Web 2.0

muzyka — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:57:15 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot about the cool new technological advances that might be used in education recently. Wikis, Blogs, Distance Learning, Google Docs, Facebook – the options can be a little intimidating. I’ve been renewing lots of old acquaintances using Facebook and thinking about a wide variety of issues by reading blogs. Today I read an extremely interesting post from the IU Chemical Informatics Journal Club. First of all, I think it’s awfully cool for a journal club to have its own blog. I remember those Tuesday evenings in grad school when we had journal club meetings. The purpose of the whole thing seemed to be to encourage us as grad students to read the literature carefully and to give us practice presenting in front of a friendly audience. As a faculty member, I have a different perspective on the journal clubs because I now have the energy to be curious about new things. Teaching at a small liberal arts college means I’m not likely to encounter a journal club devoted to the niche of my current research interests (or maybe no journal clubs at all…..). So I really appreciated seeing this journal club on Chemical Blogspace. Today I read a post about userscripts, published by some of the folks involved in the Blue Obelisk project. A userscript is a browser plug-in that allows the browser user to add specific additional information to the page that she is viewing. One of the examples given in the article is Amazon searches that provide prices of a book from competing retailers. What a cool idea! I’m going to need to spend some time exploring this idea further…..

Muzyka's Musings » web 2.0

Web 2.0