Harriet Bassett's 23 or so Things Blog

Dog (children, partners, colleagues) training

2009-01-20T11:45:00.004+09:00

HB managed to avoid the Vet this week, at least for now. Though a bit long, Ian Dunbar's presentation on dog-friendly dog training is interesting.

Things 14 to 23 - in brief!

2009-01-16T17:42:00.004+09:00

We're probably cheating by blogging about half the program in one post, especially some time after the sessions. Looking back, I can see Things which I barely remember. And there are certainly Things I haven't managed to keep up with since creating them - sorry to all those people who've found my very boring Facebook entry... And while I twittered/tweeted quite happily for a few weeks, I haven't gone back to it since new year, though can see it's quite useful for keeping in touch. But some of the Things are so obviously practical and useful, and let us do the sorts of things we would once have needed serious skills to perform - like creating and making available short videos, or adding photos/images to documents. That's not to say that skills are no longer required - good design still requires skill and talent, but some of the basic requirements are now easier to fulfil.
Second Life (Harriet Bookmite): report from the Australian Online of January 12 2009: "Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character in the Second Life virtual reality game requires 1752 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian."
I'm not quite sure whether Harriet Bookmite requires this much electricity, but if she does I'm happy to expunge her in the interests of carbon reduction - she's possibly using more than me. SL does offer opportunities for learning, and it's terrific to see the creative work done on our Island.
And Del's presentation on Gaming was very engaging - as others have noted, it's hard to compete. So perhaps we shouldn't try to compete with fantastic graphics and sound, but rather go for competent, useful and personal productions, focussing on relationship building.

OK, what haven't I done. I didn't attend the session on slideshare and youtube. Trying to embed a video was a distressing experience. First I found that Rookie the dancing dog died last year. Then I couldn't find the code to copy across. Grr... And I haven't done anything with Ustream.

HB is good at relationship building, usually, and hopefully will remember this on her visit to the Vet for an operation next week. She forgot it briefly while having her teeth checked...

23 feet

2008-11-28T13:44:00.000+09:00

Excellent library feet/shoes.

2008-11-18T18:26:00.000+09:00

Zotero and LibX are both excellent tools, known by a number of people already. LTSG is very keen for the library to train users in both Zotero and LibX. I wish I'd starting using Zotero sooner (though don't find it especially intuitive). There seem to be a large number of services which help people organise their resources - links, documents etc, and share them. The library could use these to assist in various projects.
Today we looked at Delicious and Social Tagging and Search. There are a number of interesting articles around which discuss the pros and cons of tagging, comparing it with the use of systems such as LCSH. I like the notion of our traditional library practices being based on subject description from the author's perspective, while tagging takes the user perspective. There's a list of most used tags from June 2008 on Technorati (can't find it again), which identifies tags like Politics, News, Family etc etc as most popular. It's hard to imagine these being very helpful without a great deal of context.
One of the things I've been noticing while working through the Things is that if you've missed some basic bit of information somewhere along the way (and I've missed many), it can be quite hard to make judgements about what strategy is likely to work best in a particular situation - so you end up having to learn things step by step, lacking the ability to act intuitively.

Added HB's photo today - or a small bit of it. She's wading at South Beach, blissfully. Haven't worked out how to get the blog title back though...

2008-11-14T14:55:00.000+09:00

Today HB has shared the story of her recent walk down to the school oval with JagoMac, using Google Docs. JM seemed a little disinterested, but shared a photo of himself with us. LTSG has also used Google Docs to share comments on selection of new technologies.
Harriet now also has an iGoogle page, which could prove useful and addictive.
To the exclusion of Wiki creation. HB and I have created a number of very boring wikis. There's one for LMC which operates intermittently, and is accessible to members of that group. There's another which was supposed to be used for operational planning, but hasn't quite got off the ground - will have another go at this. Having another go at things is something HB is good at, though usually they're things she likes eg bones. (Not that I'm implying that I don't like wikis - I do).

2008-10-31T13:53:00.000+09:00

RSS Feeds - a topic of potential (but unfortunately not actual) interest to HB herself. I've had some feeds set up in Google Reader for some time, but while they mean I don't actually have to go out to the sites, in practice I don't check out the Reader site very often. So right now I have 60 unread items. Worse, I actually do go to some of the sites I've added, so while they appear as unread in fact 43 of them I've already seen. Seriously inefficient...
To compensate HB for the lack of real food involved in today's exercise (another possibility), I've added a feed from Eukanuba (with assistance!)

2008-10-24T14:30:00.000+08:00

Harriet Bassett is a highly intelligent 9 year old girl (ok dog) who would probably be fascinated by some of the 23 Things. Or not. But how Harriet learns would be an interesting subject, so for the next few weeks I'm going to think about learning from her perspective (or my guess at her perspective).
From the 7 and 1/2 lifelong learning habits the one I felt most anxious about was the notion of beginning with an end in mind. Harriet frequently seems to have an end in mind when she starts something - eg get food, sleep on couch without owner noticing - whereas I might see a nominated end as being a bit too prescriptive. Harriet's ends are also quite easy to conceptualise. Less complexity sounds like the way to go.
Till our next post.