Week 7: Wikis

Image courtesy of www.writingwiki.org


This week you will be asked to explore the world of Wikis and discover the ways in which they are being used in a library setting.

Planning a conference, workshop or educational program? Want to share book reviews, Reader's Advisory tools or bookclub discussions?
How about creating a Wiki for your library?

A Wiki is a collaborative website that allows anyone to add or edit page entries. It can be a very useful tool when planning projects with many contributors.

Some question the popularity of Wikis and their authority and accuracy, especially Wikipedia. What do you think?

Week 6

This week sees the Learning 2.0 Program exploring Tagging, Folksonomies and Technorati.



Is organisation in your life a problem? Are your Bookmarks becoming unmanageable? Do you find you have to trawl through huge numbers of blog posts to find ones that are relevant to your needs? Well, maybe the social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us and the search tool Technorati will be of some use. There are also some articles on Web 2.0 and the future of libraries which hopefully will be interesting and thought provoking.


Keep up the great work and keep on blogging!

Week 5- Play week!

We know that many of you are struggling with tasks and time constraints for this program, so you'll be pleased to hear that Week 5 is Play Week! This week's exercise asks you to spend time playing with online Image Generators which, although frivolous, are wonderful for party invitations, signage, motivational aids (like the one above), displays and presentations. Try your hand at creating something silly- you'll enjoy it!
Also we ask you to explore Library Thing which is a cataloguing program. You can catalogue your books at home and see the 'shelves' of other readers! We've actually just installed this at work so our catalogue presents search results with an added 'cloud' at the bottom of similar writers, genres etc. It's proving quite popular with patrons.
Finally there is Rollyo- a searching tool, which can be customised to fit within selected search parameters of your choice. This is great for school projects or personal hobbies.
We hope you have fun this week!
Cheers,
Leslie

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders

And the blogs continue to roll in...now over 720 blogs have been created and registered! Well done!

This week’s discovery exercises focus on learning about RSS news feeds and setting up a Bloglines account (a free online newsreader) for yourself to bring your feeds together.
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a file format for delivering regularly updated information over the web. A newsreader collects your 'feeds' and channels them to a single account, making them much more manageable.

During this exercise you may decide to subscribe to your friends and colleagues blogs, or to sites that you check regularly ie. ALIA, The Age, Radio National, IMDb, Museums Victoria and so on. You can subscribe to any site which has a feed icon (see above) but remember to keep it simple- you don't want to overload yourself...






Remember to mark or label your blog posts in some way, to facilitate our tracking of your progress. At this stage we are sometimes having to make judgement calls on whether individual tasks have been completed and we don't want anyone to feel their hardwork is being ignored. Please contact us if you have any problems or questions.

Good Luck!

Image courtesy of www.ezprezzo.com