Beyond Google: Information literacy and Web 2.0 Transformational Technologies: 2 nd November 2007

Pub quiz 2.0 Number of blogs? Number of blog entries posted each hour? Number of households that will regularly subscribe to podcasts by 2010? Number of Myspace users?

U120 MOSAIC – out with the old…. Making Sense of Information in the Connected Age Short course, reversioned from Safari Step by step approach to finding using and evaluating information Over 1000 students Informed further developments within the Library

…and in with the new – TU120 Aiming for “a quick refresh” Beyond Google Part of Relevant Knowledge programme –New platform –New sorts of activities Opportunity to experiment with technologies in the new information landscape

New information landscape… Compare and evaluate –Blogs –Google Scholar vs. subscription services –Wikipedia Organise –Social bookmarking e.g. FURL, del.icio.us –Tagging and folksonomies

New information landscape… Keeping up to date –RSS –Blogs –Aggregator services (e.g. Bloglines, Pageflakes) Synthesize and create new knowledge –User-generated content –blogs and wikis, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube

Audio and ‘the cast’ MP3 player –Interviews with researchers, kids and silver surfers –Audio downloads

“You can find out new things quite easy on the Internet. I rely on friends though because it's I find it a whole lot easier to trust people telling me face to face….. but you still can't trust half of the stuff that you sometimes get. You can't find any way of possibly finding if they are telling you the truth…..You do need Internet Police” “In the next five years people aren’t gonna need to go out of their house quite frankly. I mean you can do it now frankly if you wanted to. You can buy your food on line. You can buy your clothes on line. You don’t need to leave the house”

What do people think? I found it really interesting… the way it’s presented, the way the different sections flow has made me think about what I did know in a different way. I’ve actually learnt a lot, and now I’m having to think about what I thought was good practice My enthusiasm for the current Open University course that I'm studying... has been revitalised with an excellent [assessment] question. We're allowed to choose our own search topic. I find it far more rewarding to work on a subject that I can relate to rather than having one set.

Jo Parker The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA jep24 on del.icio.us