Week 7, #16

I spent a lot of time reading wikis and reading about wikis. So much of what I looked at was outdated--wikis that were created awhile ago with no recent updates. I was interested in reading an article from the Washington Post about a wiki for the ingelligence community called Intellipedia. It has 15,000 edits per day with 100,000 users. Now that sound like a powerful tool for a specific audience. I understand that the intent of wikis is to be a knowledge sharing tool and a way to organize information--most have an alphabetical list of categories. Our library team has used Google Docs and I have found that easy to use with a very similar objective as a wiki. I must say I am underwhelmed with ideas for implementing (and updating) a wiki, but perhaps I need to keep exploring.

Week 6, #15

After reading some of the links about Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries, it occurred to me that many of the phrases I wrote down are just plain good library policies and good library philosophy. Examples: "eliminate barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need" (Rick Anderson), "make libraries relevant" (Sarah Houghton), "user participation" (John Blyberg). The Wikipedia article about Library 2.0 says "constant change", "meet users in their space" and make the library "user-centric". I believe that most of us strive to do these things everyday, but now with 2.0 tools, we can participate with our users in new ways. I am happy to learn about all of these tools and yet am slightly overwhelmed. I realize as I learn more that I don't need to master each and every one of these things, but instead I need to reflect carefully and incorporate what tools I find relevant to my population. So far, several of the tools have excited me, most recently Rollyo and Del.icio.us. I am happy to know how to find blogs more efficiently with Technorati. I need to take one step at a time, work with my team, and think about what services can be improved and what new things to add to enhance student learning.

Week 6, #14

I just spent hours exploring Technorati. Glad there is such a thing, though with 50 million blogs out there, the vastness of it is overwhelming. I experimented with searching--first, I used the "search the blogosphere" bar and entered School Library Learning 2.0. Though some of the results were relevant, many were not. So, I went to Advanced Search and typed in the exact phrase and got 0 results. I tried using the phrase "library 2.0" and just "2.0" and was interested to see the difference in the results. On the advanced page, you can search by tags and those results were more relevant. However, as I learned from reading the Technorati information, one must register and of course, add tags if blogs are to show up there! I wonder how many bloggers actually add tags.

I follow a couple of blogs, one of which is my 89 year-old mother's blog. I entered the name of her blog in the search bar and the result was 6 bloggers who mention her blog. It surprised me that her blog would not come up as one of the results. Am I missing something?

I spent time looking at some of the top 100 blogs and was fascinated by the diversity of them. Boing Boing which came out at the top covers a wide range of topics. Many of the top 100 are technology oriented, which makes sense. Looking at the "top searches" list was interesting too--the majority seem to be either about Hollywood people or technology. One was for news. One could spend hours looking at these results.

I think tags are important. Though there is no controlled list of tags (like the concept of Library of Congress' subject headings), tags reflect the way we are trying to teach our kids the idea of keywords and brainstorming possible ways to find information. We try to teach them that they should think of multiple ways someone could classify information. I think showing kids the lists of tags that show up on Technorati would be a great lesson. Again, though, I think it will be awhile before most bloggers add tags so it does limit the results of a tag search.

Week 6, #13 Del.icio.us

Like my colleague Lisa, I don't create lots of lists of bookmarks. We link useful webites on our school portal pages and that has worked well. The idea of tagging makes sense and I was interested to see what some tags were on some searches I tried as well as what websites popped up for various tags. For example, I tried "YA authors" and there were very general tags such as "books" and "reading" which I would not try, though I did find lots of the YA sites interesting. I also tried "elementary graphic novels" and thought many of the websites were useful. I also agree with another of my colleagues, Dee, that this tool could be useful for us as a team when we are developing a unit together.

Week 5, #12

I played around with Rollyo and created a mini-Searchroll with some bird websites I use with a first grade teacher all year long. She does an extensive project about local birds and the kids do research in the library for each bird (not the dreaded Loertcher bird report!). I often use the same sites over and over, so I created a Rollyo for those couple of trusted websites I use. When I searched on Rollyo, I was a little disappointed because I got a lot of other websites as well. I noticed that it lists the sites I entered and also says "entire web". I will try to figure out how to take that off because I don't want all the commercial sites and ads to come up. I had created a specialized Google "search engine" a few years back and this is very similar. I think it was pretty easy to use, but I just need to fine tune it.

Week 5 #11

2.0 Award Winners
I had fun looking around these winners. I first chose "food" and saw that I could watch a video of Paul McCartney making mashed potatoes! I saw another winner that said "Community Walk" and thought this could be helpful when we are studying local history. But, that was not the purpose at all. It was a place where people could share hotel ideas, for example. I have used Pandora quite a bit and like it a lot. The internal functioning of the site must be amazing in order for music of a similar type to be found. We are always teaching the kids how to be effective searchers, using appropriate keywords and I just wonder what the program for Pandora must look like! I need to play around with some more sites to think of good applications. Of course the Google map sites are invaluable, but it will be fun to discover some of the other useful places to take the kids.

Week 5 #10

Long ago, I used an image from ImageChef (the beach scene and I said Read on it). I had trouble loading it on my blog and one of my colleagues now has it on her blog. So, I had to try something new. Let's see if I can import the image! Yipee, it worked and I didn't have trouble. Success. The url for this is http://www.imagechef.com/ic/final_widget.jsp

I am thinking of student applications. Hmmm...I think the visual poetry application could be fun for kids to use (this is National Poetry Month, afterall).