School Library Learning 2.0 Week 6, Exercise 14

So, it is occurring to me as I do this blog, that real people are reading it – at least a few! I feel like my past few entries have been bland, my writing flat. Like I’m doing a checklist, which of course is what I’m doing for the class.

So, I’m working on the Discovery Exercises for Technorati – a service which keeps track of my favorite blogs. So doesn’t my RSS Feed do this also? OK – now I’ve registered my blog. Can’t seem to load a photo because they are all too big. Searched the tags for School Library Learning 2.0 and found 1,295 posts and 12 blogs. Darn, should have added that tag in my blog. Instead I added Library2.0. There are 2,210 posts for that topic and 166 blogs. Wow, big difference for the blogs, but not so much for the posts. When I search posts and get “everything in the known universe”, I also get photos and videos – that is cool. I think my favorite part of all of this is that I feel I’ve been asked into a conversation and its making me think about what I do professionally. I can see already that I’m going to have favorite bloggers and that what I enjoy reading is a personal thing. So this is a very strong tool to help discover favorite bloggers.

Great, she says good naturedly, now I need to go back and make sure my blog entries are tagged. The only one that is coming up is clouds because of a flickr photo I put in. And really my blog isn’t about clouds!

Now I know I’ve read somewhere in all this that all these tools will save me time, but I’m not there yet. I wander off here and then skip over there and then wonder where the hour went.

School Library Learning 2.0 Week 6, Exercise 13

Beautiful Music,
originally uploaded by Gexydaf.

Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site)

Well, the author of this to do item nailed it. My bookmarks are a mess. Once in a while I try to clean them up and put them in categories, but really they are still a mess.

Watched the tutorial and feel like I could watch it a few more times to really take it all in. While I had previously set up a Del.icio.us account, I wasn’t using the social part as much as I could. I appreciate that it is social, but yet doesn’t feel like an attack on my personal privacy.
Looked over the SJLibraryLearning2 account – what a wealth of information. Added it to my RSS. I can see how other users categorized their bookmarks and I can also see how it would be a wonderful tool to build a community of people with shared interests.

How can libraries use this? Well, it would be a wonderful tool to teach the students (though I think it is a bit above my elementary students) and a great way to share/learn/contribute information. I think about my school district sending around photocopies of various magazines’ table of contents. When then make what we want and they copy the article for us. Del.icio.us just blows that out of the water!