Thursday, May 13, 2010

Wikipedia Education

Things I have been reading about on wikipedia lately:

1. Orthodox Judaism- Dress code, rules, differences between the sects... This is what happens when a religion is over 2,000 years old. No wonder you have to go to yeshiva, because otherwise I have no idea how in the world you could learn all this stuff.

2. TV Shows I like- Sex and the City, Glee, and Daria. Trivia abounds.

3. Social Networking- With all the privacy flack facebook is getting right now, I'm trying to keep abreast of the situation by making sure I know what color shirt Marc Zukerman was wearing when he and that other guy invented facebook and became BILLIONAIRES.

4. Fonts- what is the difference between ' arial serif' and 'sans-serif' I wanted to know? What is kearning? I now know these things.

Wikipedia: clearly a source of superficial surface information about a topic, but what a breadth of scope! Sex-positive feminsim? Yes. Cookie varieties? Yes! Explanations of military abbreviations? YES!

There is so much stuff to learn and wikipedia helps me to figure out what of that stuff I really want to learn, and what stuff I can read about just enough to fake it.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Twitter and FB Pages and RSS Feeds, Oh My!

I'm kinda sorta getting more involved with this new job with this company that does after-school and camps for kids in NYC, and they are brand new. Like, this is year #2. Which is SUPER exciting, because it means that there's a lot of room for innovation and learning and growth within the company, but it is also a little bit crazy because there isn't a lot of precedent for doing things. It's a pretty hit the ground running, trial and error type situation.

I am actually really into it.

Which is why, when they said that they might want me to do some aggregation of materials to post digitally, and do a bunch of stuff with Twitter and social media/ networking stuff this summer, I felt super excited to be a part of that. Even though I am not on Twitter personally, I know it is a huge phenomenon right now, and I think it will be a great opportunity to learn more about it, and other web applications that I kind of haven't been using because I have no personal reason to do so... nice to have a professional reason to.

Like RSS feeds. What is an RSS feed? And what does it mean to click on one? I am into learning by trial and error with technology. Apparently you need a reader to read your RSS feeds... good thing Google has one! Hopefully it will be easy to use or at least intuitive because I use so many of their other products. Seriously.

All this in general, makes me really excited. Like things are actually happening... that there's a shift in what I'll be doing/ using my brainpower to accomplish. Creative, crafty, dynamic, and with kids! What more could I ask for?