Social Networking Pt. 1

Just checked out some of the library sites noted on the RULA2.0 blog that have social networking features. I'm far from impressed!
Seems like so much of a wasted effort to me.

If you were a real friend of mine, I might be interested in the diagnosis that your cat has OCD. In reality, you're some stranger in NYC and I couldn't care less!

The Denver site was way too busy. You need to have an attention deficit disorder to find it exciting.

Meow,
val

P.S. Why doesn't the RULA posting mention any of the controversies such as Facebook's recent media flare up about "ownership" and "use" of postings.....

Ignoring important issues like this does not serve the user community well. Let's use tools but be smart about them.

Rula2.0 Catchup
Better late than never....
Just finished messing about with some of the Google docs stuff. It was quite straightforward to create a new post for sharing but I didn't try uploading an existing file. I received a couple of notices that people were sharing things with me, including Michelle's name game activity that I finally completed a little while ago.

The google mapping helped me to calculate some distances that I've been walking in the RUNAMOK team exercise project. Practical uses for learning things is more in keeping with my learning goals.

Now, let's see about last week's activities....
val - virile

Dinner With Shani Mootoo

The dinner that I won with author Shani Mootoo was held on Feb. 21, 2009 and it was a magical event. In addition to me and my four guests, the diners included a number of people from The House of Anansi Press including the president of the company who was our gracious host, Shani's partner, and a young journalist from The National Post. The Press has some publicity information posted on their website.
http://www.anansi.ca/anansi_reader.cfm

Shani and her kitchen assistants did a remarkable job, preparing an appetizer of polenta with coriander served with roasted tomatoes and baked kale. There were two main courses with half of the guests dining on seafood, and half on poultry. The poultry dish was baked chicken breast, stuffed with spinach I believe, and coated in baked ground cumin and cinnamon. This came with an apple sauce and a form of glazed carrots seasoned with thyme and bay leaves. The seafood dish was a bouillabaisse or fish stew that contained fresh scallops flown in from Nova Scotia, shrimp, clams, salmon and monk fish. There was a fresh greens salad and the dessert was a true work of art: poached pears with whipped cream and a fresh mint leaf. A Bacci chocolate was served as the finale.

The red and white wines were all very tasty, and the conversations most enjoyable. I probably drank too much, and talked too much but can attest that everyone seemed to have a wonderful time and my guests did not disappoint as they added so nicely to the mix that evening. Shani answered countless questions about her writing, her visual art, her love for a Trinidad that is no more, and of course we enjoyed talking about the characters in her recently published novel Valmiki's Daughter.

I've been asked to submit a book review to the Caribbean literary studies journal
MaComère, and hope my review will meet their standards.

Thank you Shani and House of Anansi Press for making this wonderful dinner happen.

LibraryThing

Library Thing
Here I am again playing catch up... two weeks behind but at last I've got my Library thing account up and running. The site is quite easy to use, but I hate all of these separate logins and passwords.
Here is a link to my catalog:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/vlem
My profile isn't fleshed out very fully yet:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/vlem

I did remember to tag my records with RULA20. Did you?
Well, I have to move on to another post.

Wiki Report

I forgot to blog about the wiki exercise that we did a few sessions back. I made a post about a Trinidadian Dinner Party that I'll be attending. For those of you who have access to the RULA2.0 wiki,
you'll find the posting here:
http://rula20.pbwiki.com/Trinidadian-Dinner-Party

Thanks to Lei and Helene for commenting. I've added a comment of my own.
mmm, can taste the seafood already.

Social Bookmarking with Delicious

One of the hassles with this RULA2.0 web2.0 learning program is that it requires so many new online registrations and passwords. For someone who can barely remember his phone number on a good day, this is all TOO much.

However, I did find that setting up the account and downloading the bookmarklet tool was quite easy. The features are fairly intuitive. Finally an e-tool designer that actually gets it! It wasn't too challenging to figure out how to get into and edit my bookmarks' tags. As for tagging, I think this is greatly over-rated. If it works well for you, power to you, but it cannot replace other metadata tools, and dare I say, controlled vocabularies that I like to use. Sometimes a single word just doesn't capture the essence that I'm looking for, and it isn't practical to hyphenate or otherwise conjoin words because of the design of the tagging tool.

I could write a booklet, but don't have time to fool around any more tonight.
Here's a link to my bookmark page:

http://delicious.com/vlem

ciao

Flickr account now live

I didn't get around to creating my Flickr account on Friday afternoon--the time when I seem to get around to doing the weekely RULA2.0 tasks. Last week was the Wiki exercise and I haven't been back to check out all of the recipes.

I uploaded a couple of photos of some elderly friends that I took last fall, and a couple of photos that my friend Pascal in Marseilles, France sent to me the first week of January 2009 following a big snowstorm. I'll try to upload a couple of photos of his garden in the spring of 2008 for comparison purposes.

To visit my Flickr site, try this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35267005@N08/