Friday, May 1, 2009

View of Sacré Coeur through L’horloge a Musée d’Orsay

View of Sacré Coeur through L’horloge a Musée d’Orsay






View of Sacré Coeur through L’horloge a Musée d’Orsay photo by Ana Sofia

Sainte Chapelle



Sainte Chapelle







Angel of Sainte Chapelle






Sainte Chapelle















Video of Sainte Chapelle.



More video of stained glass and tracery.




Ana Sofia Hernandez and Sid Kamerman Part 1


A Parisian Beauty and Sid

Sid and Ana at the Bird Market










The unanimous favorite.













Metropolitan Metro stop gorgeous ironwork and more gorgeous models.






On to Sainte Chapelle

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Exercise 23: Thanks for the memories!

Because I am a visual person images are such a joy. Of all the exercises I really liked the
flickr mash ups and the online generators best. Because I am a pragmatic person I also liked Bloglines to help me find and organize the RSS feeds and the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards List for introducing me to so many valuable new sites. Bloglines and the Awards List makes me more efficient and effective. Since I am a believer in life long learning, the entire adventure in Navigating New Technologies helped to broaden my geek horizons.

2. Until the “23 things” program my education and furthering of my professional development was “catch as catch can,” or simply haphazard: for instance, I would take part in whatever irresistible class was offered that would fit my work schedule, whatever topic was offered at the OCLC symposium at either ALA mid-winter or annual conferences, whatever workshops were offered by the Center for University Teaching Center, the Technology and all that Jazz Workshop (before it passed on was an "ahead of the curve" introduction to cutting edge technologies), whatever workshops PLAN offered, or continuing education courses that fit my schedule, or a personal campaign to learn new software (often presentation power point or Articulate type software).

3. There were several things that were takeaways for me. The list of categorized winning web sites was wonderful. The concept of the mash up was great as well. I had to have faith that the application did exist. The most concrete takeaway will be the blog that I wanted to start a year ago.

4. We were all working in separate vacuums. Frequently students learn best from peers. Peers who keep them from going down the wrong path, peers who share with each other to seek out perceived quality resources, peers who motivate each other by simple but insistent inquiries into progress toward completion. Students could not be responsible to read all blogs but could be put into groups or teams. I feel that the completion rate would be higher if there had been some required interaction.

5. I will be at the beginning of the line for any future discovery program that you may offer. I found the program to be more of a time demand than I initially assessed. I could have never done the program during work time and also accomplished my assignments. The discover exercise required a very fair amount of volunteered hours.

Exercise 22: netLibrary and Project Gutenberg

Net library has been a favorite of mine for a number of years. However, I’ve found that our library users are not as immediate in their acceptance of this product. I’ve demonstrated that they do not have to read the entire book online. They can easily zero in on the specific chapter or chapters that will meet their needs. Somehow if the book is of interest to them the conversation comes around to, “Do you have a print copy of this book?” Each time it happens I am surprised, but it happens at least 80% of the time. The Net Library interface I find to be useable but not entirely intuitive. I particularly like the search feature that gets the user to the chapters that will meet his/her needs and the dictionary feature. What a luxury to have it resident so that the student does not have to open another browser window.

Project Gutenberg began even before I started library school. Its infancy was in 1971. Where else can you search for a favorite Shakespearean quote with such ease? This site is a dream come true. What a wealth of out of copyright classics. How much easier it is for serious literacy textual scholars.

Exercise 21: Podcasts and podcasting

Podcast.net is a tool that offers 18 broad categories and a modest interface. There is no way to request a particular time period or to request a podcast that occurs after a particular date. I did find some public domain podcasts by Jermaine Grigg’s on the topic “Secrets to playing piano by ear.” There are 21 lessons.

Podcast Alley offered the same series of podcasts by Mr. Grigg. The tool Podcast Alley was put together in an expeditious manner. The podcast titles come up in a numbered list. Is it consecutively numbered or is it some kind of undefined ranking? Is my vote going to affect the numbered list? After clicking on vote I did find out that “Rankings on this site is determined by the number of votes.” I found some ESOL podcast some for pay and some free. There were many, many grammatical or careless editing errors on this site.

Yahoo podcast beta is certainly aquamarine. “Sign in, sign up, help” this was a very welcoming invitation. “Find ’em” and “listen to ‘em” were the two categories we were offered. One begins to question which population demographic is Yahoo trying to target.

Podcasts or vodcasts or screencasts would be an ideal way to inform our user public. Buy me the hardware. I’m ready to rock and roll.

Exercise 20: YouTube

YouTube is an endless source of amusement. The first YouTube video I went to the site to find was Nora. The talented Nora and her encore performance are linked in my first blog post. I had seen the video on either CNN or MSNBC and decided I had to find it and send it as an email link to MS Mildred Bou, my piano teacher. She was amused and mentioned she had tried to instruct Tango, the family cat, to play piano but Tango would have nothing to do with piano lessons.

More recently the YouTube Democratic Debate gave us an interactive, collaborative, national perspective of the concerns of the American people. The questions were guileless and direct. The people chosen to have their questions asked of the presidential candidates were non-intellectuals, non elite, non Lexus drivers, non Harvard professors. Instead, the questions were from working people. They asked questions discussed around the dinner table or at a local “watering hole.” I feel that the candidates made a somewhat more sincere effort at answering the questions as asked, rather than as they might with the journalists’ questions: simply take them as a launching point for their political stump speeches.

All in all it was an imaginative use of new technology. Maybe the University’s president will request that student submit YouTube videos for the Q & A part of his welcome back gathering.


I'm looking for some models for "Library advertisements" and think there is a lot to learn from this one.


Another link. Library advertisement. Maybe too cute.


This one is just right. We will model our library's advertisement on this example. The music is good, the pace is good, we just need to make it for an academic library. "Come in and Check it out!"