When I first started the 23 Things, I was dreading this exercise, Thing #21: You too can YouTube. At that time, I had a dial up connection at home and no sound at work, so I was originally going to have to do this assignment "elsewhere," probably the library's public machines.
Well, things change. A little over a month ago, I managed to upgrade my home connection to the lowest grade of DSL. Suddenly, watching videos at home was not so unattractive. I still have to wait a few minutes for a video to load (on average, about twice the total run-time of the video), but that's not unreasonable, at least not compared to having to wait four or five hours to load a five minute video with a dialup connection. Maybe for some people, any load time is a deal-breaker. For me, it depends on how badly I want to see something.
Since getting DSL, I have wasted a lot of time on YouTube--the good, the bad, and the stupid. YouTube, like the open web, like the shelves of a grocery store, and even like the library, is filled with an immense variety of things. Saying you like or dislike YouTube is like saying you like or dislike a particular library. Some of the stuff on YouTube bores me. Some of it offends me. Some of it informs me. And some of it is just plain fun. The same can be said of any library. YouTube is like an online video library with no collection development policy.
I did not know how to imbed a video in a blog post before this exercise. It's fun learning new things about tools you already use.
Throughout Nebraska Learns 2.0, we have watched quite a few episodes of Common Craft, explaining everything from wikis to Twitter. Looking at other Common Craft episodes, I see that they cover much more than web 2.0 tools. There are episodes available to explain everything from money management to compact fluorescent light bulbs.
And so I present an episode of the Common Craft show that we didn't watch for these exercises: Zombies in Plain English. (Content warning: fake blood and implied violence.) Hide your brain and fire up your sense of humor.
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