Reflections on Wise Kids training: Day One

Day one of the Wise Kids New Technologies - Information Literacy Training has been a fun, interesting and brain busting day!  I have to admit to being a bit of a geek and did know about/use many of the tools mentioned but hadn't put much thought into their integration with other tools/services and how they can be used in libraries/LRCs.

What I really appreciated from the day was starting at the start so we all had the same idea of what we were talking about.  We talked about the internet, it's beginings and its infrastructure through to how the world wide web has developed into what we see now, as new fancy web 2.0.  Our trainer, Sangeet, did mention about the idea of the semantic web/web 3.0 which is something I would like to look into further.

Some terms I hadn't heard of before, such as affiliate schemes (e.g Amazon), were discussed and again I can see how these could really benefit libraries by being an income generator in some instances.  Although I have heard the term web 2.0 about a billion times I never really thought about its defintion.  I had also heard that Tim O'Reilly had been the first person to use the term web 2.0 but didn't know that he used it as a definition for users creating, tagging, rating and sharing content.  Which now I know seems really obvious to me!

As a group we looked at copyright issues and the use of Creative Commons Licences.  Again I have used CC images but didn't know about its background (lawyer created licences we can use for free) and also didn't know that you could search for music too.

Some tools that I hadn't heard of or had seen but don't use I would like to evaluate further:

• TED Talks
• Scribd
• Jamendo

At the end of the day we created short video clips about our feedback from the day.  This is a personal issue of mine where  (and some will find this hard to believe!) I don't like public speaking (even in a loose sense) but have been trying to overcome my fear.  I'm partly looking forward to seeing the clips so I can get feedback from the rest of the group and see for myself how I come across so that I can get better at this, but also dreading it!

I'm really looking forward to day two of the training (tomorrow) and especially looking forward to creating pages on blogger which is a completely new concept to me.