Monday, July 13, 2009

Week 6 Thing 14 Technorati

I find that this site has too much information for me. Perhaps, I just need to spend some more time learning how to filter properly the results I am interested in. I have found that there are a lot of results that have little to do with what I am interested in. Even when I searched using the tags only I get a lot of results that seem extraneous. However, searching tags was likely to get me closer to what I wanted to find. I am not convinced that this tool will become as much a part of my technical life as the RSS reader has. Although, I could be surprised when I get back into looking for information. During summer vacation I do not spend much time looking things up. It probably doesn't help that I am currently away from my own computer and my own space and my nice internet connection. This means that I am at the mercy of the internet connections I can find while I am away and often have to wait a long time for the search results to load, only to be annoyed by the results I didn't want.

I like the concept of tagging sites, pictures etc so that I can find things I am looking for with less trouble. However, I do not like that some tags are used just to get you to a site that has nothing to do with anything I am interested in. This did not happen when I searched something very specific like School Library Learning 2.0, but instead when I did a broad search for things like education or math.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Week 6- Thing 13 Del.icio.us

I like the idea of having my bookmarks on any computer I use. I don't have a lot of sites that regularly want to visit, but for the few that I do this will be a good option for me. I am wondering if in my class I can encourage my students to use this to share with each other good sites for math tutoring. I am sure they would find plenty of other sites to share as well, but I could at least offer my profile for them to see what sites I have found. Although, I will likely have to make a separate profile for work vs home as I try to keep my personal life separate. I don't mind that my students know I play video games, but I would rather not have them find my bookmarks to the maps and guides. I did enjoy seeing the comments people were making about the bookmarked sites. When I am doing another research project this will be very useful. I also think this is something that my colleague next door would find helpful to use with her students. She teaches history and often I see her students in the lab finding new information and going projects. It seems to me that they could use this tool to consolidate efforts on finding good accurate information.