Week 10 – Gaming & Virtual Worlds

I wasn’t able to attend the session on this as I was on the Help Desk, but I’ve found the links very interesting, especially Kathryn Greenhill’s 10 reasons for and 6 reasons against a branch in SL. I agree that this is a technology that is good to know about, but as with Facebook, I don’t really think the students/staff would be present there using library services as yet (if ever!). I can see far more use in the podcasts that I looked at as these can be easily linked to the library website and can also perform useful functions for those with certain disabilities. The technological requirements that SL requires, to my mind, could create the exclusion of some users from accessing library services and this goes against one of the most basic priciples of libraries.

As for gaming, I play some myself recreationally and initially couldn’t see how this related to libraries until I read the Shifted Librarian piece, and then suddenly thought how good it would be if we could develop some games on information literacy, referencing, finding books, (loads of options really!) and put them on Olivia and/or the library website. Food for thought….

Week 8 – Social networking sites

Ah, well…. I fell over at the first activity here as I realised that I must have deleted the Ning invite from my hotmail account… hmmm….. Anyway, I think that I’m fairly up on these social networking sites now as I recently had to sign up to Facebook so I could see the pics of my wedding that people kept telling me they’d uploaded there!!! It’s a nice way of keeping in touch with people and a tool that I thought I wouldn’t be interested in until I tried it.

There are also some other more academic possibilities for this kind of site, such as ResearchGATE: free web 2.0 platform which we recently highlighted in the Life Sciences blog. Not that much activity on it at the moment, but this may increase as we’ve had quite a few people read the post on our blog.

Week 7 – podcasts and multimedia

I found this very enlightening, I’m a big fan of the Commonscraft duo. Aberdeen also seem to be doing some really interesting stuff which I thik we could adopt in terms of the podcasts and vodcasts and our library website. I also found it useful that I’d previously set up a google account (although I’m loosing track of the passwords I’ve created!!) and I searched for Thomas Hardy and was pleasantly surprised at how much material there was and I managed to find the recent BBC programme which I caught the end of in Iceland. I was able to sign up for an alert when new items on Hardy are added.

I’ve already seen the benefit of this technology in my MSc studies as they had sent out some recorded lectures on management on cassette but the quality was so poor I couldn’t bear listening to. Last year they put them online as podcasts in the VLE and the quality was much improved and meant that students didn’t have to hunt around for a dust covered cassette player!

Web 2.0 Week 6: Online applications & tools

Well, here I am again after a three week break to get married ) Means I have quite a bit to catch up on though. I decided to try setting up an iGoogle homepage after watching the video clips explaining the different sites for this function and found it really quick and easy to use. I’ve added in a feed from the Life Sciences blog and a heading full of tabby kittens – meow! I think this is a tool that I will actually make use of on a regular basis now that I have a Google account, although I won’t be getting a gmail account as I’m happy with my hotmail one.

Week 5: Social bookmarking and tagging

I already had a del.icio.us account set up with some sites bookmarked from a while ago. It was useful to revist the technology and to see that the del.icio.us interface is different from when I last visited it.

I decided not to do the optional Flickr exercise as I’m not conviced about the security of the images uploaded there. Also, my wedding photographers have advised against it as there was recently a girl who found herself on a poster for mobiles phones (try searching Google with ‘news Flickr sued’ and you’ll get the idea!) I know a lot of people use Flickr and think it’s great – I’m not sure about it yet.

I have also investigated CiteULike and Connotea as, what I term, Academic Bookmarking tools, and have been briefly mentioning them to students in the Intelligent Use of the Internet lunchtime sessions over the last few sessions. I can certainly see the advantage of these sites and have already started using them for my own MSc in Information and Library Studies as well as marking useful sites for both my wedding stuff and future PhD. The aspect of having my favourites available wherever I am is very attractive, although I think I’d prefer an option to have folders as tag clouds can become a little unwieldy.

Anyway, good technologies that need, as always, to be treated with common sense.

Web 2.0 week 3 – RSS feeds

Again, this is another tool I have used before, and I’d already set up a Bloglines account previously. So all I had to do was remember the username and password (I’m getting quite a few of these now!) and then log in and add some more feeds. I wanted to add a feed from Daniel’s website (my other half) and as he hadn’t got an RSS feed button set up it gave me the perfect opportunity to try the RSS2, create your own RSS feed thingy. As I said in my post on wikis, I can see that I could have a vast amount of stuff to wade through and this is especially true of the RSS feeds – I’d previously set up a feed from the BBC technology site and had around 200 unread messages from that one feed alone!!! Needless to say i didn’t read them, but being so much information, what if there was something really useful I’ve now missed? The lesson learned, I think, is to only subscribe to really useful things for specific reasons and then check the feedreader regularly.

Anyway, it’d be interesting to know what everyone else thinks.

Web 2.0 week 2 – wikis

This is a slightly delayed post on wikis as I forgot to add a post to my blog last week. I think I forgot as we had to add some comments to the web 2.o wiki. Anyway, as i said there I’d already signed up to wetpaint as we’d used a wiki last year in our team. The thing I am noticing though, is that there end up being an awful lot of places to visit on the web, so unless I have a specific reason for using one of these tools I think I could waste quite a lot of time wading through things I don’t really need. The wiki is good for info on a specific project, as we used last year.