For this week's assignment, we will try to evaluate several social bookmarking resources specifically designed for education. Please find the site adjacent to your name and create an account for that site and begin using it to see how it works.
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2collab - Amanda
http://www.2collab.com/ -
CiteULike - David
http://www.citeulike.org/ -
Connotea - Matt
www.connotea.org -
H20 Playlist - Sineenart
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do;jsessionid=1FEE54417D18F6236032AA7BA0FF7FC6 -
LibraryThing - Freddie
http://www.librarything.com/ -
Scholar - Shawn
http://www.scholar.com
Once you have evaluated the site, post a comment in which you discuss the following:
- Who created and maintains the site?
- Who is the intended audience?
- How does the site work? Are there any special features that make it different from the social bookmarking sites we explored in this week's class? Please elaborate.
- Does the site have useful help files, FAQs or other materials (such as videos or other tutorials) to help new users learn how the site works? And, if so, are these materials helpful?
- Do you think the site you evaluated would be useful for yourself, other students and/or instructors? Please discuss why or why not?
- Is there anything else you would like to add about this site?
Important Note: There are many other social bookmarking sites that deal with education that are not listed above. One such site is edutagger (http://www.edutagger.com) that describes itself as a "K-12 Social Bookmarking" site. You may evaluate a different site than the one that was originally assigned to you as long as you make sure that the new site was designed, or is being used within an educational context.
6 comments:
This site was created and is maintained by Elsevier, ScienceDirect, and Scopus. 2collab was created for science, technicial, and medical researchers. Users can store, share, and catergorize educational bookmarks as well as find new research bookmarks. Users can also collaborate with others in their fields privately or in large groups. Users register for an account and then add their own bookmarks to their profile. Although this may be possible on other social bookmarking sites but I thought it was nice that users have the option to import or export bookmark lists from other sites such as delicious. I thought the help section had a large amount of helpful information and is set up like an online manual. I did not see a FAQ's section but there are informational videos of what different types of users would need to know when using this site (researchers, librarians, etc.). While I do not think that this site would be useful for myself as a teacher I think that older grade level teachers (which this site is geared towards) could benefit from the option to collaborate with other teachers. I did not find the bookmarking section to be any more useful than the sites we reviewed in class.
LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog and tag the books that they have in their personal library. Within this site you can find people with similar libraries, you can get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth. LibraryThing was created by Tim Spading, a web developer and web publisher based in Portland, Maine. The site is maintained by both Tim Spading and Abby Blachly. Abby is the head librarian. There is a team of five other people that are responsible for the site. I would say the intended audience would be people that are book readers and have a large collection of books.
LibraryThing is really two sites in one. It is a tool to catalog your personal library. Users add books to their catalog by entering titles, authors, or ISBN numbers. LibraryThing then searches the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and over 255 world libraries, and returns with precise book data. User can then edit the books in their catalog, tag their books with their own subjects, and use the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems to organize their collections.
I not aware of any special features that would make this site different from any other sites we talked about in class other than the things I mentioned in the previous two paragraphs. However, I must say that I like the social space, connecting people with similar libraries. This site also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.
There is a help and FAQ page. There are no videos, the site is text based. There is a section for rarely asked questions. There is a WikiThing which allows the user to edit the help page. The user can add their frequently asked question or solution to a question. I also observed that most of the information on this page is centered on assisting the users in learning the site.
I think the site would be useful to me. I am math teacher, musician, minister and student. I have a lot of books at work, church and at home. This would be a way for me to keep up with all the books that I have and organized them by tags that would make sense to me. In addition to finding other books on the same topic that are recommended by the LibraryThing system or people with libraries similar to my library. I believe this site would be useful to other students, and/or instructors for the reasons I mentioned above and for research purposes.
I like the search engine within the site. You can search your library or the site in general for book information.
Richard Cameron created CiteULike.
The intended audience is scientists, researchers, and academics. After you have joined, you have an option of adding a CiteUlike toolbar to your browser. During your research, when you find an article you would like to cite, you can either click the toolbar shortcut and add the article or its address to your library or you can manually add an article by logging in to CiteULike and entering the web address or uploading the article. You have to enter the title of the article, the author, and the pertinent publishing information in order for the citation to appear correct. Once you have entered this information, you can tag it and/or share it with a group you may have joined. Now you have shared your citations.
One difference between this site and the others from last weeks class is that there are limited advertisements on the pages. It looks like academia created it; bland. I like that fact. Which leads me to the second point. I think that this site has a very specific target audience and a specific purpose. Rather than sharing files you like or sites you visited or hobbies you are involved with, the purpose of this site is to share citations for scholarly endeavors and to make the citations uniform.
The FAQ page is very useful. There are no videos or other tutorials, but I did find one elsewhere on the internet.
I think this site is very useful for our purposes. By joining the EdTech group I have been exposed to a number of articles that could help me in finding answers for my research.
The H2O Playlist website was created by the Berkman Center of Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. The intended audience is probably students, but it can be helpful to users who are interested as well. The site is basically a social bookmarking site. The features and interface were simple and easy to use. All you have to do is create playlists that contain all the websites in the same categories. You can name the playlists and add tags and description of the playlists. To add items to your playlists, you can search the H2O website or add them manually. You can add just one site or many sites at the same time. The only drawback is that unlike well known bookmarking sites, this site does not provide any button for you to click and add items to playlists. You have to copy the urls and paste them to the form manually. Doing that can be awkward and inconvenient since you have to open many windows at the same time. The site provides useful help feature with enough information, but since the process of creating playlists is not complicated, the help feature is adequate. The website is useful and easy to use, but I would not use it since other bookmarking sites can do the same function but with a more convenient way.
www.connotea.org
-Who created and maintains the site?
2005-2008 Nature Publishing Group – Nature, a science and medicine journal
-Who is the intended audience?
“Free online reference management for clinicians and scientists”
-How does the site work? Are there any special features that make it different from the social bookmarking sites we explored in this week's class? Please elaborate.
No auto install of the bookmark icon, just a link in your bookmarks toolbar. Information you can enter includes display title, tags, tag suggestions, description, privacy options, and comments – pretty standard for most bookmarking websites. There are tag pages, group pages, and community pages – none of them seem to be very organized, however and there’s no apparent hierarchy of information.
-Does the site have useful help files, FAQs or other materials (such as videos or other tutorials) to help new users learn how the site works? And, if so, are these materials helpful?
There is some content like this but it’s not too extensive. The site is relatively straightforward.
-Do you think the site you evaluated would be useful for yourself, other students and/or instructors? Please discuss why or why not?
I might use it for interest-related scientific research, but since I’m not in that field it probably wouldn’t be useful otherwise.
-Is there anything else you would like to add about this site?
The site goes pretty slow.
Scholar.com is an educational resource site created by Blackboard, the makers of WebCT Vista and Blackboard, Course Management Utilities used by most universities, including UH. It is intended to be used by students and faculty, but is open to anyone.
It is incredibly rich and allows users to organize posted resources into personal collections, while rating and providing feedback to those who post them. In essence, scholar.com is used to share unique academic collateral with others.
In addition to being able to post, review, share, and organize the resources on the site, scholar.com can be used in two major ways: as a supplement to courses that are taught either traditionally or on a different site, or as an embedded resource in an existing online course offering.
The site uses a variety of help files, including successive level formatting and evaluation which allows users to see how the various elements of the site work.
I think that this site is extremely useful as a valuable component to my classes; it allows students to find a variety of related topics while evaluating and crating collections that are related to the subject matter being investigated.
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