WebQuest 8th July 2008

The WebQuest has been set up to familiarise library staff with Web 2.0.  A WebQuest post is appearing in LibeRaCe every Monday for 8 weeks starting on 16th June with a new task each week.

Week 1.  The post explained what WebQuest is all about.  We can find information to help us with the tasks in the learning guides on the Library Moodle page.  To do this you log onto Moodle, click on Library & IT Workshop, then Information Literacy Skills, then Have you twigged? 

There were also links on the Week 1 WebQuest blog to 4 videos, which we were asked to watch.  The first provides a definition of Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly.  “…..”  The Machine is using us is an example of a video on YouTube (all on YouTube?), and the subject was social networking.  Web 2.0:  a very brief introduction showed photographs and screenshots about the development of the internet and social networking.  What is Web 2.0 is an informal talk by an American woman about web 2.0 and social networking.  Some library staff posted positive comments on LibeRaCe about this film.

Week 2.  Creating a blog. 

New terms

A blog (or weblog) is a form of website where entries are added and filed in date order, almost like a diary, with the most recent entries at the top.  WordPress is an example of a blog.

A blogroll is a list of interesting or useful blogs that you want to share with others.

A post is an article/comment/image that you publish on your website, wiki (what’s that?), or blog.

Widgets are the small boxes that you see to the side of a blog or website that are pre-programmed to contain text, pictures, RSS feeds (what are these?) and more.  It is an easy way of adding extras to your site without needing to know any programming language.

 I set up my account by going to www.wordpress.com, clicking on Sign Up Now! and then on Register a username, password and blogname.  I chose Doowyam as my username, which is Maywood spelt backwards.  This is also my Blogname.  I added my weblog/website to my Favourites in a new folder called Blogging.  I entered my btinternet email address as my contact address because so many emails are automatically trashed on Groupwise.  Any changes made, comments on posts or notices will be sent here (by the LibeRaCe administrators?).   

I then clicked on the Design tab and chose Sunburn for the layout.  This has white text on a black background, which is easy to read.  Next I added widgets.  Most of the names meant nothing to me so I chose terms which were familiar:  del.icio.uc, Search, Recent Posts and Flickr.

A post called “Hello World” appeared automatically when I set up my weblog.  This can be deleted, changed or added to.  I deleted it.

To write a new post I clicked on the Write tab of the dashboard.

 The address of my weblog is http://doowyam.wordpress.com. 

To edit my weblog or “access my dashboard”, I go into http://wordpress.com and then enter my username and password in the bluish Already hip? box.  I can edit published posts and continue with any saved but unpublished blogs on this page.

I have noticed that when I click on Save, the cursor returns to the top of the page which means that I have to scroll down again to continue adding to the blog.  Saving also takes quite a while.

I haven’t registered my blog address with the quest administrators, because I can’t find any instructions for doing this.

Week 3.  Tagging and Bookmarking

New terms

A tag is an informal subject heading you can add to a blog post, bookmark, wiki page or uploaded photograph to categorise and find them later.

Social bookmarking  is like adding tags to the saved bookmarks in your college Favourites Menu, but your Favourites list is hosted by an online service.  You can access the list from any computer anywhere in the world and share your chosen sites/files with anyone.  Examples include Del.icio.us and Flickr and we are using Flickr and Del.icio.us to learn about tagging and social bookmarking. 

I worked through the handout Setting up a del.icio.us account.  First I registered my account on the website http://del.icio.us by entering a username and password and my email address.  To install the delicious shortcut buttons on every computer I use I will have to click on Help/FAQ/How do I install buttons again …  I will have to do this on every PC I use, if I want to use my del.icio.us bookmarks.  I had already added the college webside my account and tagged it.  It is in a folder (or bundle?) named FE/College_websites. 

The next step was to import a saved Favourites folder from my PC.  I clicked on Applications/College website/File/Import & Export, selected one of my folders called “Sarah” from the Browse list and saved it to my H drive.  Having tagged and entered the name of the folder I was ready to import it into del.icio.us.  I clicked on the Settings button at the top of the page and then on import/upload.  I clicked on the Browse button and found the folder on my H drive, changed the subject of the bookmarked folder from “imported” to “Sarah”.

I found this quite complicated and will have to do it a few times to remember all the steps involved.  Some of it though is fairly intuitive and you can see what to do from the screen rather that having to follow the handout.