This hasn't got much to do with Learning 2.0 but...

...I'm getting into this whole blogging thing.
I went with my mother to see Miriam Margoyles "Dickens' Women" at the weekend. There seemed to be quite a few other mother-daughter combinations in the audience but very few people under 40. Is that because it was a matinee or are younger people not interested in shelling out for Dickens these days?
Anyway it was great: Margoyles brought the characters to life in a way that Dickens himself would have approved. (He may not have been so pleased with her warts'n'all portrayal of his domestic life). Hearing some familiar and some not-so-familiar passages from his books read with such feeling and delight was a real treat.
I'm reading Daniel Pennac's "The Rights of the Reader" at the moment (the edition with the wonderful Quentin Blake illustrations). It's a funny, thoughtful, radical, inspiring kind of book: the ten "rights" should be posted in libraries and schools and homes across the country.
I am convinced that our public libraries can and should not only be places where books are borrowed and returned but places where books are read (out loud and in quiet), debated and extolled. Thanks to Dickens (via Margoyles), Pennac and Blake I feel re-energised to make this happen.
Phew, that's getting a bit passionate and idealistic isn't it? (One thing I'm just getting used to with a blog is the fact that although it is like a personal diary it is nothing like a personal diary in the sense that I would never ever willingly let anyone read my private ramblings and musings).

#5 flickr: fotos, fun and frustration

I spent way more time exploring flickr than I should have (still clicking when everyone else at my place had taken themselves off to bed - even the dog). I'm beginning to see how on-line"social networking" tools can become really addictive and physically isolating.
I was blown away by the quality of photos posted on flickr - I expected a swag of amateurish happy snaps much like my own recording people, places and incidents of interest only to the person uploading them. Instead I found a whole galaxy of unusual, beautiful, thought-provoking, artisitc, life-affirming images that people all around the world were prepared to share with me.
Although flickr is fairly user-friendly for the first-timer, I found finding out how to do some fings frustrating e.g. how to change the order in which my photos appear (never did really resolve this one), how to rotate an image and make sure it stayed rotated (sorted, I think).
For the record here are some of the things I did:

• Uploaded several photos from different sources on my computer
• Organised them using tags and sets
• Marked on a map where some of them were taken
• Searched for other people's photos that shared some of my tags (very interesting)
• Looked at some groups
• Looked at some forum posts
• Set up and used the "blog this" function to add one of my photos to this blog
• Worked out the URL of an image on flickr and used it to add the image to my blog
• Haven't got into the whole contacts/friends/family thing yet

Prom Sunset

P1010621
Originally uploaded by tiptoes in moominland

This photo was taken at one of my favourite places: Wilson's Prom. We camp there every year. A hike up Mount Oberon at dusk was rewarded by a sunset unfolding in spectacular fashion.

#4 What's in a name?

There I was trying to think up a name for my blog and everything I came up with was seemingly unoriginal (how many Tove Jansson fanatics are there out there in bloggerland??) so I just threw together a couple of unrelated pseudonyms. I figured a meaningless blog title would be okay.
On reflection I realise it isn't meaningless at all; it's actually really really deep! "Tiptoes" is me - I'm tall but I always want to see a little bit further in case there's something amazing out there on the horizon. "Moominland" is Libraries 2.0: an imagined place full of unusual characters, surprising adventures and happy endings.
Okay, it's only a little bit deep.
It's just that things seem deep at this time of night.
Still, it has given me something to say in my first post. Yay!
By the way, Moomin Book One: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip was published last year and I think we should get it for our Library.