Monday, October 20, 2008

Welcome


Greetings Fresno State Faculty and Staff!

We are happy to share with you ten social tools that are changing the way people and society access, share and communicate today. These ten social tools are also known as Web 2.0 technologies or emerging technologies.

If you're wondering How, Where, Why or What Web 2.0 is, we highly recommend this video: The Machine is Us/ing Us

This program is loosely based on the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County's (PLCMC) Learning 2.0 Project developed by Helene Blowers. Thanks to the PLCMC for all their great ideas and activities, many of which we have adapted for these lessons.

FAQ:
1. Who is this program for? All faculty and staff at Fresno State.

2. What is it for? To give everyone a chance to learn and have fun with technology, to become familiar with ten selected applications or social tools (all free!), and to think about how you might use these in your classroom and professional work, and of course, for your own personal interests as well.

3. How much time will it take? Most of the steps will take less than an hour a week!

4. Do I have to do this? Of course not, it is strictly voluntary.

5. How does this program work? This is a self-directed, self-paced learning program. It is designed to encourage you to take control of your learning through exploration and PLAY.

Work through each step in your own time. Follow the instructions and each step to explore each social "thing" through the various descriptions, examples, videos, tutorials, articles, and more that we have provided.

6. How long do I have to complete it? The program kicks off Oct 30, 2008 and there is an incentive to finish by December 15, 2008 – the first twenty people to complete everything by then will receive a 2GB flash drive and everyone who finishes by then will be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card.

7. What if I've already done some of these things? It’s great if you are already familiar with some of these social tools. Just read through that section and post your comments about your experience with that particular step.

8. How will you know what I've done? You'll be posting information, links, and comments for each step. Vang Vang will check the 10 steps to Social Fun and Enlightenment blog for your comments in each step. When you are finished, please email Vang (vangv@csufresno.edu).

Remember: The first twenty people to complete everything by December 15, 2008 will receive a 2GB flash drive and everyone who finishes by December 15, 2008 will be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card.

9. Why should I do it? Because it’s a fun way to learn something new that will expand your personal and professional horizons.

10. What if I get stuck and need help? This probably won't happen, but if it does, contact Vang Vang

Now that you're ready. Let's start!


Note: In order to leave your comments on this blog, you need a Google account. If you use any products of Google (i.e., Gmail, Docs, Calendar, etc.,) you can use that username and password to login to this blog to leave your comments/questions after each step.

If you don't have a Google account, create one!

Social Networking


STEP 1: Introduction

Social networking is extremely popular and the sites can be broad or narrow in focus. Social networking sites are predicted to be the portal of the 21st Century. PC Magazine gives a brief history of web social networking:

"Introduced in 2002, Friendster was the first social site, followed by MySpace a year later. Started by two friends, MySpace became extremely popular, and its parent company, Intermix, was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million two years after MySpace was launched. Facebook came out in 2004 initially targeting college students, but later welcoming everyone. Following Facebook were TagWorld and Tagged. TagWorld introduced tools for creating more personalized Web pages, and Tagged introduced the concept of building tag teams for teens with like interests. Social networking sites compete for attention much like the first Web portals when the Internet exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s."


Discovery Exercise:

1. View the Common Craft Show video -- Social Networking in Plain English.

2. Browse through these different social networking sites:

MySpace - the Library's Multicultural MySpace
Facebook - Henry Madden Library's Facebook
Optional: A very interesting interview with Facebook's CEO -- 60 Minutes - Facebook
LinkedIn - Monica Fusich's LinkedIn Profile
Optional: View the Common Craft Show video -- What is LinkedIn?

Did you know? Sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn account for seven of the top 20 most visited Web sites in the world. For many users, especially the fully wired Net Generation, online social networks are not only a way to keep in touch, but a way of life.

3. Check out a couple of these sites:

Imeem - for music lovers.
ComicSpace - for comic artists, writers, fans, etc.
Ficlets - for storytelling, writing.
Fresno Arts - for Fresno-area artists
43 Things - for those who are goal-setting oriented.
Oort-Cloud - for sci-fi authors, readers.
Care2 - for those wishing to live a green life.
Eons - for the over-50 crowd.
Retroland -for people who love "retro" culture.
MiGente - for Hispanic Americans.
BlackPlanet - for African Americans.
Orkut - for Europeans, Brazilians and Indians.

4. Optional Read: How to Get Started With Social Networking: Picking the Right Social Network for You

5. Join Facebook (free! and very easy to sign up) and post a brief profile of yourself.

Find a friend from your department or the CSU Fresno community and make them your friend. Be sure to become a fan of the Henry Madden Library and the Arne Nixon Center!

Begin exploring and adding Facebook applications. A good way to do this is to see what other people at Fresno State have done and what groups they belong to. (hint: use the search box to look for people and groups)

6. Post a comment in the comments area below about which social networking sites you liked the best. Did you try one of the more specific ones? If so, which one and why would you recommend it?

Video Hosting


Step 2: Introduction

Video hosting services is a fancy name for video-sharing Web sites like YouTube, MetaCafe and Blip.tv, etc. The basic functions of video-sharing Web sites are nearly the same: They allow you to search for and watch existing videos and upload your own.

YouTube may be the biggest and most popular site, but it is not the only one. Many others host videos of every description including current events, hobbies and recreational activities, opinion, instruction, and home movies.


Discovery Exercise

1. Take a look at some of these sites:

YouTube revolutionized video on the Internet by making it easy to upload and share. The video quality is not the greatest, but it has the widest possible audience.
Veoh learns your tastes and picks videos that are most interesting to you. The more you use it the smarter it gets. No upload size restrictions.
MetaCafe is a video entertainment site that focuses on short-form original video.
Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted videos and tracks them as they spread across the web. And shares all ad revenue 50/50 with the creator.
Vimeo is first a social networking site, and second a video sharing site. Allows only user-created videos, first site to enable HD. Caters to a high end, artistic crowd.
Blip.tv focuses on episodic content or shows, rather than viral video or “friends and family” videos. Supports a variety of formats, and uses technologies like RSS and an opt-in advertising program with a 50/50 revenue share. Great video quality!

2. Now explore some other video related sites:

Jumpcut - create, edit, and remix video online. Splice your footage, reorder the shots, and add music, photos, transitions, even special effects. Easy to use, and has many other features, including slide shows and clips to add to your own content.
KeepVid allows you to download videos directly from most video sharing sites.
Zamzar is an online file conversion site that allows you to convert files without downloading software.
Media Converter is a free online audio & video file conversion site.

3. Optional: Look at this article: ranking of the Top 10 video sharing sites from PC Advisor

Did you Know? YouTube and Blip.tv, allow you to record video directly onto the Web site without any special software. This is very useful for video bloggers, or vloggers, who enjoy being able to post quick video messages directly from their Web cam.

Also ­Video-sharing sites are so popular that even Britain's Queen Elizabeth II used the forum to post her Christmas message.

4. Set up an account at one of the video sharing sites you've visited (your favorite).

5. Post a comment in the comments area below describing some of the features you like about the video site for which you've opened an account.

Photo Sharing


STEP 3: Introduction

Photo-sharing web sites such as Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket are great places to upload and share photos. Flickr has become one of the most popular, with more than two billion images loaded.

Photo-sharing sites offer more than just sharing your pictures with grandma. Many of them are also online communities of photographers, both amateur and professional. Some sites are more conducive to the community aspect than others are, allowing users to form groups, keep contact lists and comment on each other's photos. This allows people to share photography tips, find others with similar interests and get in touch with photographers from around the world.


Discovery Exercise:

1. View the Common Craft Show video -- Online Photo Sharing in Plain English. Then take this 7 step tour of Flickr. You will learn about: uploading, organizing, sharing, mapping, and other cool things you can do with your photos.

Optional: View this 7 minute tutorial from YouTube will teach you more about searching, uploading and downloading photos, Creative Commons (copyright), etc.

2. Visit these albums on Flickr:
Fresno State Sports
California Faculty Association
Clovis Independent's 2008 Rodeo

3. Go to Flickr and do the following:
a. Search for photos of things that interest you by typing in keywords in the search box.
b. When you find a photo you like, see who posted it. What other photos do they have?

4. Now you can begin uploading and working with your own photographs by signing up for a Flickr account.

Note: If you already have a Yahoo! account you can login to Flickr using that username and password.

5. Post a comment in the comments area below about your experiences with Flickr. Don't forget to add your Flickr link (optional) because we want to see your pics too!

Tag - Tagging


STEP 4: Introduction

A tag is a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information. Source: Wikipedia

Tags are read and used by major search engines, social bookmarking and social media sites like Delicious, Flickr, YouTube and even by Gmail to easily categorize, find and aggregate similar content without limiting the user to a pre-determined set of rigid categories.

A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag like this example.


Discovery Exercise:

1. View this video to further understand tagging: Video

2. Optional: Read this article about "Tags" and What is "Tagging"?

3. Look at some tagging examples:

Tag clouds gallery
Tag Cloud of University Home Pages
New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library

Early and popular examples of sites that use Tags are:
Delicious
Flickr
Gmail - A webmail site that was one of the first to allow categorization of objects using tags, known as "labels" on emails.

4. Post a comment in the comment area below about your experiences or thoughts about tags, tag, tagging, and tag clouds.

Delicious


STEP 5: Introduction

Delicious is a social bookmarking website/service, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser.

This has several advantages:
First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you're at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend's computer.

Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on delicious as private -- only viewable by you).

Third, you can find other people on delicious that have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection.

  • A PBS Teacher’s blog takes a look at the wonderful world of delicious.
  • A collection of links to libraries that use Delicious, including many university libraries.

Optional: Read this article on Social Bookmarking Showdown (ranks and give pros/cons of each social bookmarking websites/services)


Discovery Exercise:

1. View the Common Craft Show video -- Social Bookmarking in Plain English

2. Go to delicious and browse what others are bookmarking.

3. Sign up for an account. It's easy and free!

4. Start posting/bookmarking 3 of your favorite websites or pages.

Did you know? Students in your class can view and use the webpages you've approved only by giving them your delicious url/link. They don't have to have an account to view your bookmarks.

5. Post a comment in the comments area below about your experiences or insights into what you’ve learned about delicious. How would you use delicious? If you like, post your delicious link so others can check out all your favorites.

LibraryThing


STEP 6: Introduction
LibraryThing is a site for book lovers. It helps you create a library-quality catalog of your books including thumbnail pictures of books covers.

You can “catalog” all of your books or just what you’re reading now and because everyone catalogs online, they also catalog together. LibraryThing connects people based on the books they share/read.

· Take a look at how it works.
· Watch this
LibraryThing Training Video for more in depth information.


Discovery Exercise

1. Go to LibraryThing and sign up for an account.

2. Add 5 books from your shelf or 5 books you loved and would have to have if you're suddenly stranded on an island.

Just type in the title, author, or ISBN and then select your book from the list that pops up on the right. If your book or edition does not appear, you can build a new record for it from scratch by clicking "Add the book manually".

3. Tag your books.

You can add tags to your books when you are building your library, or by clicking the pencil icon next to the record.

4. Optional: Write reviews of your books. To write a review of a book, you have to click on the 'pencil' icon next to the book on your library page.

Or check out this cool LibraryThing feature -- the Zeitgeist page, which basically has a huge range of interesting lists of popular books, tags, authors, ratings, and users.

Did you know? You can add the LibraryThing widget to your Web site or blog to show your students what you're reading or if for a class, what they should be reading. Don't know what a widget is? Find out

5. Post a comment in the comments area below about your experiences with LibraryThing. Optional: post your LibraryThing link/url.

Firefox


STEP 7: Introduction

Firefox is a free, open-source web browser that looks and acts very similar to Internet Explorer and most other Web browsers but with lots of neat, cool features.

You may already have Firefox installed on your computer, but if you don’t have the brand new Firefox 3, follow instructions to download it here

Note: If you download and is installing Firefox on your work--university issued computer, you might encounter an administrator issue.


If this happens, please contact the person who service or maintained your department/school's computers. But if it's your own personal computer, the downloading and installing should be a breeze and ignore this note.


Discovery Exercise


1. Take the video tour of Firefox 3 and see the new features in action.

2. Go to the Add-ons page and explore the different categories.

3. Find an Add-on that looks fun and interesting and download it. Have fun but keep in mind that installing a lot of add-ons might slow down the browser.

4. Optional: If you have time, the video -- Why Firefox 3 is Awesome is great to hear and see all the new features.

5. Post a comment in the comments area below telling us which Add-on you chose and why you like it.




Twitter


STEP 8: Introduction

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application.

Basically, Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people using the web, your phone, or IM.


Discovery Exercise

1. View the Common Craft Show video --
Twitter in Plain English

2. Optional:
Twitter: Use It Productively - Like many Web tools, Twitter has the potential to be a huge time waster. This guide gives some pointers on using it productively instead.

Or read this article:7 Things You Should Know About Twitter

Example - Twitter accounts by your Fresno state colleagues and friends:
Vang
Monica

3. Go to
Twitter and sign up for an account. It's pretty straightforward, and they don't require a lot of information to sign up.

4. Check the Twitter Public Timeline, and see what people are Twittering. On the right is a box that has some of the main Twitterers. See what they're twittering, follow (optional) one or two of them if you think they're interesting.

NOTE: If you use Firefox, check out the article 8 Awesome Firefox Plugins for Twitter and try adding one of those plugins to your Firefox browser. One great add-on is Twitterbar, which lets you post whatever is in your address bar to Twitter.

Did you know? People were twittering about major events like earthquakes, wildfires, etc, happening in their backyard hours before they actually showed up on the news.

5. Post your comment in the comments area below about your experiences with Twitter. In your opinion, what can you use Twitter for or how can you see Twitter being used productively?

RSS - Google Reader


STEP 9: Introduction

How do you keep track of all the news, sports, weather and blogs you follow and still have time for play, family and hobbies? Answer: RSS

Introduced in 1997, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is basically a way to subscribe to a source of information, such as a Web site or blog and get brief updates delivered to you.


Discovery Exercise

1. View this Common Craft Show video -- RSS in Plain English.
Optional: What is RSS and How is it Useful? - very detailed video instructions on how to use RSS.

2. There are lots of News Aggregators or RSS Feed Reader.

Note: A RSS Feed Reader is a client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. Source: Wikipedia

Let's look at a one Aggregator or Reader: Google Reader
View
the Common Craft Show video -- Google Reader in Plain English.

3. Use your Google username and password to get the Google Reader.


4. Using Google Reader, subscribe to at least 3 RSS sources of your choice, or you can use the following three examples.

Remember: When you see the RSS icon on a website, it means that the site offers its content through RSS.

·
The US News Section on Google News
·
The Craigslist Fresno Furniture Page
·
The Fresno State News to stay current on Campus news.

Note: Most blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger.com, etc) have RSS capabilities built in. This means that you can subscribe to any blog through RSS. Also Newspapers usually have a special page dedicated to RSS feeds. They use this page to divide content into different sections, for example, Local News, Sports, National News, Local Life etc.


Here's an example of how you can find the RSS feeds to most newspapers -- like the Fresno Bee

Go to the Fresno Bee Website
Locate and click on the RSS Link (usually found at the bottom of the page)
Subscribe to one of the RSS categories (ex. Local News, California)

Did you know? The content you can get via RSS feeds isn't just text. Depending on the kind of feed it is, you might get images, audio and video.

5. Post your comments in the comment area below on your experiences with RSS feeds or Google Reader.

Blogs


STEP 10: Introduction

The term blog comes from “web log” and can be defined as an online journal or a chronological publication of personal thoughts, web links, photos and more.


Authoring a blog is called “blogging”; individual entries are known as “blog posts”; and the person who posts these entries is known as a “blogger”.

Did you know? Influential blogs are now being licensed and indexed in LexisNexis via Newstex Blogs on Demand, which indicates that blogs are now a part of mainstream media.

View the Common Craft Show video Blogs in Plain English.


Discovery Exercise:

1. Look at these different blogs related to academic life.
Optional: bookmark one (your favorite) in your delicious account.

- Critical Mass: dedicated to commentary on the state of American academe
- Virtualpolitik: rhetorical criticism with technological sophistication
- Zenpundit: exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security, strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits

2. Visit some blogs created by your Fresno State colleagues and friends. Feel free leave comments.

Anthro Geek - James Mullooly
Digital Musings - Candace Lee Egan
Eat Lunch in the Fresno & Clovis Area - Vang Vang
Web Access User Trends - Renaldo Gjoshe
Sew What or Hancock Fab - Monica Fusich

3. Look at some different free online blog softwares, and take the video tutorial that will walk you through each one. Then decide which blogging software is for you.

- Blogger - View the YouTube Tutorial
- LiveJournal - View the Tutorial
- Wordpress - View the YouTube Tutorial

Note: If you already have a blog -- GREAT! Skip 4 & 5.


4. Think about what you want your own blog to be about. Some possibilities are:

· Insights into your job/career.
· Explorations in cyberspace.
· A favorite hobby.
· Book and movie reviews.


5. Create your own blog using your chosen software (blogger, wordpress or livejournal, etc.).

6. Optional: If you're interested in keeping up with the latest technology, the blog
ReadWriteWeb is highly recommended.

7. Post a link of your blog in the comments area below.

That’s it! You’re done. Thank you for taking the time and effort to learn these 10 basic social tools that can enhanced your work and life. We hoped we've wet your appetite to explore, have fun and be creative!

Remember: email Vang (
vangv@csufresno.edu) to let her know you've finished.