Railroad Tunnel Hiking Trail

During Christmas, 2008, my friends and I took the Railroad Hiking trail. This trail is maintained by the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Great views of Lake Mead and easy walk. The trail eventually leads on to Hoover Dam. We did not go that far, had more places to visit!

Bookstore in Las Vegas

Sorry folks, the Mandalay Bay has decided to close their fantastic bookstore, the Reading Room Hopefully the new Fountainbleu will pick it up. :(

Kimbooktu visits Las Vegas!

One of my favorite bloggers is kimbooktu. A couple of weeks ago she visited Las Vegas and discovered the wonderful Reading Room. It's a great bookstore at the Mandalay Bay.

Nevada Library Association

I will be giving a presentation at the Nevada Library Association in Carson City on October 4, 2007. I am part of a panel and my section is on "Access Denied: Government Web Sites: the disappearing act?" I will be putting up my presentation on this blogsite after the conference.

Carson City is a great town. There are about 50,000 residents but every other year the legislature meets and the population swells. Many of the houses in Carson City are Victorian and have been kept up. Fall is a lovely time to visit as the leaves are turning and there's a crispness in the air. It's a nice place to take long walks.

UPDATE: Here is the link to my powerpoint: http://kendallpapers.pbwiki.com

Spring Mountain Ranch

About 30 minutes from Las Vegas is the state park of Spring Mountain Ranch. During the summer, the Ranch offers outdoor theater. We went to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was a great production. The only thing that marred total enjoyment were 3 teens next to me. They talked the entire performance -- yes, they talked 90 minutes straight. You would have thought they would stop talking during the crucifixion scene. Oh no, they just kept talking away. I was going to ask them not to talk, but decided that they would have kept on and just made it more miserable for me. Fortunately the sound system was loud enough to keep their talk at the buzzing level.

New fangled thing in Vegas

I know this is really lame. But at the District -- a nice shopping / restaurant area in Green Valley Ranch area, they now have solar powered trash compactors. This picture was taken from a camera phone.

Spamalot in Las Vegas

IMG_7190.JPG
Originally uploaded by FroggyMonkey.

Enjoyed Spamalot in Las Vegas at the Wynn Resort. John O'Hurley was the star and was great. The cast was terrific and the play is Monty Python silliness. We all laughed a lot. The Theater at the Wynn was very comfortable and seemed as if there were no bad views.

Number 14 update on Technorati

Well, I looked at Technorati -- again. I can see the point of tagging, but so many inconsistencies. The lack of a thesaurus really causes many items not to get the same tag. I tried Learning2.0 on all 3 types of search, it was interesting to see the "by the hour" that a person had posted. And I searched other subjects. One thing was the ability to pull up blogs in other languages. That was easy to do.

Number 23 - Thoughts

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I liked playing around with the image generators. I always wondered how those things were done.
2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
But for work, the google word processor was a find. I was thinking of articles that I've done at work and then at home and wished I had saved it to a disk or attached to email, so I can work on it. The google thing would really help in productivity.
3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
Some of the sites were not user friendly, but then again, they were free. Once I was able to work out the glitches, I felt rather empowered.
4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
Maybe an "L2 lite" with a few key exercises? I am doing these from home and using a dsl line. Sometimes the connection is very slow which is frustrating.
And last but not least…

5. If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate
Yes -- you can read and read about all of the new technologies, but until you actually do it, you really have no idea of the accomplishments that these programs can do.

Number 22 - Audio / ebooks

World EBook Fair took some hunting to find free downloads. But once found, the site was very simple to use. And the quality was very good. I also tried sjlibrary's ebooks & audio books. Too bad we have no books that are compatible with iPods. I was looking at audio books and none worked with the iPod. Hopefully we will get some books that we can upload to iTunes. Would also like to see more audio books.

Number 21: Podcast experience

I have a lot of podcasts saved to my iTunes account. This was interesting to put one in my bloglines account. I added a podcast from Kaiser Permanente on tips on health. It's rather interesting and nice that I will be getting feeds, not emails. The email updates are too clunky, you have to log in usually, remember your password, etc. The feeds -- just easily come to the bloglines account.

Number 20: YouTube:March of the Librarians

Ok -- If you haven't seen this video it is just too cute for words. Did you see me and my friends Lorene and Eva in this? Besides fun videso, YouTube has a lot of videos on library instruction and library tours. This is a wild media. When this video first posted, within a few hours, I had 3 emails from friends from across the country tell me they saw me in the video. I uploaded March of the Librarians to my site, but it now has decided to disappear. hmmmm

Number 19: Library Thing

This is a lot of fun.

Number 18 -- Using the Google Word Processing

Visiting Las Vegas for the first time

Before visiting Las Vegas, you may want to visit the website for the main newspaper of Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Review Journal On this site you can find out major attractions, latest news, weather, hotels, etc. While most people go for the gambling, Las Vegas offers a lot more. For hiking and birding, there are great trails out at the Red Rock state park. In Henderson (a suburb of Las Vegas) there is a great Bird Preserve. The people that work there are friendly and very knowldegable. I like visiting the art museum and flower conservatory at the Bellagio, as well as watching the fountains show (after 3pm). The university there, UNLV, has a great library that uses a robotic storage area for books, an information commons, and rfid technology.

-- Note: I had difficulty uploading this, but the help from Google was perfect. Also I decided to see how a different font would look.

Number 16 Libraries Using Wikis

Doing a search for libraries using wikis, I found a cool site at Ohio University's main library. It's a business wiki that would be so useful to the students -- has databases, books, helpful hints, etc. on the site. While looking at this, the business librarian was online using MEEBO for a chat. What fun this is! I had no idea that you could embed chat into a wiki. That way you could update the wiki if a student asks a question about a new class -- endless possibilities.

Number 17 Wikis

I registered on our pbwiki. I've added a comment under favorite vacation spots, Las Vegas, of course! One favorite that you will see there is a link to The District -- it's like Santana Row but bigger. When LV started the District a lot of people thought it was doomed to fail. Not so, they put in top of the line shops, restaurants and recently added a huge Whole Foods Market. The Green Valley Ranch casino anchors it and it has great restaurants and movies, so The District is a great place to visit.

Number 15 Future of libraries

Just read an article by Helen Spaulding in Library Management. She discusses how state universities are not being funded as they had been in the past. So universities administrators are searching for financial sources just as private universities have always done. The results can be very demanding for libraries. The library has always been viewed in a positive light. Now with so many students using the Internet and finding material (good and not so good), the once prized library is being looked at as a possible revenue cutting source. Dean Spaulding argues that libraries must look at the principles of market research and apply them to the library to help administrators understand the relevance of libraries in the age of the Internet. At a recent conference, Visions of Change, I heard David Lewis present his ideas on the future of libraries.
He presented the paper at CSU-Sacramento. One concept that he discussed was on the window of opportunity available to libraries for funding. But the window is closing if librarians don't address the needs of new generations / emergent technologies / access, etc. As I listened to Dean Lewis, I thought that taking part in the sjlearning2.0 program is one step in answering this complex puzzle of the future of libraries.

Number 14 Technorati

I've let the spiders loose! I think I need to explore this some more, though. It is really hard to stay on one topic as so many great things pop up on these tools.

Number 13 Del.icio.us

The first thing is link to del.icio.us from our website, other possibilities are not exactly what you want. I came across Cross Engine blog http://blog.crossengine.com/ and it is really interesting. I've been a fan of Greg Notess for a long time, so I am definitely adding this site to my bloglines account.
Del.icio.us has some big possibilities with organizing favorite websites. If I'm at the reference desk or away from my computer, it would be helpful to access my favorites. I could see it as a way to see how others look at a topic. Sometimes you focus on one term and the patron is just not "getting it". But a similar term or more current term might just open up the discussion. Hunting around del.icio.us just might do the trick. I need to experiment with this some more.

Number 12 Rollyo

Select Search Engine...Calneva Gov sitesReferenceTech NewsSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

This is really an interesting tool -- still figuring this one out -- could be good for setting up for classroom instruction on specific topic.