Snow Day

In the twenty-some years I've worked in libraries, the libraries I've worked at have closed fewer than half-a-dozen times--until this year. Rockford Public Library has closed twice in the past week! This is unheard of in the annals of RPLdom. There are hundreds of homeless depending on the library being open. There are countless people with questions waiting to find answers. How dare the library close!
But the administration jus announced that the library will close tonight at 5:00 PM due to the blizzard-like conditions.

Happy holidays!

The end of the beginning

I've enjoyed reading all of the summations on my colleagues' (classmates') blogs, and I wanted to do something spectacular for refdeskpaul to celebrate the end of the semester. But this is not the end, merely the beginning, for refdeskpaul, and it seems kind of silly to list each of the 23 things and what I learned from each of them during the past 16 weeks.
I am, however, so very glad that I have learned the hands-on basics for web 2.0 by actually doing each of the 23 things: I learned the theory of web 2.0 in other classes, but this has been an exceptional learning experience because I have had to actually apply what I have learned. Being a Piagetian constructionist at heart, I firmly believe we learn best by coordinating sequences of neuronal firings in multiple parts of the brain simultaneously--employing motor neurons in hand-eye coordination, exercising verbal (and actual speech) neurons in constructing letters and symbols and words, neurons in the corpus callosum that coordinate the two hemispheres of the brain and allow cross-talk to happen between the left and right brains, etc. That happened in this class because of the "realness" of blogging for each other in real time. We all had to use parts of our brains in new ways. Now that we know how to do all of these things (way more than 23 things), we'll continue to build new learning on top of the base we constructed in this class. So I intend to continue blogging on RefdeskPaul. This is only the beginning....

Reference Resources Wiki

I have started a Reference resources Wiki at . Come and join me at http://referenceresources.wikispaces.com/ and join the conversation about full-text reference resources available online.

Checking all the new places I've visited in this class

In preparation for summing up the 2300+ things I've learned in this class, I went to http://www.checkusername.com/ and entered refdeskpaul. I discovered I've registered this blog or used the blog's username to create accounts at Blogger, Diigo, Flickr, Hellotxt, Livejournal, Myspace, stumbleupon, technorati, tinyurl, tumblr, twitter, vi.sualize.us, Yahoo, and YouTube. But that's not nearly half of the web 2.0 places I've visited or where I've created new accounts because of this class. This has been a super learning experience.

Gave you see All My Faves. yet? http://allmyfaves.com/ offers logoized links to all of the web 2.0 sites, including 43 Things. Check them out!

Digital Media Blog

Great site: http://spotlight.macfound.org/

Statcounter.com

Carrie had an interesting post about viewing visitors who view our blogs, and I took her suggestion to add a stat counter to my blog. Now everyone can see who visits this site!

Statistics Counter from statcounter.com

Carrie introduced us to statcounter today, and I thought it sounded like a great idea.