Week 7, Thing #16

Wikis
I read through all of the suggested links for this exercise. There are so many ways people, especially educators, are making effective use of wikis. There are wikis set up for library professionals in which participants, rather than adding content on a subject, add links to online articles and websites under a variety of library-related categories (this is what I found in "Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki"). And there are wikis that allow participants to add content about one particular subject (Book Lovers' Wiki) or about a variety of subjects within a specialty (teacherlibrarianwiki).
I was most impressed by what some high school and college-level teachers are doing with wikis. Some very innovative teachers are using wikis to foster collaborative learning groups that work through a challenging project together. With the right kind of leadership from the teacher, these groups not only support their members in determining best practices and processes, but they help participants make critical content connections, and develop techniques of study and learning that can be replicated in other settings.

Week 6, Thing #15

I read three online articles for this task. In "Away from the Icebergs" academic librarian Rick Anderson uses the metaphor of a ship moving through icy waters to illustrate the risks libraries will encounter in moving their "boats" into the future. He identifies three "icebergs":

• Spending a lot of time and money developing "just in case" collections. That is, trying to anticipate users' varied needs in developing our collections. I don't see this as much of a problem in the elementary school library. Our collections need to support the curriculum while at the same time offering students high-quality, high-interest reading materials to encourage independent reading. I don't have extensive resources on every topic students choose for their science fair projects, and never will. But I do lead the students in the right direction, with online resources and assistance in using the public library website.
• Reliance on user education. Here the author is telling us that we can't rely on direct instruction to help library users master the research process. Instead, he says librarians should create library settings and online portals that eliminate "the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning." In an elementary school, the library is a classroom and instruction in the research process and in accessing information is what an elementary LMT does every day. I think the author's point here is valid, but he is an academic librarian working with a very different population (both staff and students).
• The "come to us" model of library service. The author believes in using Web 2.0 resources to make it easier for library users to access information resources outside the walls of the library. I can't argue with his point here. This might be the first place elementary librarians could start in creating their own "Library 2.0" plans. I think we could do a lot to bring the information resources and interactive online learning into the classrooms and the homes of our students.
  

This last point was made very clear in another online article (from School Library Journal): "School Library 2.0: Say Goodbye to Your Mother's School Library". This article, from May 2006, also highlights some other practical uses of Web 2.0 technologies for the school library media teacher. Examples include book discussion blogs and ideas on how to use Web 2.0 features to get beyond the fixed/flexible scheduling problem.
The last piece I read was the Wikipedia Library 2.0 entry.

Week 6, Thing #14

Using Technorati
I started with the optional exercise of adding a tag to this post to then check on how well it would work. Let's see:
School Library Learning 2.0
So it does seem to work. My impression is that when I select the tag it takes me to other postings that have the same tag, and from there I can see what other tags have been assigned to the posts so that I can come up with related keywords and subjects.
Next I explored Technorati using the suggestions on the CSLA Web 2.0 site, searching "School Library Learning 2.0" in posts, in the blog directory, and in the tags. I found I got more hits searching within posts than within the blog directory, which makes sense. Using tags is more serendipitous -- you never know where the clicking on tags will lead you. Sometimes it seems a waste of time, other times you come across something fascinating that you'll go back to and continue to use. I had to fool around with the authority settings to understand the logic of search results.
Playing around with Technorati features, I included a widget from the Technorati site that lists here on my blog the hot blog searches of the moment.

Week 6, Thing #13

All About Tagging and Social Bookmarking
I did quite a bit of reading and exploring in this area before I felt competent enough to be able to put my reflections here. I set up a del.icio.us account and eventually understood the concept and how to set it up. So I have just a few bookmarked sites in three different categories. I set up some of my own tags in addition to other tags I assigned from the ones others had already used.
The SJLibraryLearning2's bookmark site in del.icio.us was a good spot to explore the features of del.icio.us and also to encounter some great resources. I found a piece from the October 2007 School Library Journal about educators' experiences using Web 2.0 ("A Little Help From My Friends: Classroom 2.0 Educators Share Their Experiences") and read about a social studies teacher in Pennsylvania who uses a social bookmarking site called "Diigo" to have his students read, bookmark, and respond to their reading as part of an online group. I guess you'd call Diigo a combination of a social bookmarking site and a .ning. This particular teacher sets up groups on Diigo for the different sections he is teaching and has his students read online articles related to their studies. Using Diigo, the students can then make comments, highlight certain passages, and place "stickies" next to those passages, with their comments. He prefers Diigo to del.icio.us because of these features. I signed in to Diigo and played with it, looking at some articles just for fun and using the comments and stickies feature. The teacher, Dave Ehrhart of Central York High School, also has an impressive site on the Classroom 2.0 .ning: http://classroom20.ning.com/profile/dehrhart.

Week 5, Thing #12

My Rollyo searchbox follows:

Select Search Engine...Running TipsSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

We were asked to put in a topic that interested us, then place a searchbox on that topic on our blog. At least that's how I understood the directions! I completed a half-marathon in June and another one in October, and had so much fun and loved the challenge so much that I want to continue training through the winter months. So I created a Rollyo searchroll named "Running Tips" that you can access through this blog. I also created a Rollyo account and added some other searchrolls for topics of interest to me.

Week 5, Thing #11

I spent quite a bit of time looking through the award-winning Web 2.0 sites. I liked the way the awards site was organized by categories. After looking though a number of categories, I finally delved into the Furl.net website that is listed under the "bookmarks" category. It's a nifty website that allows you to keep a record of sites that you've visited that have been useful or of interest. It automatically fills in the URL, the title, and gives you fields to fill in such as opinions, ratings, keywords. You also put a "Furl It" button on your favorites bar, which you select if there's a particular passage or description of the website that you want to copy to your Furl.net page. Your results can either be public or private. I will continue to use Furl.net.
For the "ning" activity, I went directly to "Teacher Librarian Network Ning". I joined the network, but still haven't joined any of the groups within the network. I'll need to spend more time on the site to see what this social networking offers. But I did put the feed for the "Information Fluency Project" group here on this blog.