I was a bit overwhelmed with the material this week. I am not sure I really want to know about connectors....I admit, I use them both at work and at home, but I avoid taking responsibility for them whenever possible. ;-) I have enjoyed learning about computer networks - and I think it is a funny coincidence that in my other class (Political Science) I have to view the movie Network this week! Do you hear the Twilight Zone theme? I do! Anyway, I have had fun exploring the library for access points, and found them to be hidden in the ceiling. When they remodeled the library, they were able to gut the inside of the building, and so they set up little openings in the ceiling for the machinery to be hidden, yet accessible. Pretty nice. This is not an actual picture of our library - I found it on the net, but it gives you an idea of how they are hidden in the ceiling.
I completed my survey for "most asked computer questions" and I wasn't surprised to find out people were most confused about using the printer/copier, with a distant second being searching websites. Word processing questions, searching the catalog and "what is my password" rounded out the top five. One person asked "how do I access porn sites," but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to write an instruction sheet for that one. ;-)
Oh, and the other good news is that I received an answer back to my question about setting up a Wiki for our department. Not only was the answer "yes" but our webmaster opened one for us, and I have been tasked with setting it up with all the information. We are all pretty excited about this, and I would never have pursued this had it not been for this class! It will not be open to the public - just our department. But it will give me the practice in wikis so that I can set up another one for our class project.
As for technical blog updates......
Librarian in Black presented a survey about how often we experience censorship in the library. Not technical enough for me to comment on here. Educause didn't have a new post this week, so I went to ALA Techsource, one of my alternates, and I found an article from Valentine's Day which really blew me away. It was on 3D Printers - and how this technology is growing and will soon become readily available in homes, like regular printers. The author of this blog post linked an article which gave more information about what 3D printers can actually do, and that was where I had visions of Star Trek in my head! 3D printers are able to copy the entire structure of the object and produce actual 3D replicas. Hello Star Trek! I mean, this is incredible to me. The bulk of the article focussed on the patent and copyright infringement issues that are sure to develop, but to me, I couldn't get past the idea that there is a technology that can replicate objects in 3D objects. Here is the link, in case you don't believe it....
http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2011/02/3d-printing-fabrication.html
Be sure and check out the "It Will Be Awesome if they Don't Screw it Up" article! I am...in awe.
Ok, I am going to go work on the study questions. I really do appreciate that option for studying, although this week's terms are a bit harder for me to "get." I hope you all have a wonderful President's Day, and I look forward to reading your blogs!
No comments:
Post a Comment