Week 8/Thing 14

I've been hearing about his technology for a while and thought it was just a way to keep your leisure time favorites in order, but after seeing both videos and creating my own account, then using that ridiculously easy link to add to my blog here, I'm astonished at what a great tool this is for academic research and teaching. Keeping web resources organized has always been a struggle for me -- I'd have lists of favorites, stuff cut and pasted on word docs-- and no way to really get a handle on what I'd read.Luckily, I've learned how to use rss feeds to at least keep these resources current. I love the "folksonomy' aspect of tagging here, reminds me of using a thesaurus. I also did contrast a search on Stonehenge on del.icio.us with a search on Google. Very interesting. This is an amazing resource for a library to create and share sites on a topic as well as my number one tool in any kind of research project. I'm going to extol its virutes to my grad. shool daughter and college student son.

Week 7/Thing 13

I love Library Thing!. This is really an amazing use of social networking and what a library of resources! I created an account and then purposely set up an "off the wall' list of five books and created one tag for them. I also sent out a few invites. I especially liked the "be a reviewer" option which I'd love to do at a later date. I took a peek at Shefari and Gurulib. Honestly, I could spend days on tthse three sites and add many many books to my shelf. I just invited a few people and joined a group--Nancy Pearl's Book Lust.

Week 7/Thing 12

http://www.meez.com/main.dm

Frankly speaking, this was my least favorite and useful lesson so far. That said, I did learn a lot about creating avatars (did not really get their popularity with YA's --even when on the cover of School Library Journal) and how many sites are available for the novice. I checked into Zwinky, created a virtual self on Meeze and Avatar and looked at Speech Agents.I can see how speech agents could be useful in online learning courses. It was a little bit fun to play paper dolls with the images.
What;s amusing is the comment"remember to be tasteful" -- I guess that's why I'm not so crazy about this technology.

Week 6 --Catch Up Week

Thnaks for this extra week. I'm going back to my MySpace and Facebook accounts and adding libary groups and a few people. I want to look at the customizing stuff and the optional things.

Week 5/Thing 11

Still learning about social networking and creating accounts. Today its Facebook. It's very easy to set up these accounts and the amount of applications is amazing. Also, fun to contact and keep in touch with people. My daughter uses Facebook to send "e-vites" to parties and social stuff. That said, I read the wikipedia article and realized how complex and problemmatic this technology is --and the not-so-great uses of it. For instance, I didn't know it was located in Beverly Hills and owned by Fox and how corporate it really is, I wasn't aware of the lousy customer service aspect(I just assumed there was a contact us box and that somebody would get back to you.) I guess (from my brief tech class) I knew about the problems with the poor web source coding--which explains its popularity since relatively few peoplel take the time to learn how to write correct code and don't really care--but I thought that the techies had taken car of that and that it was not a problem. I did not realize that a 14 year old can have a page and that a 16 year old can have a public page--which seems strange since 18 is the age of a legal adult. Does this mean that a 16 year old who's page is linked to a crime is tried as a juvenile? I can now see how Congress, child protective agencies and first amendment supporters run into such a quagmire when trying to regulate social networking sites on the Internet and how much a worldwide issue this is.

Week 5/Thing 10

Wow, my last post was 2/27--do I need to catch up! I've actually been looking forward to his activity since Facebook and MySpace have played such a huge part in the lives of my children. One is 26 and very committed to this technology as a way to keep in touch with high school friends and let them know what's she's doing. My son is 21 and also uses social networking to "get the word out "about himself and find out about others. It's easy as an adult (to whom this way of communication is so foreign) to look for something sinister here and many young adults are now just realizing that what they post can be available to employers and school authorities and that even when they request that a profile be taken down, it still lingers on a server someplace. Also, according to my kids, the whole "friending" aspect of it can result in uncomfortable situations. At their ages, they are savvy to the realities of privacy and fraud, but I still have concerns when thse technologies tricle down to middle school students. Still, this is the way that many younger people communicate and it has outgrown the college community to become mainstream. I really liked Digg with its political focus and Ning was ok,too. With regard to libraries creating MySpace pages, I actually think its a viable idea to connect with young adults would be much more likely to access My Space than the traditional library website.