Where has Google Docs been all my life? While I am slightly concerned that Google does seem to be controlling the world, this is one of the best things out there. Back in college the "easy" way to right a group paper was just to pass it around through email, then senior year one teacher showed us how to use Track Changes in Word. What a great thing that was, unfortunately, it seemed that the rest of the campus was unaware and therefore made my super knowledge useless.
Being able to share documents this way could solve the worlds problems. Alright maybe that's overstating it, but the freedom that Delicious and GoogleDocs provides is amazing and extremely useful. Passing this simple information on to patrons will help them become more mobile and productive. It has certainly helped me. While I will continue to use my somewhat excessive like 8 gigs of thumb drives, and will never be caught without my external hard drive, GoogleDocs will be an important tool for professional use in the future.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Week 7: Wiki's World
While I have heard of Wikipedia, I only really use it to find quick answers to somewhat irrelevant questions. So to say that I was skeptical of using wikis in work would be putting it mildly. But, my mother taught me how to play nicely in the sandbox with others, so I jumped into the wiki sandbox feet first.
I enjoyed playing around in the CHPLearning "sandbox" wiki. Even though I got stage fright and didn't make a post, I think that this was a wonderful teaching tool for this technology. Wikis really do have their place in the world, and for a work sharing platform could be extremely beneficial. I really loved the Library Success wiki. So long live wikis!
I enjoyed playing around in the CHPLearning "sandbox" wiki. Even though I got stage fright and didn't make a post, I think that this was a wonderful teaching tool for this technology. Wikis really do have their place in the world, and for a work sharing platform could be extremely beneficial. I really loved the Library Success wiki. So long live wikis!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Week 10: Tag and the City
Once again, Web2.0 has almost a sixth sense when it comes to our weekly topic and my life.
My final paper for my Information Organization class was all about "subjects." One of the requirements was to take our unique topic and search for it using one web search engine and one web resource. Naturally, with all of the buzz, I chose to use Delicious as my web resource.
Setting up my account was pretty easy and searching and tagging items was even better. Using it for my paper was even more beneficial to me when combined with the Web2.0 training since it was a timely, in depth project on social tagging. While I will spare everyone a repeat of the 15 pages of knowledge I have now gained, I believe Delicious will be a great Library resource for years to come.
One of the downsides of course is the lack of controlled vocabulary in the tagging. If someone was to search for my account and see my tag "Bibliography" it would probably not be very helpful to them. However, for my other class, I found it to be a lifesaver to group my resources for my bibliography project together. (My topic by the way, is Jewish Fiction for children between the ages of 9 and 12).
But this lack of controlled vocabulary is also one of the great things about it, since it gives us an unexpected look into how patrons think about the information they need.
My final paper for my Information Organization class was all about "subjects." One of the requirements was to take our unique topic and search for it using one web search engine and one web resource. Naturally, with all of the buzz, I chose to use Delicious as my web resource.
Setting up my account was pretty easy and searching and tagging items was even better. Using it for my paper was even more beneficial to me when combined with the Web2.0 training since it was a timely, in depth project on social tagging. While I will spare everyone a repeat of the 15 pages of knowledge I have now gained, I believe Delicious will be a great Library resource for years to come.
One of the downsides of course is the lack of controlled vocabulary in the tagging. If someone was to search for my account and see my tag "Bibliography" it would probably not be very helpful to them. However, for my other class, I found it to be a lifesaver to group my resources for my bibliography project together. (My topic by the way, is Jewish Fiction for children between the ages of 9 and 12).
But this lack of controlled vocabulary is also one of the great things about it, since it gives us an unexpected look into how patrons think about the information they need.
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