Bloglines

This is a cool extension of the presentation I did last semester on podcasting. At that time, my understanding of RSS feeds and how to subscribe to them was still pretty rudimentary. This week I've definitely furthered that education. I didn't find it hard at all to use Bloglines. I hope that doesn't mean I didn't do it right. All I know is, now I have a list of feeds in my name, and when I click on them they open up. When I created my Bloglines account, the very first page explained that all I had to do was add "Sub with Bloglines" into my favorites list and use that whenever I was in a page I wanted to subscribe to. So that's what I did, and it worked like a charm. I added a news feed, a couple book review feeds, of course the Learning 2.0 blog, my own Flickr account (mainly because I'm still angry with Flickr from that particular week and I hate it intensely to this day).

Then I began looking around for other cool blogs. As I searched for feeds to which to subscribe, I found myself enjoying exploring, as it's so rewarding to meander one's way through various crossroads and turning points and find cool things you never knew about before. As Anne suggested, I subscribed to Point of Reference, which seems like a great resource in an area where there is such constant change. I'm happy to have a place to help me wade through all the different choices, especially since I'm not naturally drawn to reference sources and I sort of speak it with an accent.

Then I happened to talk to Michelle on the phone, and she reminded me of a blog Emilee had enjoyed called Kiss the Book. So I went to that, and since it looked awesome, I also subscribed to that. I did feel that that particular blog dealt mainly with picture books and other elementary-level fiction, which isn't my primary area of interest. So then I decided to do a search for other blogs related to young adult fiction and found another neat one by a woman named Jen Robinson. She (and the Kiss the Book lady) both do what I've started doing in my own school blog, which is to review books they've read. I find it helpful to see these kinds of things, because it gives me ideas both of new books to check out, and also ways that I can improve my own little book blog on my UEN page. I wonder if there's an option to add pictures onto mine... As I was looking in Jen Robinson's blog, I saw a link to a NYT debate regarding whether libraries still need books. So I went into that and subscribed to that also, since it looked really interesting.

There wasn't really anything that I disliked about Bloglines. As you know, if you've read my other posts, if I don't like something I will definitely say so, but I had a really positive experience here and I'm excited to keep searching and adding other feeds to my list.

Library 2.0

Interesting article. As I've done my observations, I've seen a gap between what we're talking about in class (as far as what librarians could and should be doing with technology) and what actual librarians in the field are doing. One of the most impressive librarians I've observed, in fact, talked to us about this very thing. She has made herself an invaluable part of the faculty and the school, and yet she expressed real concern to us about what she (and her attorney husband) perceive as the huge security risk of putting so much personal information out on the web. Watching her, I would have to argue with the author of this article that incorporating more and more and more technology is the best way to make ourselves relevant. Should librarians step up the technological relevancy of the library program? Of course. However, I would postulate that pushing all the latest web applications and trends is only ONE way to serve the school and the students. In fact, if not done well, I suspect it would be more of a time waster than anything else. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it necessarily should be done.

Just as librarians search through available book titles to find the best, in the same way they should choose only the best, most inspiring web 2.0 possibilities. More is not always better. Quantity does not beat out quality.

I've also wondered many times with my own classes how to get students involved in more web 2.0 applications, such as blogging, when their parents in some cases won't allow them to have e-mail or Facebook pages. Do we only do these activities with the students who have signed permission slips? What about the other ones? Now I believe UEN has its own blogging capability that I need to look into. Sometimes I think people who write these articles either aren't in a lower-grade school setting, or else they aren't in a school setting at all, because they seem to forget important things like parental permission.

Technorati

So this was exciting. Often on Blogger I've been frustrated with the lack of ability to search for blogs on topics that I was interested in. I knew there must be a way to do it! So Technorati is really cool.

Of the categories on the blog directory, my impression was that they hit the popular culture pretty well. Judging by the magazines in the check-out counter, people are pretty obsessed with celebrities' lives, and entertainment, so obviously that would be a big deal. My own blog (my real one) is a book blog, attached to my website, so I could see how there would be 3592 blogs about books. That's good news for librarians, I hope. I wonder how many of those books are being read in print form, and how many in electronic?

Also, business is a big deal to a lot of people, especially with the focus on the "economic downturn." I wasn't surprised to see sports, politics, and technology on there, obviously. After the success of Julie and Julia I would have been shocked if the "living" section had been less popular. I personally know a number of people who have cooking blogs.

How sad that education didn't have a category in the blog directory. I wonder why that is, because I did a search for blogs related to teaching and got 4202. Wow...that could take a while to wade through. Is there a reason why they didn't put education in the directory? When I did a search for posts with the same key word, I got only 529. That's still a lot, but I found it interesting that the number would be less. I'm not sure why that is. I confirmed the trend when I also did a search for "yellow labrador retriever" and got 11 blogs, some of which looked pretty interesting. When I searched for posts under the same key word I got no hits at all. Still can't figure out why that would be. Next I looked under the key words "school library" and found 216 blogs (pretty good!) and 85 posts.

Overall, I think Technorati is really cool for my own personal use. I'm thinking it would be a good way to follow blogs related to libraries and librarianship. As far as educational applications go for school hours with students, again, I'm thinking about how much there is to do in the small time we have with our students. How would we monitor which blogs were appropriate and which weren't? It seems out of the purview of the public school, and a real headache with parents. I could use it to find blogs to recommend.

Del.icio.us

I watched the podcast, looked through a site that was listed in the hot site list, and browsed through some more of the bookmarks. The bookmark I looked at was a site where a guy had composed a list of the top 10 dystopian novels. The site was interesting--I had not read all the books--but there was offensive language in it.

At this point I'm torn. Do I tell Ann the truth, or do I say what she wants to hear? Probably the A-seeking thing would be to lie and say some way that I would use Delicious in my library in order to share favorite links with my library patrons, just as she asked. To be honest, I would never use Delicious as a middle school librarian, which is what I want to be. It's a fine service, I suppose, although I don't think I really can imagine surfing the web so much that I would need it. However, out of all the material that I could expose students to, it's really far down the list. Frankly, we put a lot of time and effort into limiting what our students access on the Internet. Why would I want to inform them of a service that would put them in a position to browse all kinds of sites that I've had no chance to monitor? Sites where they might encounter inappropriate material? I guess what I'm saying is that I just don't get it or what's so great about it.