Blogs, what in the world are they?

1. Blogs, what in the world are they? Stephen Barnett Coordinator Liaison and Information Literacy

2. Found at http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/blob-blogWeb2.gif

3. Lets find out!! • One way of finding out • A search run on the EdNA web site

4. Blog (from weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). • Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Source:Wikipedia

5. Another definition… • The term blog is short for web log, a "log" of diary-like entries published on a web site. This is how it started ... But blogging has evolved to mean much more than diary entries. Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable. Content can be photographs, recipes, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize. ...

6. “The true power of the blog comes from its interactivity with visitors and other blogs. As an author, you can allow your web visitors to comment on your entries, the comments then being published along side or in a separate window of the entry. ... The blogging tools that are freely available to the public have changed the nature of web publishing."

7. BLOGS • A GLOBAL CONVERSATION • A Master’s Thesis on the Social Phenomenon of Blogs • By James Torio • http://www.everyhuman.com/work/theses8.12.low.pdf

8. “Blogging has emerged as a social phenomenon, which has impacted politics, business and communication. • Blogging software has enabled people with limited knowledge of the Internet to publish their thoughts online and participate in a • global conversation; while the Blogosphere has hyper-accelerated the spread of • information.”

9. Technorati, a Blog search engine is now tracking over 7.8 million Weblogs, and 937 million links, and reports that there are about 30,000 - 40,000 new Blogs created a day

10. Some examples: • Mine • topend.blogspot.com • digitaldamage.blogspot.com • evidence-based-nursing.blogspot.com • Others…. • http://digitaldialogues.blogs.com/learning_technologies/ • http://www.incsub.org/blog/ • http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/category/codi-2006/ • Sheila Webber from the UK • http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/ • A daily source of interesting bit and pieces • http://www.boingboing.net/ Keen on the news? • http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/ • E learning • http://blog.articulate.com/the-19-best-elearning-blogs/

11. What are the implications forteaching and learning? • Put into practice with an understanding of their benefits and limitations, blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology tool. • Blogs can be used for reflection about classes, careers, or current events; they can also capture and disseminate student and faculty-generated content. • RSS feeds make blog content accessible through newsreaders, allowing bloggers to increase the sharing of this information among interested individuals.

12. Blogs offer students, faculty, staff, and others a high level of autonomy while creating a new opportunity for interaction with peers. • Blogs provide a forum for discussion that goes beyond coursework to include culture, politics, and other areas of personal exploration. • Students often learn as much from each other as from instructors or textbooks, and blogs offer another mechanism for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and acquisition. • from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7006.pdf

13. Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools forvirtual collaborative clinical practice and education • http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6920-6-41.pdf • And one just in this morning: • http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/physio/ • “Those of you interested in applying various Web 2.0 technologies into your library practice, might find our new podcasting mini-project to be of interest. • For the first time in UBC, the graduating class of Master of Physical Therapy students has compiled their systematic reviews of literature (high quality medical research) on eight (8) different topics in physiotherapy, with Charlotte Beck from the UBC Library co-teaching the class. • On Sep. 14-15, 2006, those systematic reviews were presented in Vancouver, BC for a wide audience of physiotherapists. • We have recorded those as audio files and just shared them with the broader audience as another outreach product. • On our blog - http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/physio/, you can find all eight presentations (both PDF versions of the presentations themselves and audio files in mp3 format of their talks). Here is an alternative link – http://tinyurl.com/pzdqd • We are planning to continue to support these reviews from now on, and are also planning on including them in the UBC Institutional Repository as a fully searchable component. • As far as I know, those are the first podcasts in physiotherapy! Send those as a holiday present to your physios :)

14. Another useful document • http://landmark-project.com/Coming_of_age.pdf

15. How to create a blog in five minutes or less • I use Blogger from Google • There are many other tools • Typepad,LiveJournal,MovableType • Ask your colleagues, friends, relatives and students what they use! • My photos, which I link to are hosted at www.flickr.com

16. Wiki? • Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski

17. Yet another EdNA search

18. UNIVERSITY LIBRARIESand WiKis • Curtin University Library and Information Service has an internal wiki, used by the Research Services unit to record operational information (e.g. who to contact for X), and to work on group projects and procedural documents. The wiki runs on MediaWiki (same wiki as Wikipedia). • ACU National has a prototype wiki for storing the answers to common reference enquiries. This runs on Lotus Notes. Nb: we have recently purchased RefTracker, which may render the wiki obsolete :( • University of Sydney META Language Library:META Library Wiki • Murdoch University Library has used an installation of TikiWiki as a site where staff can experiment with new web tools and learn about them. For the 2 month project called MULTA (Murdoch Univerisity Library Thinking Aloud) staff read about a new web tool (Content Management Systems, Forums, RSS feeds, Blogs, Wikis or  Social Tagging) and  complete some tasks to try it out. They are also reading about a different aspect of Library 2.0 and a Web 2.0 meme each week. The wiki has some passworded pages where staff are experimenting with using a wiki for everyday work (eg. a timetable for practicum students or a proposed change to the catalogue). The project runs from 16 June to 11 August 2006. More information is here.

19. From: • http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/libraryblogswikis/wikis?wpid=268250 • And one for Information Literacy • http://www.infoteach.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page • “Infoteach is intended to be a dynamic information base on teaching and learning in a library or information context. Originally developed as part of a UK National Teaching Fellowship project, the aim of Infoteach is to play a part in enabling librarians and information workers, in every sector, to be competent teachers and facilitators of learning. Infoteach is not about Information Literacy or Information Skills - it is about the teaching of these things.