Sunday, February 14, 2010

Searching, Info Literacy, Google Squared

Another week full of information. I usually spend at least two hours browsing through the recommended sites, reading posts and creating posts with every visit to the classroom wiki. It just works better to tackle a few chunks of information at a time. My week started with the information literacy topic and the Allen November website. I took his IL quiz to see how savvy I am and I scored pretty well, but not in the geek category yet. It was alarming to investigate the Martin Luther King website that was created by the racist group White Power. It is amazing that the government cannot shut down an operation like that. It was a good example of how corrupt a seemingly legitimate looking website can be. I am glad I now have some good sites to refer to when I need to check on a website.

The discussions involving searching tools for catalogs was very informative. There are so many options now to make searching easy for any type of user. I don't think library users will have any trouble finding what they need if libraries take advantage of newer systems like the Follett Destiny Quest catalog. The types of resources have also become very diverse with the advent of digital resources. I myself have not experimented too much with these features, but I know it will be increasingly popular, so next time I want a book, I think I will see if I can download one into my iPhone. I actually did this once, but it was rather cumbersome. Hopefully, the second time around will be smoother.

Tonight I enjoyed playing around with the Google squared site. I looked for information on cross country skiing in NY, getting only a few possible sites. Skiing is a sport that is primary promoted for downhill skiing, so most of my results came up with this area of information. I tried adding other options to narrow the field, but it did not help much. In the end, I did get some good websites for XC skiing, but these did not show in my squares. I saved and retrieved the squares without difficulty, so I will think of some other ideas to try Google squared again. It seems like a good way to organize a variety of search results. So many new tools for finding and organizing information!

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