Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Thing #14

When I first heard about Web 2.0 I really had no idea what it was or what it involved. Actually, I thought it was just one more thing that Mary wanted us to learn (hence the name of my blog!) Sorry Mary for not having more faith in you! I now realize that Web 2.0 is not really a "thing".To me it is more of social computing where you share thoughts, ideas, pictures, writings, feelings, research, basically anything that you want with other people. They can add to and even improve what you have created and vice versa. It has changed the library and the internet from just accessing books and information to so much more!
I believe that in the future we will need to look closely at our collections and decide what we need in the way of such things as hard copies of encyclopedias and certain nonfiction books. All of these can be found online and patrons will probably prefer to be able to access them from home or a hotel if that is where they happen to be at the moment. We also need to be ordering more playaways and ebooks since this is the technology of the future and students love anything that has to do with music,computers,earphones,etc.
It is a concern that there is only one of me and 900 students and I certainly can't educate all of them. But I do believe that a lot of the students learn this on their own. They certainly know about myspace and youtube and every day they teach me something. I also think that a lot of this new technology is very user friendly and students will pick up on it very easily.
Another concern I have is that so much of this technology is blocked right now by our district. I understand the reasons behind filters and blocks, but if we want our sudents to use this technology, we may have to get away from all of the filters. Just a thought.

1 comment:

mmw said...

I agree with you about the filtering. We rely on the filter to protect students instead of teaching them how to live safely in the real world and cope with any issues that they may encounter. I really think we are doing them a disservice in this. Until teachers start doing what we are doing and learning about how these tools can enhance instruction and engage students, we will still have the filtering problem. As more and more teachers ask to have access to these tools, though, me may see the filtering loosen a little. At least I hope so.