Sunday, March 25, 2012

Wikis and Libraries


Working on a Wiki was a new experience for me; and I thought the process was very time-consuming. I thought learning the navigation part of the wiki was difficult and frustrating. I'm still not sure if I got the uploading of the documents part right - what's the difference between putting the documents on as a page or a folder? - and do you have to do both? I spent so much time on this project. And that to me is the drawback of using wikis- this it is too cumbersome for librarians - too much time checking what is posted and editing postings that are inaccurate.

However, one way that libraries can benefit from using wikis is to share information; particularly forms, written procedures, presentations. This would save us a lot of time because we librarians wouldn't have to go around re-inventing the wheel. My personal preference of a web tool for informational purposes is blogger. It is easier to use than wikis and I like the navagation better. It is much simplier and I think you can be more creative with blogger. It is so simple to pick a template and you are ready to go! Love blogger, would pick it hands down over wikis.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Delicious and Diigo

I think both delicious and diigo are great tools for saving web pages and sites. I used to save sites and web pages in folders but there was no way to search or organize them and I just ended up with a lot of information that wasn’t searchable. I really like the interface of delicious and thought it was the best until I started using diigo. Diigo is really more useful because you can highlight parts of the site and add your own notes, so that you don’t have to search the site to remember what you thought was useful about the site to begin with. Click here to see my delicious site and here to see my diigo site.

I plan to use both my delicious and diigo sites as  teaching tools to illustrate social bookmarking at our next faculty meeting on how to use Web 2.0 tools. Very few teachers in our school are familiar with social book marking, so these sites will be great to illustrate how to save, search and use all this electronic information.