Technically Random

The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About … ” series.

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters
of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving
economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases,
individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only
for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators
easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different
strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach
can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

I have an account in SL and spent way too much time trying to make my avatar look even remotely like me (although for some people, maybe that’s not the goal). I haven’t explored very much but I do know there is a Second Life Library Project. Right now my first life is leaving me barely enough time for sleep and a small guilty dosage of bad television.

It seems to be a never-ending quest to find a blog editor. As good as the editor in WordPress is, I just don’t like dedicating a browser window to it and it feels too much like typing in a web form and not an editor. (Picky, picky…) I wrote earlier about blogging from Word 2007, but the limitation of only being able to select one category, and the time it takes to get Word up and running has kept me from going back.

Now I think I’ve found just the thing. ScribeFire is a Firefox plugin that lets you easily post to your blog. By default it runs in split-screen mode, but you can also have it launch as a new tab or in its own window. It has some nifty features that make it very easy to include a link to the page your looking at or to drag and drop formatted text. Best of all, it’s always there in the browser so I don’t have launch another app or open a new tab and go to my blog to add a new post.

This is the second post using ScribeFire and so far no deal-breaker irritations. I’ll keep you posted.

This from the Chronicle Wired Campus:

Wired Campus: Twitter Ideas for Libraries - Chronicle.com

The Web site College@Home has put together a nice list of ideas for libraries interested in using the instant-blogging service Twitter.
More…

I’ve resisted Twitter so far because I’m trying to reduce the number of distractions that keep me from… well… work. I can see though how it could make it easier to do some things. Just yesterday I was trying to help diagnose a IP authentication problem with a new database. It seemed to be working from some subnets but not others. I was going through my IM list looking for people to help me test but it would have been much easier to send out something over Twitter so that whoever was available could to respond or not.
Maybe it’s time to jump in.

Hot on the heels of Corey’s great work with del.icio.us at the Foster Business Library, I wanted to post about another use for del.icio.us, just completed this quarter. UW Bothell faculty Gray Kochhar-Lindgren and I, with the help of Leslie Bussert, created an assignment for an interdisciplinary inquiry course in which students used del.icio.us to thoughtfully save, categorize, describe, and share information resources.

Through internet research and emerging UW Libraries’ tools, students created a research repository online that was required to be at least 20 resources deep. The “bookmark & share” widget that has been added to UW’s WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources to del.icio.us and annotate them. The faculty and I recently evaluated the students’ work, and are currently working on compiling their reflections and feedback about the assignment. I look forward to reporting on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.

I recently discovered ibreadcrumbs, which is specifically created for online research and collaboration. This will be an interesting tool to track. -AH

I just finished a project to move all of our business related web links into del.icio.us.  Previously, they had been in a MySQL database with Perl scripts that I wrote almost eight years ago to build the web pages of categorized listings.  I also had a web based admin module that was also written in Perl that was getting long in the tooth.

I finally got tired of dealing with my clunky admin module and decided to look for a better way.  I found this article in Library Journal: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us and looked at the page at the College of New Jersey Library for inspiration.  From there it was just a matter of setting up an account for the library in del.icio.us and bookmarking and tagging all 440(!) sites from the database that we had collected over the years.

The end result is a collection of links that is much easier to maintain and, more important, much easier for me to give to someone else to maintain.  I’m able to use the link roll function to pull in the links into a static page in the Libraries web space.  And, it has the flexibility to create many more discrete collections of links and could make it easier to create situationally specific collections such as for a particular class or assignment, or even for a reference transaction.

Links:

Foster Business Library - Business Resources on the Web
International Business Resources page with del.icio.us links
International Business links in del.icio.us
Foster Business Library del.icio.us collection (http://del.icio.us/FosterLibrary)