I started this project out of my own curiosity, then I decided to make it into a blog post. Since I didn't begin with the idea of organizing the results, I didn't start with controlled vocabulary and a list of points to look for and all those other things that make good statistics.

Then when I realized I could turn this into a blog post, I became overwhelmed with the thought of having to start over (boring) or create perfect charts. Then I reminded myself that this is a blog post, not an academic articles, so naturally formed information is acceptable as long as people know what they are getting.

So here you are, obvious holes and all.

What prompted this project is that I occasionally like to check and see if what I think is true, actually is true. It had been a while since I compared search engines and I wanted to see if anything had changed. I also wanted to see what the best search methods are (keywords, short phrases, full sentences). 

All search engines gave 10 results per page.

I only looked at the first page.

All search engines contained duplicate results, meaning same or different pages from the same URL.

Suggested Searches in Dropdown = Suggested searches that show while typing in search box

I did not count carefully which results were the same across search engines. I looked at URLs and decided if all, some, or no results were similar to Dogpile's results.

Compared all search engines results to Dopgile because it searches the other three.

I ran an organic search. That is, I started with the vague idea "I want to know something about painting my own car," and then refined the search based on what I wanted to know as I read the first set of results.

Helpfulness of suggested searches, ranked best to worst: 

Relevancy of results, ranked best to worst by search type

Broad keywords:

Short phrase: 

Full sentence: 

Search method, ranked best to worst: 

Does the best search method depend on the search topic and/or the words used? Would keywords or short phrases be better for more common topics, such as a biography of an actor, while short phrases or full sentences are better for topics with less available information?

My computer class students want to learn how to sell things on eBay and Craigslist. Of course, I'm not going to do anything directly with their financial transactions, but I can't think of a way to teach them how to create a listing. 

I've shown them how to upload or attach photos to Facebook and email and I think they have any other computer skills needed to make an eBay listing, but they don't feel confident transferring those skills out of the programs with which they are familiar. I don't know how to create a mock listing to walk them through the entire process. 

For now, I've told them to jump in, allow themselves to make mistakes, and if they have specific questions, I'll try to help. Still, this question comes up from several people, so I would like to figure out how to teach it.

Does anyone have experience with teaching selling on eBay or suggestions for how to create a lesson on this?

I think I'm pretty good about backing up anything important. I upload my photos to an online site at least once a month, if not once a week. Once a month, I upload them to a second site as back-up. At least once a month, I email myself anything I write, sometimes more often. Really important things get saved to an external device, too. But things I want, but don't often use, such as articles that I want to write about for a future blog post, I save to my hard drive until I'm done with them.

And then the computer power cord finally frays through and no amount of electrical tape can coax it into properly conducting electricity. I've held the cord together for at least a month, probably more, so I should have ordered a back up, but I kept hoping this cord would last and last and last until the day I can finally buy a new computer. Well, it didn't. The Monday a week before NaNoWriMo it died and I couldn't access my computer for a whole week.

Sure, I could use other computers, but I didn't have access to the articles I had saved and I certainly didn't know where to find them again. The only reason I found them in the first place was through following a link on Twitter or a blog post. Naturally, I didn't want them until I couldn't access them. And then I realized the appeal of Evernote or Diigo or similar link storage programs.

I still don't know that I'll use these tools regularly. They still feel like too much work to sign in every time I want to save something (I don't like to leave myself signed in to several programs at once; it feels cluttered). But who knows, if I start collecting more than one or two of these want-but-don't-need articles, maybe I will start to use an online collection program more often.

At any rate, instead of thinking of these tools as just one more thing to use up time, I begin to see why they were created and how they appeal. 

In various places (scattered through enough time that I don't remember where) I read that the best blogging practice is to use read-more breaks. The reasoning behind this seems to be that in order to capture readers' interests, you should have the start of several posts easily visible on your homepage. This reasoning make sense, but when I see blogs set up like this, I'm annoyed and more likely to navigate away.

I don't like to have to wait for another page to load. Maybe it's because I have so often had a slow Internet connection. Maybe I'm just impatient. Whatever the reason, when I see something I want to read, I want to read it. I don't want to find it, click on a link, and wait for a new page to load. Even with a fast Internet connection, by the time the new page loads, I could be halfway through a short post if it was all visible at once. (Oh, dear, here's more fodder for those who complain that the technological age made people impatient and flighty.)

When I started The Learning Librarian, I decided I would create the kind of blog I would want to read, and that includes having the whole post visible at once. It's not a format that pleases everyone and I'm fine with that. I chose this way because if something annoys me, I won't knowingly do it to others.

This is my first Prezi. I started with a template because I was in a hurry, then over the weeks edited from there. As I said before, this program is frustrating when I only have a trackpad mouse. The one time I had access to a regular mouse, the program was much easier to manipulate. 

I'm still not 100% satisfied with this Prezi, but I think it's time to move on. My biggest problem is consistency between text size because the bolding feature doesn't work for me. Also, I have to find a balance between panning to another section as little as possible and zooming in as much as possible for those with limited eyesight. I'm not there yet, but it's time to take what I learned and apply it to the next Prezi.

I designed this to use in my computer class as part of my verbal presentation, so it's not as detailed as a self-lead tutorial would be.

Anyway, for better or worse, here's my first Prezi.

Yippee! A Thing with a tool that I can use.

I was happy to see that not only is there a free version of Prezi, but also that it works with my technology. And... I had a reason to make a Prezi!

Now, my reason was that the next day I wanted to talk to my computer class about creating safe passwords. Learning to use a new program and creating a presentation to use the next day probably wasn't the best goal I could have set for myself to accomplish in one afternoon, but I wasn't working and didn't have any other appointments, and once the idea was in my head, it wouldn't wait for a more convenient time.

Because of the time constraints, I didn't do as much learning and exploring other presentations as I would like, but I did watch the Prezi beginning tutorial videos. I already had the information I wanted to put in the presentation, but it still took me at least four hours to create a novice presentation. It is so clearly unpolished, that I considered not using it, but then decided visuals would be better than me yammering at the class for 10 minutes, so I told them that they were my guinea pigs while I learned this new program and used the rough presentation anyway.

• Visualizing how large/small to make the entire presentation. When I first made it, it was way too small. Then it was way too large. Even now, it doesn't feel right, but maybe that's part of getting used to a new program.
• Scrolling across the screen. Maybe this is because I have a touch pad, but once I started scrolling to another part of the canvas, the canvas would start moving and keep going, and going, and going, and going. The only way I could figure out how to get where I wanted was to start the canvas movement with the slightest scrolling motion then click frantically until a text box appeared and hope the canvas had stopped somewhere near what I wanted to edit. Most of my time was spent chasing down the item I wanted to edit. 
• Zooming makes it hard to edit. First, I couldn't get it to zoom on the specific part I wanted to edit in a click-on-that-part-and-click-zoom kind of way. I had to zoom out, scroll so that what I wanted was more or less near the center of the screen, then zoom in and hope what I wanted would still be in the screen. Also, overall, I found it difficult to visualize how all the parts looked as a whole unless I kept switching to the presentation view after a few edits. And trying to get the small parts to look correct on the screen in zoomed and unzoomed views is something I'm still figuring out.
• If an item is tiny, you can't click on it to move or edit it until you zoom in more. This lead to more frustrating scrolling. If I can see it, I want to be able to click on it! Don't punish me just because I have good vision for seeing tiny things. I can't think of a good reason for not being able to click and edit something you can see. Who cares how small it is?
• I couldn't figure out how to delete things from the template. Because of time constraints, I used a pre-set template. I wanted to delete some graphics, but all I could do was move them around and resize them.
  

• I learned something new.
  
• Paths. I see how this could be useful for revisiting a topic without having to click back a bunch of screens.
  
• Being able to (usually) have the most important parts fill the screen, even if they start off as tiny print.
  

It will take some getting used to, but I like the concept. 

Anna*: Does your computer work now that you've restored it?


Creig: I don't know. I can't get on the internet.


Anna: There's more to your computer than the internet.

Creig (who regularly uses off-line programs): There is?!

I'm not posting this to make fun of someone; I'm posting it to help demonstrate how people interact with and think about computers. For many, "computer" and "internet" are synonyms. This was made even more clear to me while teaching my second Intro to Computers class yesterday.

While talking with the students about what computers they have at home and how they might be different from the new laptops we use at the library, I asked if anyone had internet access. The response generally was, "I don't know, I think so, but my computer is very old."

"Just because you have a computer, that doesn't mean you have internet access," I clarified.

Surprised looks resulted from this statement.

My further explanation, "You have to pay for the internet like you have to pay for phone service," produced nods of understanding.

Now, I don't have any great lesson to draw from knowing that some people think "computer = internet," but I find interesting this indication of how people think about common things.

I do wonder, though, if the internet was never invented, would computers be as necessary in daily life as they are now?

*Not their real names, but names are more interesting than "Person 1" and "Person 2."

Not yet being in a professional position and having an old computer, there is only so much integrating that I can do. I am, however, happy to have multiple things in my back pocket, ready to be pulled out and further explored as needed.

I've already written about my progress with RSS and Twitter, so I won't repeat myself.

The only other change is that I made a screencast with Screencast-o-matic. The program was easy to use, but it took me half an hour to get a decent two-minute recording. Syllables of words kept getting dropped, so by my sixth or so recording, I was speaking... one... word... at... a... time. I know some of it is that I'm not trained in enunciating, but when recording, I do try to be certain to sound my final consonants. When I tried to record a podcast, my recorded voice had the words smoothly connected, but still understandable. When I listened to a Screencast-o-matic tutorial, the man's words also had syllables dropped, so I wonder if this is simply a part of the software.

After the 30 minutes of recording, it took almost an hour to save the file to my computer. Then I tried to load it into my other blog on WordPress. Oh, right. You can't load video with a free account. Wish I had remembered that earlier.

So I tried, but once again am thwarted by technology and economics. 

I have more than one email address with the same provider. One day, I was unable to send emails from one of the accounts. The other accounts worked fine.

I moved to a different computer on the same wireless signal. I could send emails from the troublesome email account. I took my computer to a different wireless network and was able to send emails from my computer. Only on my computer, on a certain wireless signal, would the emails not send.

For about a week this one account behaved this way while other email accounts with the same provider worked normally. Then, just as mysteriously as the problem began, it disappeared.

See? There are pixies in my computer.

____________________________________________

Because most of you don't know me, I want to clarify that I don't actually believe in pixies. But, sometimes when I have no explanation for events and my choices are to be upset or laugh, I choose to blame things on fantasy creatures and amuse myself by picking which one would make the most sense in this circumstance. 

I would rather exclaim, "There are pixies in my computer!" and move on with life than to huff and puff and have my day ruined because of something over which I have no control.

When I came to edit the blog this morning, my columns were still messed up. When I published the previous post, the columns went back to normal.

I hope it stays the proper way, because I have been unable to learn how to fix it. Still, what is going on?!