Creating the iGoogle page was a useful learning experience. As regards the gadgets, I decided to add a mixture of those that are related to my particular work interests and others that are connected to outside concerns. At work I am interested in children's literature, partly because students on a range of courses in the Faculty of Education make good use of our collection of children's books and partly because I enjoy reading children's literature myself and like to keep up to date with new books, authors and illustrators. Information supplied by such gadgets should feed into my professional knowledge and it's something we might usefully show students with an iGoogle account. At the Faculty of Education we produce a termly newsletter and have recently decided to include news items about significant developments in the field of education, so being able to add the BBC Education website to the iGoogle page will probably also be useful. As for my outside interests, I've added gadgets related to current affairs and human rights issues. I'll monitor all of the above to see how relevant they prove to be to be.
I can see that, for some libraries, RSS feeds would be a very useful way of communicating with students, especially in the ways outlined in ' 10 ways libraries can use RSS' but at the Faculty of Education we have created CamTools pages for academic staff and almost all of our different groups of students, and these deliver specially tailored information relevant to each user group. CamTools does not rely on students deciding to subscribe to an RSS feed or not and has proved to be a very effective way of communicating with them.
Although our Library serves the needs of undergraduates who tend to be young, we also have a large number of mature students studying on a part-time basis and they are much less at ease with using computers; some even struggle with using Newton and even more so with electronic sources of information, such as databases. They already have a lot of claims on their time and I am not sure they would have the inclination, energy or time to devote to setting up an iGoogle account, let alone RSS feeds, especially when CamTools already supplies much of what they need.
I can see that, for some libraries, RSS feeds would be a very useful way of communicating with students, especially in the ways outlined in ' 10 ways libraries can use RSS' but at the Faculty of Education we have created CamTools pages for academic staff and almost all of our different groups of students, and these deliver specially tailored information relevant to each user group. CamTools does not rely on students deciding to subscribe to an RSS feed or not and has proved to be a very effective way of communicating with them.
Although our Library serves the needs of undergraduates who tend to be young, we also have a large number of mature students studying on a part-time basis and they are much less at ease with using computers; some even struggle with using Newton and even more so with electronic sources of information, such as databases. They already have a lot of claims on their time and I am not sure they would have the inclination, energy or time to devote to setting up an iGoogle account, let alone RSS feeds, especially when CamTools already supplies much of what they need.
Hallo SMH
ReplyDeleteYour iGoogle page is impressive! Much more exciting than mine, and I like the seaside picture. (Would so like to lounge on those rocks and wink at sailors, ahem).
Not sure about the RSS feeds - I tend to use them to follow incoming stuff. We have accession feeds for the library and ebooks but I am not sure many people use them.
Looking forward to your next post.