Monday, June 16, 2008

Thing# 11

Tagging can be useful when you are dealing with many examples of similar pages or references. This reminds me of an electronic thesaurus. Instead of see also, it will pull up all items with similar tags. Very much more user friendly than the Library of Congress Subject headings. Uses "human" language/slang.

Delicious is fabulous. I'm not sure if I want others knowing exactly what I'm bookmarking and tagging, but it is very handy to be able to access your bookmarks from any computer. I will definitely be adding my most used to delicious.

Thing# 10

I'm not a big wiki fan. As an educator, I most certainly wouldn't let my students use a wiki as a legitimate source for research. They may be useful for professionals to put together ideas of resources or answer reference questions, but the user must still determine whether the information posted is credible. It's too easy for my comfort level.

I also agree that a wiki is only as good as the people adding to it. Unless the information is relevant and organized (as our 23 Things wiki wasn't) it can become just a jumbled mess of useless information.

I also found it interesting that during the trivia contest this year a team was discovered changing a wiki so that the answer was not available for other contestants. Too much ease in causing trouble is my thought.

Thing 9

Although I was unable to edit the public document from the 23 Things site, I have used Google Docs in the past to assist with the spreadsheets used in keeping track of who completed which Things with the coaches and multitype directors during the first round of 23 Things. This was very handy when people were in multiple locations throughout the state. It was difficult to work with when more than one person was using the site at a time. I think there would have to be some guidelines set up before editing began. One person may like to sort and change color, etc while another person may like the document set up in a different way. It is nice that changes are documented however. The other problem I see is when multiple users are editing, there needs to be a deadline set when the document can be redownloaded as a final version. There is the potential that changes could be missed if someone brings the document down to their desktop and reloads it if others continue to make changes on the google doc online.