Sandbox

I'm glad there were instructions on how to add your blog; the edit page was not at all intuitive. The sandbox was not particularly interesting, I did attempt some changes, however, and spent more time at it than I should have.

Wickis

One advantage of wickis is that everyone knows something that no one else, or very few people know. This can be an advantage in creating things like subject guides. The collective input will result in a greater breadth and depth of coverage than any one person could provide. In our department we are experimenting with a wicki that will include documentation. The feeling is that the people closest to the work should have input into what the documentation says. A downside to wickis is that they assume everyone is going to be cooperative; not always a valid assumption

Technorati

The tag search lead directly the the u-tube broadcast by our illustrious acting Dean (was that on purpose?). The state of... info was interesting, especially the information on growth, and all the various languages being used.

Del.icio.us

What I find most useful about sites like this is the opportunity it provides to interact with people who hold similar interests, especially when you live in an isolated area like SE Ohio. It appears that no matter how esoteric your interests, there are other people out there who hold similar interests. I will sign up for this for that reason.

Weatherunderground link

This one is extra credit. I have been looking at a site called weatherunderground to keep track of the forecast for some time. I recently discovered their online photo gallery where people can contribute photos of a weather, outdoors, wildlife nature. I recently got a fairly decent digital camera for free, and thought it would be fun to contribute some pictures of my own. Other people can rate your pictures on a 1 to 10 scale, and you can receive feedback to improve your photography skills. The weatherunderground link goes to the pictures I have contributed since joining last week.

Rollyo

I can see where this might be useful for librarians. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but you seemed to need to know what urls you wanted to enter. Is there a way to search for web sites and then add a link back to your rollyo account?

Library thing

This turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would. Searching on it though, was not easy. This is mainly because I searched for books written between 1450 and 1850. Lots of different editions, and particularly difficult to find the exact edition I had read. I looked for obscure works, but every one was shared by others, any where between 27 and 1204. The descriptive tags were interesting, as well as the automatic recommendations. I found the other places on the web to be less useful.

Image Generation

The image at top right is my contribution to this week's exercise. Most of what I found on the image generation sites was too cutsey or popular culturish for my taste. The logo and button generator site did, however look interesting. I would have like something fancier, but I had already spent more time on this than I can afford

RSS feeds

I may be regarded as uncooperative this week, because I haven't really done as I've been told. I would like to think I'm "taking charge of your own learning", and obeying the spirit of the exercise if not the letter. I will let the Learning 2.0 overlords decide if I should be banished.


My first thought was "oh no, another account to create." This almost made me drop out, but I decided to look for alternatives. After looking around a bit, and doing some RSS exploring, I discovered that the Google account I set up for the blog has a Google Reader option that lets you access RSS feeds. There were some canned options, none of which particularly interested me, but there was a search option for finding feeds. I cheated a bit, because I already knew most of the sites I wanted to access, but I have set up several feeds. I then discovered that Internet Explorer has a feed option. I went back, found several more sites, and can now access those through IE. Some of these should actually be useful in work. I did not add any of the feeds I was supposed to, and I am not going to like to feeds on other person's blogs. My interests are rather esoteric, and the blog linking is too voyeuristic for me.

I am wondering if these things are not just adding to the information overload problem. One could easily spend so much time looking for and reading information, that nothing else is accomplished in the course of the day. We all need information, but how much is enough? While I did find some feeds of interest and usefulness, how much of this do I really need to know to function at work and outside?