]

How many people does it take to start a social phenomena?
It takes just 1 + 1 + 1 to start a revolution and that’s just what happened in 2006 with three key players in this social networking messaging site.    The trio based out of San Francisco decided they needed something to break out of [...]

Social Networking Sites
People, Places and Things









People (Facebook, MySpace)
Reflection on Learning about Facebook,  and MySpace
It’s all about the people in social networking !
Brian S. Mathews explains the 6th degree of separation in these terms, “Social networking isn’t new.  The old saying, “it’s not what you know, but who you know” still rings true today. [...]

Animoto – Relearning my ABCs of animation, pictures and mixed media.

I had never heard of animoto before, so when I googled and found the site, I was amazed at what an easy process the making of a video or montage of photos into a slick, highly marketable, and effect social networking tool.  This Web 2.0 [...]

Reflection and Learning Process

I decided to use YouTube as my format for videosharing, and I have to admit I have been anxious, worried, and excited about this project!  Firstly, as background, I filmed the above Youtube video using a Sony Handycam with HD capabilities.  The camera is amazing picture quality, I found out afterwards that it's the same camera that the journalists use in their fieldwork!   Thank you to the trust, and generousity of my friends, and colleagues at the library.  So I put together a short script and had our Children's Programmer film the library tour, I was excited!  Then, I was going out of my mind, I got the cable for the video camera to upload onto the PC, and found out that Sony has its own programming software (that I didn't have) - they are MTS files.  I tried to download them into MPEG or Windows, or anything!  I had just about given up, then I went online and type into the google search "downloading MTS files into a MPEG", and it lead me to a site:
www.avs4you.com
I took the MTS files and converted them into MPEG and wmv files, just in case the MPEG didn't work - it took me over 5.5 hours to download everything.  I went to a premiere screening this weekend of a very close friend of mine that has a NFB film in the Internation Film Festival, and I told her how long it took me she said and I quote "wow, that's not very long, good for you".  I thought to myself, it's all about perspective!  I have had a couple of people ask me, "while you are doing all this are you keeping track of how you get things done?"  Very good advice indeed, I can relate my learning to social constructivism, where you learn by doing,  using the online community to guide me in order to facilitate that independence the next time.  As web noted from Wikipedia (September 27, 2009: 5:05 pm):
Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the general philosophical constructionism into social settings, wherein groups con