Rainy day catch up

Oy. I've gotten a bit behind. I just checked my RSS whatever it is and there are 668 something or others waiting for me, so that's officially a nightmare. I've also tried to tackle Week 5's play week. I scanned the list of Web 2.0 awards. I've heard of many of them including delicious, pbwiki, pandora and technocrati. I've used some, too, such as craigslist, monster, yelp and zillow. I checked out delicious, backpack and mango and see a bit of potential but mostly just got swamped again. I also came across parkingspaces and forwarded it to a friend who is trying to rent a parking space, so something good came of that. Now I will commit to going back to the award page and reading the descriptions of everything in case I need one of those products down the line. In the remaining few minutes that I have today, I am going to dive into week 6.

Wait, one more comment. What I was most struck by in looking over the awards list was that only the top three applications made the list and even out of those three, I bet most people only ever use the first one or two tools. This got me thinking about how much power teachers have in what they choose to teach in the limited time they have with their students. Last night I prepared my lesson plan for my English class and then today half of it went out the window to accommodate the pace of the students who made it to class this morning. Ever since then, I've been trying to decide it I kept in and cut out the right materials. It also got me thinking that when it comes to technology, or anything new, it's very important that people have positive initial experiences. Otherwise, they might be misled into thinking that learning more is not worthwhile. O.k., back to week 6.

RSS...putting things in perspective

Ha! I don't generally think of myself as someone who needs a lot of control over things. I tend to be deliberate in my words and actions but am also quite content to see how life plays out. Now RSS is making me make a slight adjustment to this perspective. I got a jumpstart on this week's activity so as not to be behind again. I have created a Google reader for the NY Times and the Globe, NPR and 12 Things. Now, I think I'm done. I had not been clear on the appeal of RSS before setting this account up and am still unclear as to the appeal. Blogs and Flickr, I can control. If I want to write or look for photos or upload photos, I can do so. If not, nothing happens. Here, RSS is feeding, feeding, feeding me information. I know that I neither need nor want all of this information. I can't figure out how to delete it, slow it down, or take a full blown break from it. Hmmm, no good. I'll give myself this week (and next?) to try it out. I'm guessing that by the end of this experiment, my head will be ready to explode and I'll unsubscribe to everything. Will I prove myself wrong? Will RSS win me over? Stay tuned.

Halfway there (links but no embedded photos)

My biggest challenge with Flickr (along with the rest of the web and all sorts of other things) is, as it seems to be with many people, finding ways to harness all-or maybe just some- that it offers without being sucked into an overwhelming quantity of options. In choosing a photo topic to link to, my initial curiosity led me to search for a few of the more off the beaten path places that I have been. In the end, I decided to select two links, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollie/483933952/ and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbird17/861283116/ that contain photos of my old neighborhood in Sunderland, MA. The first shows a view taken from Mt. Sugarloaf (in Deerfield), across the Connecticut river, across my former neighbors' backyards (I lived in a big old farmhouse a few houses to the right of the properties on the right side of the river) and out toward Mt. Toby, a popular running spot of mine. The second photo is of a cornfield that was about 1/3 of the mile down the street from my house. Every year, the farmers sculpt it into an amazing and very difficult corn maze. This photo showcases Julia Child, a Smith alum from nearby Northampton. If anyone is in need of an escape from the city, the Pioneer Valley foliage is probably at its peak for the next couple of weeks and I highly, highly recommend it.

If I dedicate a bit of time to thinking about how and when I would use it, maybe next week I'll actually open a Flickr account.

Testing, one, two, three

Ok, hopefully I'm catching up just in time for week 3. My son has now had a minor but miserable illness (3 separate ones, actually) for 30 of the past 31 days and my attention seems to be more focused on a cure for the common cold (and all of its variations) than on current technology. A cure has yet to be found. In the meantime, most of my waking hours are dedicated to tissue management. I'll spare you the details (there are actually a lot of details). I am familiar with blogging, familiar but inept at online social networking (why do I keep getting virtual plants?), and am long overdue to master just about everything else on our 12 week plan. Living with a computer guy who is sure that creating wikis to track household to-do lists is the only possible way that work on the house can move forward, I guess I'd have to list wikis as the item I am most in need of learning. Yes, the house has been vaccummed and dusted and mopped in the past few years (more than once, actually) despite my resistance to entering "vaccum, dust and mop" into a password protected site, but I am confident that through Maggie and Jennifer's leadership, greater household harmony will come to exist here in Somerville.

-afd