Flickr

Have had a go at the optional activity of adding photos to Flickr. I hadn’t used it before, I have only ever put my photos up on Facebook. I decided to try it out as I really need to back up all my photos and only a few of my photos are on facebook.  Once I got past all the registering and setting up an account I downloaded a photo uploader tool to my desktop. I have a lot of digital photos so I will add them to Flickr in stages. I have uploaded all of my 2004 ones so far.
I quite like Flickr as you can decide who sees each picture, eg only you, only family, only friends, or anybody. I have created sets for my photos eg Crete 2004. I have added some tags eg butterfly. As I have a lot of retrospective tagging, I will only tag the public ones and the others will go into a relevant set.

Social bookmarking

I covered social bookmarking last year.  See my post http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/week-5-social-bookmarking-and-tagging/

Over the last year, I did find myself adding items to del.icio.us when I was using Firefox browser.  I have never found the add-on to work properly when using Internet Explorer.  I didn’t use the imperial del.icio.us account at all.  I had another look at it and browsed some of the bookmarks relating to Flickr as that would be relevant to this weeks activities.

I plan to to upload my digital photos to Flickr and tag them.  I need to do this from home as that is where my photos are.

RSS and Personalised Homepages

Week 2 has covered RSS and personalised homepages.  I covered this last year so see http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/week-3-rss/ for my previous comments.

I really liked using Google Reader for my RSS feeds.  I use it nearly every day.  As the feeds are via my Google account, I can access them anywhere so I have set up both work feeds and leisure feeds.  I can also set it to check webpages that don’t provide RSS feeds automatically.

Personalised homepages were also briefly covered last year see http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/week-6-online-applications-and-tools/ and my opinion on them hasn’t changed.  I never used the personalised page that I set up over the last year.  At work, I have 3 tabs set as my homepage and I prefer this to a personalised homepage.  Also, I can quickly access frequently used websites via shortcut icons on my toolbar.

Instant Messaging and Blogs

Week 1 of the 2009 Learning 2.0 programme covered Instant Messaging using MSN messenger and blogs.  See http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/week-1/ for my thoughts on this last year.

In the end, I did end up using messenger quite a bit over the rest of the year to communicate with part time staff working from home and across the other side of the office.  I used it mainly for asking or answering quick queries that required a yes or no answer.  Eg being sent a link to a webpage and then answering a query about it.  In my new team I don’t have a need to use messenger as we are all sitting beside each other.

As for blogs, I didn’t use this one after the Learning 2.0 course finished.  I do however read other people’s blogs so I’m more of a reader than an author.

June 2009

I will be updating this blog with content relating to the 2009 Learning 2.0 programme.