Mapping and Mashups: Lunge 13

Uses for mashups for RMIT: Create a map in Google Maps of Melbourne specifically of RMIT campuses and RMIT buildings adding value by inserting information about the buildings and services.

Personally I am blown away by Google Maps I have not used them very much before and did not know of th existence of viewing maps at a street level or of creating maps in Google. I love the street level view and the option of rotating the picture to see the surrounding of the street.. amazing!!


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

Article sites - Buzzle: Lunge 12

When I first open the page for Buzzle article finder I found the layout quite cluttered, on further investigation I noticed that the articles were bordered by large sponsored Google ads. The articles look to be self published like Wikipedia anyone can be an author on this site.

‘If I become a Buzzle.com author, what is expected of me?
Although we do not have any requirements of our authors per se, you will be expected to submit original, quality articles written by yourself and owned by you. We also expect you to consider your author status a privilege and therefore we expect that you will make a commitment to submit articles with some regularity’http://www.buzzle.com/authors/become-author.asp
( If you want to find out more about how to become a Buzzle author click on this link)

I don’t think I would be recommending that students use this site for researching essays or projects. The site has a focus on American topics and stories and no advanced search option I think search window is smaller than the Google ads featured! On the whole I was not very impressed with this site or any of the articles. I did however find this amusing article titled: Shutup & Be Quiet 101" and "Appropriate Talk For The Library 102" Should Be Required Classes For Librarians!written by a disgruntled library user. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/140644.html

Blog catchers: Lunge 10

My experiences of using Google Blog Search and Technorati where that the search terms I used did not bring me good results. I started by using broad library-related search terms and the results were America foccused mainly small American Libraries containing local information. After a while I narrowed my search and after scrolling through several pages of blogs found Library and Information Science News http://www.lisnews.org/ This blog is a collection of blogs giving library news stories from around the world and is quite interesting but not always well written.

Social bookmarking: Lunge 9

I have signed up for a del.icio.us account and at first found the page difficult to navigate and am still learning the different functions in my account. I have tagged some of my favourite website pages incorporating my personal and work interests plus added catagories to create a tag cloud. I can see how this site would be useful for people who want to mark large amounts of websites and categorise them. Students and academics could potentially use this site to help them mark sites to help with their work and share the sites they have found with collegues and peers.

The Information Age Mindset: Lunge 7

For step seven of the 21 Lunges exercise I have chosen the article The Information Age Mindset: changes in students and implications for Higher Education/ Jason L. Frand. This article looks at the students in higher education and the way they use technology to learn and observes changing learning styles created by new technologies.

The article begins looking at the rapid change in how students view technology; students are growing up in a globally connected information rich and digitally enhanced culture. The introduction of new technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones, palm pilots and so on means that students are accessing and using information differently to how they used information several decades ago. Information is quicker to retrieve and the student must be have the ability to navigate the information they retrieve and draw their own conclusions from the data.

The article says of this generation that‘Living in a connected world means individuals can interact in real time dialogues from anywhere anytime’. This means students have come to expect quick results and Universities are adding more services on-line and labs and libraries are staying open later as students experience working at more flexible hours. This is in part due to on-line services being available 24 hours a day in other areas of the community. The article finishes saying that Universities have to keep up with their customers wants and needs and must incorporate the changing world of the information age.

Social News: Lunge 8

I have become familiar with social news polling through being a regular reader of The Age on-line. I regularly go to the most read stories of each of the major news papers to see if there is anything interesting that is newsworthy interstate. I find the majority of articles most viewed by readers are ones with unusual or sensational headlines that catch the readers’ attention and prompt them to find out about the story. On-line news is great viewing for breaking stories throughout the day.
After exploring Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and NetVibes, I prefer Digg and Stumble Upon. Stumble Upon is very interesting and enjoyable to use and I did stumble upon many interesting things and my favourites is now getting quite full plus I have a toolbar for it. The idea of Stumble Upon is that you set categories of interest to you and then Stumble Upon will search this range of topics for you giving you interesting results. Digg was interesting also the list of stories which are often on the usual side or amusing videos or American political stories. I enjoyed this exercise and will continue to Stumble Upon for a few weeks yet.