Tag Archives: 23 things on a stick

23 Things on a Stick – Thing 23

Posted on April 15, 2008 by Mary| 2 Comments

I just submitted the survey that accompanies Thing 23 and once I’m done with this blog post, we are officially finished with 23 Things on a Stick.  (With one day to spare!)

The prompts for this post included mentioning what we learned, what Things were our favorites, and what could have been done differently with 23 Things.

We’ve learned that Web 2.0 applications really work best with a high-speed internet connection.  While more and more people are getting access to high-speed, we still have to be cognizant of the fact that not everyone does when we decide to adopt certain applications.  We’ve also learned that we can’t and shouldn’t adopt every Web 2.0 tool out there, and, boy, there are a lot.  We have to choose carefully from among the offerings and select things that we have time for and that seem to be a natural fit for our mission.

We had quite a few favorite Things, including blogging, Flickr, podcasting, Webinars, OPAL, and YouTube.  While I (Mary) love Bloglines for personal use, I find that I don’t have time to check in at work.  Ann Marie didn’t care for MySpace or Facebook because she felt as though she was prying into people’s private lives.  She liked Gather, though, because of its affiliation with an organization.

We enjoyed the entire concept of 23 Things on a Stick – the idea of making a commitment to try all sorts of online applications that are new to us.  Of course, once we learn these, there will be new applications developed that we’ll have to become familiar with.  The learning never stops.

The one thing we would have done differently with 23 Things is to break down a couple of the Things.  Specifially Thing 7 and 8 seemed to have way too many websites and applications to try.  We got bogged down at that point, which was almost half-way through, and thought that if the rest of the Things were this hairy, we were going to have serious trouble finishing.

The 23 Things on a Stick website is supposed to remain available indefinitely, so we’ll probably return to it as a resource.  The program was fun and we recommend you give it a try.

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23 Things on a Stick – Thing 21

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Mary| Leave a comment

We’re close to finishing, and with not much time to do so.  Thing 21 required us to investigate social networks other than MySpace and Facebook.  I’m quite familiar with these applications, but hadn’t heard of many of the social networks mentioned through Thing 21.

One of these social networks was Gather, which is somehow affiliated with National Public Radio.  I did not join Gather or any other social network through this Thing because, well, I don’t need yet another set of user names and passwords to keep track of, nor do I believe in scattering my information around simply to try out an application.  Gather did give me some information on its front page that I could use, via its poll in the sidebar.  I liked the format of Gather and that I could read the comments people left without being a member.

I also checked out Ning, which is an application that allows you to create your own social network.  I decided to look for writing networks, but discovered that most of them were closed to the general public without a user name and password.  The ones I was able to look at seemed to be networks that people had started and then abandoned.

This leads me to an observation.  While MySpace and Facebook are all the rage right now, and they seem to be getting dissed for that, I think the best social networks are those that open themselves up to the multitudes.  There’s something about having a mass of people to draw from that makes these networks click, plus, you don’t have the irritation of belonging to a different social network than your friends do.

The suggestion has been made that museums should join MySpace and Facebook and other social networks – as many as possible – in order to gain greater visibility.  But, from what I’ve seen, the best social networks are the ones where the users are most active in updating their pages and profiles.  Gather appears to have a good deal of activity, while a lot of the networks on Ning are languishing.  Given that activity is a necessity, I don’t see that we’d have time to join a bunch of social networks and stay current with them.  While Ning contains a number of abandoned social networks, the beauty of the application is that it could be adapted to a particular use for a museum, say for creating a network of genealogists.

Posted in 23 things on a stick, culture, genealogy, minnesota, morrison county, museum, technology, website

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23 Things on a Stick – Thing 19

Posted on April 10, 2008 by Mary| 2 Comments

We’re checking out podcasts in Thing 19. This is a technology that I’ve been curious about since hearing that it was popular for museums to use for tours. The first place I went to listen to a podcast was Minnesota Public Radio because you can’t go wrong with MPR. I found a podcast series called Grammar Grater. After listening to one episode through iTunes on my computer, I added the Grammar Grater feed to my Bloglines account. (See? You really can’t go wrong with MPR.)

The next thing I did was to go to a couple of podcast directories listed with Thing 19. I looked at (or attempted to look at) Podcast.com, Podcast.net, and Podcastalley.com. I couldn’t load Podcast.net (even with high-speed internet, which is why I didn’t link it), so I don’t have an opinion on the service. As for the other two, I wasn’t overly impressed. Sure, they list podcasts, but you don’t really know what you’re going to get by simply looking at a title. Podcast.com had descriptions, but without knowing the source, I wasn’t inclined to check them out. (Limited time cuts down on the curiosity.)

Instead of fussing with these directories, I decided to go directly to a couple of sources that I figured might have podcasts – the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Historical Society. I was right. The Walker has podcasts of tours that you can download and offers other methods of listening. I clicked to download one for the Sculpture Garden, but it didn’t look like anything had happened on my computer, so I moved on to the Minnesota Historical Society. I simply googled “Minnesota Historical Society podcasts” and got a page from the collections department with podcasts that you could open as pop-ups. I listened to Marcia Anderson talk about the Bishop Whipple exhibit.

Meanwhile, the Walker Art Center tour was apparently quietly downloading to my computer because I got a screen that told me it was done. The download came as zip files, so I’ll have to unzip them before I can listen to them, which I shall do later.

This is one Thing that I will have to examine in greater detail because I can definitely see possibilities for using it at the Weyerhaeuser Museum. There’s the obvious potential for tours, but I’m sure there are some other fun things we could do with podcasting if we put on our thinking caps and have a little brainstorm.

Posted in 23 things on a stick, art, culture, exhibits, history, minnesota, museum, technology, tours, weyerhaeuser

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