Web 2.0

...on the trail of e-Resources

Monday, September 8, 2008

The Game Never Ends: Wrap-up

The "game" has been interesting, fun and very educational. Of course, it never ends! I already have several of the recommended sites in this lesson on my Bloglines. I have made it a daily habit to check Bloglines and will continue that to remain current on library-related info. I know I will continue to apply the info I find there to my work with school libraries in SD. I have also started making time for personal news on Bloglines. I would like to start a school library blog or wiki and will try to work on that soon with Lee and other Library Development staff. Sherlock never really quit his work, he just retired to Sussex to raise bees.So, on with the Web 2.0 game... it's elementary my dear Watson.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Wikis

Wikis had become an everyday part of my life at SDSL even before this lesson! I've been involved in several conversations relating to Wikipedia, participated in the PBWiki about the library's website, checked out and edited conference info on the SDLA conference wiki, joined Quynn's wiki about the Halloween party, and joined the CE Forum wiki. On Friday I visted Carmen Wilcox at Elk Point-Jefferson School/Public Library and she suggested that SD school librarians needed a way to share information and projects in addition to announcements on the listserv - why not a wiki? Why not a wiki for our WUE (weekly electronic updates)? The Library Success Wiki led me to Blogging Libraries Wiki which links to good examples of blogs from all types of libraries, associations, etc. Take a look at this one http://newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com/ which is from a high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago or this one http://casl.wordpress.com/ from the Colorado Association of School Librarians. But back on the trail of wikis, not blogs... The Stevens County Wiki Project would be a great idea for one my local communtities to try out as they are trying to gather info for their 100th year celebration. I e-mailed that suggestion to them. The ideas are endless...

Monday, September 1, 2008

Delicious

Delicious is an excellent and useful Web 2.0 application. The tag cloud on the SDSL page for this challenge caught my eye and then I saw that a few others had included these clouds on their blogs, so I investigated and have been using Delicious for weeks. I have My Favorites organized into folders, but Delicious allows me to use it on any computer and to search by tags. I have used it many times while researching a question for school librarians and on site visits when I needed to get to a site quickly to share information. At first, I was trying to keep a notebook of this info and found it cumbersome and inadequate. Delicious helps me do my job! To expand my use to some of its other services I just subscribed using the tag school_libraries and found 1,353 bookmarks! I think this is going to be a "two pipe problem." This would be a great tool for high school students to use when evaluating websites. (One point of irony... the terms "tags" and "tagging" and the actions associated with them at my former school usually meant you spent some quality time with the principal after expressing your creative talents.)

MySpace


The footprints led up to the falls... but Sherlock was alive and well! As for me, I was not traveling abroad, but in South Dakota and Montana and am now back on the trail of Web 2.0. After taking a look at both MySpace and FaceBook I decided to set up a My Space account. I was curious about it because so many of my former students loved it and it made a lot of news on 20/20. The whole process took only a few minutes and was much easier than setting up a blog. Tom is not my friend, but I did invite one friend, yes, only one friend. I don't see a personal use for this at this time, but liked the teen library stuff I browsed through and think it has great potential for school libraries. However, most schools have blocked all social networking sites. Beebo is another very popular site and students quickly figure out the proxy for it and use it anyway on school computers. Students could create a yearbook type site or even a newspaper style site for schools using this. Oh, it probably wouldn't be as cool then! But the possibilities of linking music and video in addition to photos would be great. The ads are a little too much but can be ignored.