4/30/2008

Google Generation is a myth?

Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week reports on research commissioned by JISC and the British Library about young people born or brought up in the Internet age and their ability to use the web to find information. Hmmph! I could have saved them the expense - as could most Librarians who struggle to teach Information Literacy Skills to students. The annoying thing is that members of the "Google generation" do not believe for a moment that people from any other generation can teach them anything about the Internet.

This thinking is often aggravated by people who talk about "digital natives" vs. "digital immigrants". I swear that, even though I am the most senior person in my college library, no-one else here is particularly interested in improving their skills, other than knowing just enough to be able to impart some of these skills to their students.

4/24/2008

Web 2.0 distractions

I was asked to do my standard presentation on Wikis and Blogs yesterday but "to make it fun". Well, these workshops are always fun but I thought that I could provide a new slant on this one by running through a few Web 2.0 applications and letting participants make whatever use of them they could.

I gave everyone the following handout and we worked together through each of the activities, referring along the way to what other people (myself included) had done with the tools available.

What are we doing here?

1

Create a Google account
www.google.com

2

Create an iGoogle page
www.google.com/ig

3

Add elements to your iGoogle page

4

Create a Blogger account www.blogger.com
Write about what you hope to achieve today

5

Create an avatar -- a representation of yourself. Go to http://avatars.yahoo.com/ ; design an avatar with a funky background. (You will have to set up an account if you don't use Yahoo!) Save your avatar and export to your blog.

6

Create a reader and add some RSS feeds
http://www.google.com/reader

7

Facebook http://facebook.com
Create an account, find some friends and send them a message.

8

Del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/

9

LibraryThing
http://librarything.com

10

Picasa – organise your pictures
http://picasa.google.com/


Participants were fully absorbed throughout and I had to get stroppy to get them to stand up after a couple of hours to help themselves to coffee and biscuits.

These are only some of the activities that we do in the 23 Things programme. I'm still thinking of rolling it out to the whole college but also struggling against lack of support for such "distractions".

4/22/2008

Bored? Never!

What does one do when stuck at home recovering from minor foot surgery? I caught up with some reading and finished the Life of Pi, spent many hours in Second Life and also played with StumbleUpon and discovered many fascinating new sites. If you haven't used StumbleUpon you are denying yourself hours of entertainment and finding sites that other people have considered noteworthy (yes, it's one of these new-fangled Web 2.0 tools again).

Some of the pages I discovered are listed below:

15 Handy Google Search Tricks
Most of us use Google but here are several built in functions within Google which make searching even easier. Learn how to use Google as a calculator, a dictionary, a currency converter and for several other useful field searches.

Maximize Firefox Without Extensions Using about:config
If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

The caffeine click test
where I found out that my caffeine level for the day was High - Well Caffeinated & Easily Excitable.

This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak is an excellent blog post that details how to reduce Firefox’s high memory use.

The search engine list is a list of umpteen search engines sorted by genre. I must admit that I have never heard of most of them but one day it will be fun to play around and see how they compare. There are special search engines for news, medical, maps, legal, jobs, games, enterprise, blogs – and many more.

5 Ways to copy music OFF your iPod. I have moved office to one with a new computer and my music folder was not transferred with me. I have all these tunes on my iPod and want to be able to edit and re-organise them, so what am I to do? It’s easy enough to copy music (or videos) from computer to iPod, but not the other way. Luckily this site has come to my rescue.