Week 7: Thing 17

I would like to suggest that you do not do this part of week 7's assignment; Thing #17. Add an entry to the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki.
Kathy Dubrovsky


Thank you Kathy, for not making us do this assignment - it was time-consuming, tricky and a little frustrating.

Week 7: Thing 16 Wikis

This was very fun indeed. The deeper into this class I get, the more comfortable I get browsing around the new territory of World 2.0. It's liberating to randomly browse around and see what everyone is creating these days. I particularly liked looking at the wiki of school blogs - it's neat to see how other people are using these applications. One thing I could try to do, even with my 3rd grade students, is create a wiki that's a book review wiki. Students are required to create book reports on some of the 25 books they're required to read, so it might be fun to have these reviews put online. It would prove to be a nice incentive for them to produce work of higher quality since it will be viewed publicly.

I've been to the mountaintop of wikis, Joyce Valenza's, (yikes! is she human?) and I know I've got a long way to go with my third graders, but I'm feeling more willing to take new tasks on because I'm now more aware of all the self-help resources out there that I can turn to. I'm also using my Bloglines reader more as I delete my initial not-so-useful choices and replace them with more useful resources. Weeks of working with these new tools has made a difference in the way I'm now working!

Week 6: Thing 15

I'm currently on a search committee for a new Director of Libraries & Technology, so these articles are very useful in helping to understand where our libraries are headed, and therefore where we librarians (library & technology teachers, I should say) are headed. These articles provide an exciting view of the road ahead, a nice alternative to the doom & gloom people who claim that libraries are becoming obsolete.

In Into a New World of Librarianship, Michael Stephens discusses our role as providers. In the past, librarians waited for people to come to them looking for the services. Today it's become our job to push information out to people, provide to them as much information as we know. He describes our patrons as people who are used to finding everything they want, so our role therefore becomes to provide everything to them. Not a small task, but he claims we should seize the opportunity, and find ways to make the quest for information as easy as possible. The "one-button commands", such as Flickr's Blog This and Google's Page Creator are examples of tools we should be aware of and pass on to our patrons to make the job of seeking and disseminating quicker and more efficient. No rest for the weary, I guess.

Chip Nilges in To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate, discusses something that always astounds me about libraries...they're free and they want to help you in any way they can. A simple notion but incredible in this day and age. He talks about "harnessing our collective intelligence", so that we all improve ourselves and our world. And OCLC is putting its words into action. They began by providing their members with ways to share notes, table of contents and reviews with each other. But the piece de resistance is they're working on creating an Open World Cat with no authentication required for using it. It will be available to anyone who wants to use it. What more powerful way is there to cooperate than to make the information easily sharable and totally accessible!

To a Temporary Place in Time takes libraries to infinity and beyond. Dr. Schulty talks in terms that again make me happy to be in this helping profession. Some of her ideas are that libraries are no longer books and buildings, but conversations and communities, nice images for our profession. They are now barrier-free and participatory, as we've moved from Libraries 1.0(commodities) and 2.0 (products) to Library 3.0, Service. She projects a Library 4.0 of experience, a "mind-spa" but intellectually I'm not there yet, but I hope that I get there!

To me, Library 2.0 is fun and exciting. It forces us to keep current and keep exploring in the most fun way, by sharing and collaborating with others. It encourages us to be open and available to share our knowledge with people who can be helped by it, and who in turn will probably have something to teach us. As isolating as sitting at a computer can be, the result is that we can then know how to reach out to others in a more effective and less complicated way. The tools we're learning about and beginning to use are great resources to help us navigate through the overabundance of data and information we have to make sense of. All in all, the new 2.0 library should be the concept, the hub that connects us all to our world.

Week 6: Thing 14 Technorati

I explored Technorati by searching through blog posts, which is the way I'd use Technorati when I'm looking for something specific. Tag searching is almost as specific and is good for getting additional ideas on other search terms, oops tag names, to use when looking for info on a particular topic. Using the blog directory is the most broad and forces you to use the directory items that are predetermined. The directory didn't provide as much to choose from as the other two search types did.
As for finding out any interesting facts, one I found out that people can make money from their blogs, but you have to be a pretty dedicated blogger, and two that the most popular blog topics, after technology, seem to be the same gossipy/reality TV type topics that appear on the other mediums....tv, newspapers, radio. It seems like in general, no matter what the forum, people are going to choose what's popular.
I like the concept of tagging. It makes information easier to find and it's a nice way to be lead into other related topics. (Of course it's a nice way to lead into other unrelated topics as well) Thinking about how to tag your blog forces you to think more about your topic & related issues, which is a skill we try to teach our students. They need to get better at coming up with general terms that can help them find information when searching print & electronic databases and encyclopedias, and tagging is a great tool to help them.

Week 6: Thing 13

I've just played around with Del.icio.us after hearing about it for so long and thinking that I was doing just fine emailing myself url's whenever I wanted to save one. Lo and behold, after the first Save, I could feel myself thinking that maybe people were right, maybe this is a good thing. It does solve the dilemma of trying the access the same data from multiple places very nicely, especially with the tags you can apply to each site. Our school is a K-3 school, and I'm not sure that it would be good for our students, but it would be a great tool for our teachers. We're constantly in search of more websites and the searching usually takes place at home where there's free time. I think I'll introduce this at one of our training sessions this spring.

Week 5: Thing 12

It's hard to pull yourself away from Rollyo. I signed up for an account and headed into the search roll for politics and.... once again went off into another world for quite some time. The problem with this course is that it exposes you to so much that it's hard to pull yourself back on task. I like this site for all that it offers, but I need more time to make more effective use of it. I'd like to think about using it for resources for our curriculum topics, which I tried to a limited degree. I found one resource that I'll start using with one of our grades tomorrow, it was one that we hadn't used before, so for that Rollyo I thank you.

Week 5: Just for Fun