Turning the Curve of Week Two

Week Two is almost over! Can you believe we have only been doing this crazy course for two weeks?

This week we talked about RSS and Social Bookmarking. Michele Mizejewski gave a wonderful webcast on RSS feeds and Jason Griffey showed us all of the possibilities del.icio.us can offer in the second webcast of the week. The screencast from Melissa Rethlefsen was packed with ideas for RSS feeds and Gabriel Lundeen's screencast managed to be both informative and quite hilarious.

There were two required and two optional activities for the week:

1. Explore RSS: Create an account in the aggregator of your choice, find five feeds for yourself, and five for a friend or family member. Post your thoughts on the blog.
2. Explore Del.icio.us: Create an account in Del.icio.us and find four websites to add to your account with the tag "5weeks." After finding your own websites, go and see what your other participants have tagged. Blog about it!
3. Optional items: Look at an RSS feed and try to find its parts or add a feed to a website with one of the Javascript tools discussed this week.

The blogs were very busy this week. Those of you who were new to RSS and tagging were amazed with the possibilities, which to some of you seemed endless. Some liked the new stuff you found out your tools could do!

Jini asked "Who has time to read all this stuff?"

I think this should be the point in the course when I say, "You read what you can." Dorothea's response to Jini was spot on in that you read what priority dictates you can. You can read more in a feed reader, like Bloglines and Google Reader because you are not usually reading the whole article but skimming the headlines. Sometimes, you have to hold your breath and hit that magic button that says "Mark All Read" and start over. 

Keep all those great thoughts coming. Do not be afraid to think big. If you have question, ask them in your chat groups or post them to your blog and let everyone weigh in. We have librarians from all types of libraries, all ages, at all levels, and the power of your collective knowledge is huge. Do not be afraid to use it for the powers of good.