Your Questions Answered
Week 3
I am unclear how to put my tags from
delicious into my blog as Kathy has. Same with flickR. do you put the
generic website or your personal stuff on your blog. I'm still confused
With WordPress, you can incorporate both Flickr and Delicious by using the WordPress widgets. After logging into WordPress, click on Design and then click on Widgets. If you look in the left column, you will see many widgets from which to choose. I believe Delicious is somewhere near the top. It displays it as del.icio.us, which is the old name for the site. Flickr is towards the bottom.
Click on "Add" for whichever widget you want to use. That widget will then display over on the right in the "Current Widgets" column. You then need to click "Edit" to add information about the widget you want to add.
For Delicious, it's fairly easy to add your links. You add your Delicious user name and then tell the system how many Delicious links you want to display (I use 10.) If you hit "Change" at this point, it will display all of your public Delicious bookmarks. However, in my case, I only display the links with the semls20 tag. To do so, I added semls 20 to the box that says "Show bookmarks containing all of these tags." Click "Change" to update your Delicious widget. Then you need to click "Save Changes" to save your new sidebar. I always forget this step and have to go back to redo everything.
How can I best 'gather the goodies' in
relevant and appropriate publications that will integrate several tools
in user-friendly ways for teachers? KISS or they will not be motivated
to 'adopt' or even test-drive !
Week 1
My only problem is confusion about how
best to communicate directly with you and classmates; your personal
email @semls, on the class main page, the weekly assignment page, our
individual blog pages . . ?
As a rule of thumb, I would post comments related to the coursework on
this wiki. If you have questions, it is likely that others in the class
have the same question, and a post to this wiki will benefit everyone
in the class. The Help page, accessible in the right navigation pane,
is available for "how-to" questions. If you're reacting
to your assignment for the week, you can post the comment on the weekly assignment page. I would try to avoid using hte main page to post comment, but I receive an e-mail alert every time somebody comments to this wiki, so I will get it either way.
If you would like to keep your communication with me private, there are several ways to do so. You can use the Feedback
If you want to contact other class participants, it may be best to do it through their blogs since I haven't posted any other contact information for participants.
Your own personal blog can be used to post whatever you like. For each week, I do suggest things to post to your blog so that they can incorporate some of our learning for the week, but you do not have to adhere to my suggestion.
Perhaps it would be worth mentioning
from the start, however, that the wiki can be viewed and read by
anyone, not just course participants.
Yes, it is worth mentioning. To post on this wiki, you need to be a member of this class. But the wiki is publicly-available for anyone to read. During the last class, we found that co-workers of a couple of the class participants started shadowing the class, which was a great way to open it up to more people. Jessamyn West also linked to the course wiki from her blog, librarian.net, as she was preparing for a presentation at SEMLS.
As an extension of my answer to the last question, you can contact me privately with questions that you don't want to share with the world.
One thing I do still feel a bit
confused about is the concept of skype which was introduced by Kathy as
an alternative way of doing our scheduled chats. I'm still not sure I
really understand what that is and how it works.
It turns out we will not be able to do the Skype chats, so you do not need to worry about it for this class. However, to give you a little more information about it, Skype is freely available software you can download to your computer and use to talk to people via the Internet. To use Skype, you need to have speakers, ear buds, or headphones to be able to hear the person on the other end. You also need some kind of microphone to be able to talk to the other person. If the person on the other end is a Skype user, all of the calls are free. However, Skype also gives you the option to call an actual phone number at a cost of 2.1 cents per minute. If you are doing one-on-one calls, you can also use a Webcam and see the person you are talking to. For our chat, we would have used the conference calling feature that allows up to 25 people to talk at the same time. People with family and friends in other countries often use Skype to stay in touch with them at no cost.
How do you choose the technology that will best serve your projects?
How do librarians balance time and tools? How do they decide what works best?
As we proceed through the course, I will try to highlight how the tools differentiate themselves from one another. These are also great questions to bring up for discussion. I'll try to do so in one of the chats as well as during one of the wiki discussions later in the course.
Will I be able to retain this information?
I believe the fact that this is an online class makes it more likely that you will retain it than during one of our face-to-face classes. Figuring out the tools for yourself is a great way to retain information. But, in reality, I think what you'll find in this class is that there are one or two tools that you really find useful, and you'll learn more about them as you continue working with them. The others will also be useful because you will have the experience of using them and will know what they are when you come across them. However, I don't imagine you will end up using all of these tools on a regular basis. Even I don't use all of them! link at the top of this page, e-mail me directly at klussierATsemls.org, IM me at semlskathy (AOL and Yahoo), or even call me.
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