ALA Sessions

At ALA I went to a couple of sessions that discussed new technology. One of the presentations was called “Research Instruction in a Web 2.0 World.” This webpage they put up discusses web 2.0 and information literacy. There are also links to other resources:
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrlbucket/is/conferencesacrl/DiscForum2006.htm
This page describes the new technologies:
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrlbucket/is/conferencesacrl/TechPrimer2006.htm

They talked about having assignments to teach Wikipedia. For example, have the students add content to Wikipedia based on what they’re learning in class. It’ll show them how easy it is for anyone to add content, but it teaches them to add good content, not bad. (You shouldn’t have them deliberately put up false information.)
There was also discussion about teaching students about privacy, since many of them are putting up damaging information about themselves on Facebook, MySpace, etc., and job employers are often checking these things.

I also went to a program on blogging. Here is their website:
http://litablog.org/2006/07/11/program-next-stop-blogging/

Both sessions mentioned some interesting technologies:
Delicious http://del.icio.us/ - It uses “tag clouds” where you tag websites with subject terms. The subject terms that have the most websites in them will appear largest in your tag cloud, so you can see their relative significance.
Refworks http://www.refworks.com/
Library Web Chic (for blogging) http://librarywebchic.net/wordpress/
Library Thing (keeps track of books) http://www.librarything.com/
Tag Warrior (I couldn’t find the website for this)
Flickr (for posting pictures) http://www.hi-beam.net/cgi-bin/flicker.pl
Technorati http://www.technorati.com/
WordPress http://wordpress.org/