Lesson #13

Discovery Exercise 1: Tag clouds -- As a recovering cataloger, it just seems a bit suspect.
Discovery Exercise 2: Write a brief passage in your blog about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness if you so desire) of the tag clouds in Encore.
Do you think the tag clouds will help our users in the future? The Michigan State Univeristy version of Encore was claen in its appearance and easy to use. I was surprised in that these tags did allow me to drift to a legitimate topic. I wonder if students could also successfully drift.
Why or why not? So, as the algorithms improve, these tags may become genuinely helpful to students trying to pick a topic and/or find materials.
If you teach classes, how do you see yourself teaching undergraduates about tag clouds?
Not yet--I need to play some more with them.
Discovery Exercise 3:
Is this [del.icio.us] a useful tool for you personally? No. For example, for teaching chess, there aren't enough relevant bookmarks. And the search engine was so incredibly slow that I had originally thought that there was nothing on songwriting.
Can you see its value in teaching a class? Not really.
How would del.icio.us be beneficial for the library? I think that there would have to be a large number of bookmarks on a topic before the tagging would become useful to a library and helpful to patrons.
Discovery Exercise 4:
1. Pause to admire the gorgeous tag cloud on this page. Lots about politicos, hurricanes, and Michael Vick.
2. Once you have finished admiring the cloud, search for your own blog using their search box. I could not find it. Nothing on songwriting. Found one of the Polgar sisters chess blog, but the search contained a bunch of unrelated, non-chess junk--even on the first page of results. It is ironic that many of these Web 2.0 sites seem to have such poor search engines.