del.icio.us

Social bookmarking (delicious in particular) is one of the few Web 2.0 technologies that I had been using before starting the Learning 2.0 course. 

Once set up it’s very quick and easy to use. One click of the ‘tag’ button and the page you’re viewing is saved. Being web based is great too as you can access your same bookmarks no matter where you are. Another plus point is the way you can manage your bookmarks with loads more options and info (tags, notes, users etc) available compared to your standard favourites folder.

I’ve also found delicious very useful with some aspects of my work (mainly because it’s so simple to save certain pages that you wan’t to go back to, handy when you are researching a particular topic that sees you visiting a lot of seperate sites, some more relevant than others). Although I haven’t fully explored the social side of it yet I can see the potential in sending & sharing bookmarks with colleagues (rather than the old fashioned way of emailing a link).

A really useful tool!

RSS #2

After stubbornly declaring that I couldn’t see myself using RSS that much I have pretty much spent all afternoon playing around on Google Reader (reading plenty of news items that I didn’t know I wanted to read) and have found myself slowly drawn in. I think a new e-ddiction has taken hold of me. To conclude, RSS makes avoiding work much simpler! Right, I’m off to try bloglines.

RSS

What to say about RSS? Depending on your viewpoint you could say RSS encourages efficiency or encourages laziness! I would say a bit of both.

Different to the other technologies we’ve covered as RSS is much more of a personal preference thing. Still very useful though. Like an extension of your favourites folder in many ways except you get to sit back and wait for the information to come to you. I quite like the idea of feeds and it was quite addictive setting up feeds to all my most visited sites but I don’t know how often I will use RSS. You need to have a reader as your home page to make the most out of RSS I think (I haven’t quite decided to do that yet) but I wonder how quickly the novelty wears thin.

Most useful if there are important updates that you need to keep up with for your work (latest library news etc), but for news and general info I think it can get a bit overwhelming and sometimes it’s nicer to just look for yourself.

Wiki’s

It’s been a while since I last blogged but it’s given me time to reflect and it is now time to play catch up and add some more thoughts on what we’ve covered so far on the Learning 2.0 programme.

I had never previously used a Wiki (other than to look up information on Wikipedia) but I did find it quite enjoyable. Again, ridiculously quick and simple to set up and pretty easy to use once you’ve played around with it for a bit. Like the blog, it was good fun setting up your own pages and adding bits and pieces to personalise them. At first a Wiki just seems like another type personal blog but the interesting bit is being able to share ownership and collaborate with colleagues (I noticed that threads and discussion boards were quite popular on the L2.0 Wiki as well).  This seems to be the major difference between a blog and a wiki.

On a professional level, Wiki’s certainly have potential. They could provide a very convenient way for members of various teams, projects or groups to share and update relevant information. Especially useful if people are based in different departments and campuses. It could almost be seen as a step up from shared drives (although not a replacement), in terms of accessibility and ease of use.

As with most modern technologies, until the potential of Wiki’s is fully explored then it will be difficult to incorporate them significantly into our professional work but I can see them being utilised more in the future.