MHS 23 Things Blog

The appeal of online answer sites is clear. Often questions that patrons want to ask reference librarians are: personal and/or embarrassing. I know that personally I look up information online that I would NEVER ask anyone. Furthermore, often the answer sites lead to other information that is interesting and informative. I really enjoyed reading some of the questions and replies on The Straight Dope page. The questions were funky and the responses were entertaining. I think that people use the answer sites for the reason that is listed above and also for the ease and speediness of getting the answers,even though they may be incomplete or incorrect. However, I think that learning suffers if all a person has to do is copy and paste answers to complete an activity. If students were only getting these fast facts to apply the knowledge, then these sites are very useful. However, if teachers are asking for responses that anyone can “google” to get the answers, they are expecting low-level thinking skills from their students. I don’t think there is any one of us who would go back to the time when “ready-reference” meant checking an almanac or encyclopedia in print form to get a quick answer; however, these tools should never replace scholarly discourse or personal encounters with experts in the field.

Although I have used many of these travel websites in the past (Trip Advisor, Virtual Tourist) I found it interesting to see the variety of places to look for information on travel. I also find it amazing that people spend so much time making these travel mash-ups. I mean, who needs a mash up with fast food restaurants? However, I did find the mashup with green restaurants and businesses a great idea. In fact, I would love to see a map mashup of all the Flea Markets and Swapper Meets! AND, I really like the weather mashup for everywhere in the world.If only I could get the photos into the markers!!! I am sure that these travel social web tools would be much more interesting to me if I were traveling to a different area. I am always fascinated by how much everyone wants to “share” on their blogs! Sometimes it is TMI!

View Summer Travels in a larger map

I am having trouble putting photos on the map. I am wondering if the pictures should be a smaller size but I am not seeing any information that tells me what size they should be. I will try to upload a small picture.

The first part of the response is indicating which stage of acceptance that I have for Twitter. Stage 1 is Denial which basically says Twitter is stupid and why would anyone use it. Stage 2 is Presence which states I should at least get an account although I am not sure why people love it. This is the stage that I am at. Although I am reading more and more how unlikely people are using it daily. Some of the more useful suggestions that I have seen is how people use it when they are traveling (finding out about weather, road construction, or speed traps.) However, much of the use relates to mobile phone use, which I do not have (and I am proud of that!) So, frankly, my Twitter page has no personal information about me and it says nothing about me. I will continue to look for uses.

I am enjoying using the RSS feeds that I set up previously. The ability to do more things with the RSS feeds helped me learn how to set up a Google search that would be displayed with my Google Reader. I am using that to do searches that involve my personal interests; however, I can see how this would be useful for students who are researching a current event and would like to be updated daily. I especially liked the Weather feed that I subscribed to. I will continue with the delicious activity next time. Some of the prompts asked how I manage my feeds. Well, I only have about 4 feeds: bedlam farm, weather, ny times book review, and a readers book club, so I don’t really need to manage them as people who are frantic about their social networking. Sometimes I feel that people are doing too much social networking and not enough socializing with real people!

I use many of Google’s tools. I like the Google Toolbar and Google Docs are a great product for student collaboration. It is unfortunate that our filtering software makes it impossible for students to use these tools. When the students were shown these tools some collaborated on projects using their home computers.  Although it is hard to impress teens with technology, these tools  had them talking!  I have not signed up for Google alerts before, so I did get a couple of alerts started. I am anxious to see how that goes. The alert tool could be easily used in a current events class, a world language class, a government class, or any type of class that is looking to track topics.

I have an Igoogle page set up already, so I used the time to set up another page on Netvibe. Although I saw lots of comments saying how much better Netvibe was, I didn’t see how it was better. In fact, I liked the appearance of my Igoogle page much better. Additionally, the widgets available on Igoogle are more extensive. So I am not sure why people were commenting that Netvibe was better. I think Igoogle wins, hands down. It was fun looking at other providers, though.

I unblocked this site to see what this is all about. Obviously I am not a social networker! I guess that I like to share ideas and such with friends, but all this twittering back and forth….I don’t know.  Well, at least I’ve seen the site and know it exists! I know that many news people are using it. Rachel Maddow mentioned it on her show, so I appreciate at least knowing that it exists. Possibly in the future I will use it.

I am skipping this because the images are all blocked on this ning. Additionally, I wasn’t impressed with the information on that page thus far. I guess that I am not much of an online ”socializer.” There are other “things” that I can do, though!

Although the widgets looked interesting, I couldn’t download any on the school’s computer. They didn’t appear that useful to me. However, I enjoyed the picture tools — the resizer and the image modifier– and I have added them to my de.lio.us page. Another great tool was the Picapp site. It has countless photos of new happenings around the world.