Today I explored Rollyo and created my own personal Rollyo roll funnycats. In my defense, I couldn't think of anything else.
What Rollyo does is let you create an individual type of search engine. Have a few sites that you like to search? You can create a Rollyo roll that will search all of those sites at once.
I can see uses in such a tool, actually. Might be a nice way to help students conduct web searches of the free web. Particularly for very specific assignments. If, for example, a class is working on an assignment where they are researching terrorism and have to look at the web. I could use Rollyo to identify the "good" websites for them and they could save time and use Rollyo to search. But, honestly, I don't think they would ; )
It will be interesting to see where Rollyo goes and if it becomes a frequently used tool or not.
However, I still don't "get" bookmarklets. I might have to do some further exploring on that one on my own when I get some free time. Ha! LOL. Free time! ; )
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Learning 2.0: LibraryThing
Today I finally had a chance to catch up a little on our Web 2.0 learning project at my library. For lesson # 10 we were suppose to set up and account in LibraryThing and explore. I was excited about this lesson because I've been wanting an excuse to play around in LibraryThing for a while!
LibraryThing is a web tool that lets anyone catalog their personal book collection! You can catalog up to 200 titles for free and endless titles for a very reasonable cost.
It was very easy to add books to LibraryThing. To be honest, I did so without even reading any directions. But then I was like, now what? Quickly I learned, like all of our other Web 2.0 tools, LibraryThing is all about being social. I could click on one of my books and see how many other people had the book in their collection. Very cool. There are also reviews, author pages, etc. And you can be as open or as private as you want with LibraryThing, which is always nice.
For the second exercise, we were suppose to go to the Web2List and check out the massive list of Web 2.0 applications listed there. Whoa! That list was really overwhelming. But, I was quite pleased to see that Amazon was on the list! I use Amazon in my personal and professional lives all the time. Personally, it has become a great source for Christmas and birthday presents for our ever expanding extended family. Professionally, and maybe this is a bad thing for a librarian to admit, I use it in collection development all the time. When I am trying to evaluate a book, and whether or not it is good for our collection, I always go to Amazon and it gives me a much better description (usually) then Blackwell's. It also helps me identify textbooks (which I try not to buy) easier than Blackwell's.
LibraryThing is a web tool that lets anyone catalog their personal book collection! You can catalog up to 200 titles for free and endless titles for a very reasonable cost.
It was very easy to add books to LibraryThing. To be honest, I did so without even reading any directions. But then I was like, now what? Quickly I learned, like all of our other Web 2.0 tools, LibraryThing is all about being social. I could click on one of my books and see how many other people had the book in their collection. Very cool. There are also reviews, author pages, etc. And you can be as open or as private as you want with LibraryThing, which is always nice.
For the second exercise, we were suppose to go to the Web2List and check out the massive list of Web 2.0 applications listed there. Whoa! That list was really overwhelming. But, I was quite pleased to see that Amazon was on the list! I use Amazon in my personal and professional lives all the time. Personally, it has become a great source for Christmas and birthday presents for our ever expanding extended family. Professionally, and maybe this is a bad thing for a librarian to admit, I use it in collection development all the time. When I am trying to evaluate a book, and whether or not it is good for our collection, I always go to Amazon and it gives me a much better description (usually) then Blackwell's. It also helps me identify textbooks (which I try not to buy) easier than Blackwell's.
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