Week 5 - Wikis

These can be a useful source of information because almost anyone can contribute. It's a good way for people to share information. They can have various applications ranging from billboards through to encyclopedias and at different levels of complexity.

Wikis would probably engage gregarious and social types of students who enjoyed interactivity. Other students would probably still derive benefit from the information content.

The type of application suitable for libraries would probably be suggestion boards. Another application may be the ability for students to review and comment on items in the library catalogue.

Week 4 - Journal database RSS feeds

We have generated an RSS feed from a keyword search in the ERIC (EBSCO) database. We explored various searches in education in order to yield a manageable number of results. These search terms should provide new articles that will be posted to the feed in the future.

The feeds generated from database searches would act as a useful alert service for anyone searching on a particular topic. It would be an excellent way of keeping current on articles published in a subject area.

These feeds would assist undergraduate students to identify current publications for their assignments. They would be particularly helpful for people undertaking long term research. For example, research students and academics could maintain feeds on particular search terms that are relevant to their research or teaching fields.

This technology would engage those students who have a pre-existing interest in applying web technologies to their research. For other students it would be important to convey the advantages of this technology to ongoing research.

Week 3 - RSS Feeds

We have completed the exercises for this week. It has been good to find out what RSS feeds are all about. They seem to be an effective means to alert someone to information of interest. This would be useful to students and researchers interested in particular subject fields. The search facility on Bloglines was quite useful and it was relatively easy to subscribe to feeds from the search results. However, some of the topics we searched for yielded limited success. We did not find search tools from other sites to be very helpful. The week 3 exercises have been a structured introduction to RSS feeds and we now have the skills to add feeds of interest as they are found.