A vision of students today

Hope this works - this hit home with me - teaching and learning needs to change - students need to be engaged ....

Comparison of different Search Engines

I have spent bits of today looking at each of the engines and using the same keywords 'second life education'. It has been rather interesting - nothing came up under Millenium - hadn't really expected anything as it is still so new. Perhaps our Education Liaison librarian should see if there is anything out there - especially as some of the US Universities are starting to use this technology to run their courses eg mock trials etc in Law.

Del.icio.us, Connotea and Citulike are all tagged by users with the last two appearing to have fewer hits, but appear to be more scientific or academic in nature. Connotea only had 3 hits in the last 3 months.

The keyworded engines had different hit rates or methods of operandum - Google had 189 million results and was quite eclectic with PDFs also found; Dogpile initially only came up with 66 hits and immediately showed results from Flikr and Del.icio.us; Zuula had the different search engines tabbed along the top and meant that though it searched all engines simultaneously - they were shown in isolation, thus the Google tab showed 191 million, the second tab for Yahoo showed 204 million etc; and finally Kartoo - firstly you could choose whether to just search UK or world wide - this resulted (WW) in 21 million hits with each page only showing approx 14 to 15 visually with their links.

Interesting exercise - would it make people change to another search engine - don't know. I used to use dogpile over 10 years ago - got out of the habit. Am using Google at the moment - isn't everyone? Only because I'm really into Igoogle to organize my information and communications.

Second Life and Educational Uses

I read some articles in Google reader this morning and came across the info that Second Life is bracing for the million new users of Second Life that are expected to join this week once CSI NY is watched. It appears that the characters enter Second Life to solve the weekly murder. There's even a You Tube promo for the show!

This resulted in me looking at Second Life in Education. Delicious had lots of results and I've ended up being blown away in SLEducation by the uses. These include mock trials, The Alliance Second Life Library project is exploring the use of virtual worlds to promote and provide online library services, there are numerous sailing clubs where residents can learn to sail and transfer skills learnt into real life sailing skills. Residents are creating displays and exhibits on a broad range of subject areas and using images, text and multimedia they are able to create dynamic, interactive displays and exhibits which avatars can move in and interact with. Students in another example undertake a range of role-plays and simulations, practicing real life skills in a virtual space or exploring situations that they could not undertake safely or easily in the real world.

I'll look at the other sites later today or tomorrow... I think that each time, I'll take longer than 15 minutes!

Google Documents and Wiki

I used a real situation to type up and share a document ie our vision and priorities for the next 8 or 9 weeks. Trouble is we came up with 17 different priorities - both work and social! I guess if you take out a) decision re where we're booking for Christmas lunch, b) when Christmas closedown occurs, c) who is bringing afternoon teas or birthday cakes or d) rosters for Tranisition week and similar occasions - we might end up with 10 items.

With the Wiki - I'm playing with the idea of using it for students to add their bits about the library. Wonder whether it would work or not - would we get some foul mouth language under anonymous signage? or could it be rather exciting where students could give hints about surviving this campus??

My wiki is Peel Library

Meez - me

Here we go again - My Meez will work this time thanks to groucho marx's dog. Instead of a motorbike (last ridden when I was a Uni student) - I thought of sitting behind a desk (messy or tidy), handling books, waving placards or signs, blowing kisses, surfing on cars, and even dancing .... chickened out and decided that walking in ever decreasing circles is more what it feels like in real life.

Igoogle -ed

Spent an hour today setting up my IGOOGLE page to make it easier to handle the upcoming technology. I now have feeds to both of my blogs (1 for work, 1 for 23 things), 23 Things Blog, have Google Reader set up (but it's only showing 1 feed - can your and/or how do you see all the feeds?), have Gmail set up, a calendar, time, To Do list and some space for other things. I did play around with news feeds but these took up too much room and as I wasn't that fussed - deleted them.

I tried to put the URLs for 23 Things Wiki and work Wiki - but failed - can you do this sort of thing in Igoogle?

I spent most of my time being blown away with the widgets and gadgets that people have developed. I even played around with designing an animated avatar - loaded it, found it was too big and deleted it. It was pretty cool though - riding a powerful motorbike down Rodeo Drive. Can you resize these so they are only a thumbprint?

RSSing for the future

Last year I subscribed to some (10 or more sites) via RSS popper and organised it to come to my work address then forgot all about it. After 6 weeks, I remembered and found to my horror that there were thousands of bits of information, all out-of-date that I'd downloaded. This was clogging up my email. I soon UNsubscribed to these feeds. Earlier this year I put news widgets on our protopage site and found that this was a better way to handle the news.

In the past few months I've also been involved in talking to others about RSS feeds and how they could be used by different people and/or organisations. They would be good if you wanted information about new items in the library that fitted your needs ie Science Fiction or Fantasy books for those that want that info, Golf for Dummies or Investment and How to Gain Riches for those who are waiting for ONE POWERBALL!

I think I want one page (work smarter, not harder) where I can get everything I need - email, calendar, to do lists, RSS feeds, News, Search the catalogue, Instant messaging etc. Is Igoogle the answer to this or is there something else out there waiting for me to discover. I can only dream.......