Archive for the ‘Web 3.0’ Category

The folks at Educause have put together a new “7 Things” guide, this time discussing 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Evaluation. “For most institutions, the LMS is the most significant enterprise application for teaching and learning. It serves as the resource hub for the institution’s classes and delivers courseware to students.” As usual, the quick reference resource answers the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. Who’s doing it?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Meghan Peters at Mashable explains How To: Use HootSuite as a Marketing Tool. To prepare for this helpful article, Peters spoke with Dave Olson, marketing director at HootSuite, for a primer on using the platform for social media marketing. Here are his four recommendations:

• Secure Team Setup
• Track Campaigns and Engage Daily
• Measure Success
• Get Help and Give Feedback

Stephanie Gehman at the Social Media Examiner offers 6 Tips for Starting an Online Community. If you’re building an online community for your organization you’ll want to check out this helpful post which discusses these six strategies for building a strong community:

• #1: Know Your Audience
• #2: Know Their Needs
• #3: Know Your Business
• #4: Know Your Stuff
• #5: Know Your Limitations
• #6: Know How to Appreciate

Art: John Hersey

Carolyn Duffy Marsan at Network World discusses predictions from leading research labs which point to a future of talking machines, 3-D telepresence and real-world robotics in 25 ways IT will morph in the next 25 years.

“Imagine a world where the computers, networks and storage systems are all tens of thousands of times faster than they are today — and then think about the sci-fi type of applications that will be possible.”

Judy Luther & Maureen C. Kelly write about The Next Generation of Discovery in the latest issue of Library Journal. This comprehensive article discusses new Google-style discovery tools such as including EBSCO Discovery Service and Serials Solutions’ Summon.

“A casual Google search may well be good enough for a daily task. But if you are a college student conducting his or her first search for peer-reviewed content, or an established scholar taking up a new line of inquiry, then the stakes are a lot higher. The challenge for academic libraries, caught in the seismic shift from print to electronic resources, is to offer an experience that has the simplicity of Google—which users expect—while searching the library’s rich digital and print collections—which users need. Increasingly, they are turning to a new generation of search tools, called discovery, for help.”

I am thrilled and honored to share that “The Tech Set” book series has been named the winner of the ALA’s 2011 Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature!!! Congrats to all the incredibly talented authors and the wonderful folks at Neal-Schuman. This was an amazing project to be a part of!!!

Erica Swallow at Mashable writes about How Semantic Search Is Redefining Traditional & Social Media. This thoughtful article looks the evolution of the semantic Web and the role that search will play as social sites integrate semantic technologies.

“Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.

Semantic search is one broad area within the higher realm of semantic technologies, which also includes knowledge storage, information extraction and reasoning, among other topics. The goal of semantic search is to improve search result accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual relationships between the terms used in the search.”

Stephanie Sammons at the Social Media Examiner offers a quick guide to How to Use LinkedIn With Twitter for Better Networking. If you have profiles on both of these social media websites, you might already know that they are integrating through an application called Tweets which “can help you keep tabs on the Twitter updates from your LinkedIn connections”. This useful guide is broken down into the following sections:

• Add Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile
• Install the LinkedIn Tweets Application
• How to Utilize the Tweets Application to Build Social Influence
• #1: Identify and follow all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter within the Tweets application
• #2: Create a dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections
• #3: Look for engagement and promotional opportunities through LinkedIn Tweets

Sue Polanka at No Shelf Required discusses the results of a recent Cengage Learning survey entitled “Instructors and Students: Technology Use, Engagement and Learning Outcomes”. The survey looked at how educational technology impacts overall student engagement and learning outcomes. Some of the findings included:

• 87% of students believe online libraries and databases have had the most significant impact on their overall learning.
• 62% identify blogs, wikis, and other online authoring tools while 59% identify YouTube and recorded lectures.
• E-books and e-textbooks impact overall learning among 50% of students surveyed, while 42% of students identify online portals.

Be sure and check out the full post for more!

David Murphy at PCWorld has put together a great guide to PC Spring Cleaning: Automatically Organize Your Files. This quick article offers a tutorial on how to use basic Windows functionality along with free applications in order to automate your digital organization. The article is divided into the following sections:

• Find Messy Folders
• Clean Up the Mess With Symbolic Links
• Automatically Organize Files With DropIt

Ben Wieder at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports on the 6 Top Tech Trends on the Horizon for Higher Education. The post discusses the 2011 Horizon Report, an annual look at technology trends affecting higher education produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause. Here are the top tech trends to watch:

1. Mobile Devices
2. Game-Based Learning
3. Learning Analytics
4. Augmented Reality
5. e-Books
6. Gesture-Based Computing

Mari Smith at the Social Media Examiner reviews 8 content curation tools in 8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content. This quick post summarizes the latest edition of Social Media Examiner TV, detailing tools which can be used to find the best social media content on the Web. Here are the first four that made the list:

• #1: Google Alerts
• #2: Google Reader
• #3: Facebook Friend Lists for Better Facebook News Feeds
• #4: Twitter Lists

Sarah Houghton-Jan, the LibrarianInBlack has shared the slides from her ALIA Information Online pre-conference session titled 3.0 tools without 3.0 million dollars. This presentation is chock-full of excellent free resources that budget-conscious libraries will want to take advantage of.

The folks at Common Craft have produced a new video which explains BitTorrent in Plain English. After watching this 3 minute video you’ll know:

• How files are shared on the web and what makes BitTorrent different
• The BitTorrent application and how it’s used
• How trackers, peers and hosts work together to deliver “pieces” of files
• How anyone can use BitTorrent to share or download files

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch discusses Seven Technologies That Will Rock 2011. This interesting article highlights 7 new trends in technology that are predicted to go mainstream within the next year including:

1. Web Video On Your TV
2. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment
3. Mobile Social Photo Apps
4. Mobile Wallets
5. Context-Aware Apps
6. Open Places Database
7. The Streaming Cloud