Musings

This course evidently taught me something! I answered a whole Jeopardy category of questions on emerging technology last night. Questions dealt with such things as RSS and wikis. I did better than the college students competing!

This has been a great course and I would like to thank the members of the ETG for all of their hard work and dedication. I've learned a lot over the past few months and hope to expand my knowlege further. I have incorporated a number of sites, apps etc. into my routines at work and at home.

I plan on continuing my blog. I will strip out the Learning 2.0 material and use the blog to post interesting news and information on genealogy.

Thanks again for a wonderful learning opportunity!

Browser Tools

I already had Firefox installed at home so it was no problem to add it at work. I had never tried the add-ons before, so this was new territory. I tried changing the theme on my at-work computer but it would not take. I repeated the process at home with the same results. While installing an add-on I once again restarted Firefox, and to my surprise there was the new theme. I now have Aluminium Kai 2 on my PC (YESSS!!!).

I browsed the list of add-ons and chose the following which I installed:

• FoxyTunes - finds lyrics, videos, etc. and allows user to control many media players

• StumbleUpon - is a social networking app. The user picks an interesting catagory and then clicks the Stumble! button. This takes you to random sites in the same area of interest. This can be very addictive.
  

I also added MORRIS Bookmarklets to my favourites. This should come in handy when doing searches.

Gaming

I've been interested in computer games since the days of Atari and the Commodore 64 (I'm dating myself, aren't I?). I played arcade games but never responded well to timed-play and impending threat of death. The only one I mastered was a great game called "Aztec Challenge". My real passion was text-based games, where I would spend hours trying to solve mysteries and try to survive. As computer games advanced and I upgraded my computer, I became addicted to Sim City and Myst.

With the advent of the internet, I drifted away from computer-based games and started playing games on the internet. I now gravitate to online jigsaw puzzles, trivia, logic and board games. My favourite is "Daily Mahjong". It changes daily and has three levels of play. The graphics are well-done and are holiday-themed at appropriate times of the year. You can play this game at:
http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/dailymahjong.jsp . I also like playing "Bookworm".

Facebook

Facebook is all about connections. It allows one to connect with family, old friends and classmates. Like MySpace it is youth-oriented and the majority of it's users are university-aged. It's a great place to reconnect with old classmates, but if you have been out of school for a long time the pickings are slim. I prefer, when possible, human interaction--either face-to-face or by phone. I know this isn't always feasible but I still find it more satisfying.

The use of social-networking websites like Facebook really show their worth when "things" happen. Case in point is the recent shootings at Virginia Tech. Within minutes the news was flashing across Facebook as people checked to see if friends were okay. UV members immediately set up an "I'm OK" page to let family and friends know what was happening to them. Other universities and colleges around the world set up support pages as well.

MySpace

I toured around MySpace looking at various links and also checked out a number of groups. I'm not interested in setting up an account (too many of them these days!) so I just decided to browse. MySpace is very youth-oriented. When searching profiles, the age groups range from 18-68 only which is fine for the millions of young people that use it for socializing, but it seems to leave out the ever-growing number of seniors that are using sites like Facebook and flickr to keep in touch with families and friends.

This may be really negative, but there seems to be so few posts that are thoughtful, intelligent or worth reading. Most of the posts I have read on MySpace and other social networks are pure dreck.

Del.ici.ous

I'm still undecided about del.ici.ous and Google searches. I did a search on “science fiction alternate history” in both.

Del.ici.ous came up with 33 hits and Google came up with 5,820,000. The site that I expected to be at the top of both was “Uchronia, the Alternate History List”. It appeared at the top of the del.ici.ous list and eighteenth on Google. Other important sites like the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide, however, did not appear in Del.ici.ous. Google gave me the Wikipedia article for alternate history at the top of the list, but del.ici.ous did not list this site at all. It did list several other Wikipedia sites for subgenres.

I looked at the content of the del.ici.ous entries for this search and was not really impressed. I got more solid information from Google.