some meanderings about blogging so far...

It's been several months since I started my blog, and it does appear to be developing into a sharing of information for library staff and other interested individuals. I recently found out about widgets and managed to create a poll widget, uploaded a couple of vids from You Tube, and added pictures and links. There's so much that can be done it's amazing. When I get the time, I'd like to explore widgets a bit more. I can see these being used for quick question and answer quizzes. These could be used in a number of ways on the library website, staff blogs, class blogs etc. They could provide instant feedback for students. In the eCDRF project research report, one finding was students liked the instant feedback on some the activities. I see this as a way to make info lit more interesting and less dry. I could set I/L or APA citation exercises. Students could attempt them and find out how they were doing instantly...cool.
Time...this is something I'm having difficulty coming to grips with. I seem to be spending lots of time reading blogs, connecting through to various feeds/links and writing my own. Blogging does seem to take up a lot of time. After saying that, I know I'm faster now, as I know what I'm doing (more or less). May be it takes time getting to know the good sites you can rely on, or that are useful, and set up feeds to them. The amount of information out there is another problem. Filtering what is relevant and what I need is the biggest challenge. There again once I have picked up some good blogs, I've added a feed and can easily keep up with what's happening, sift or delete stuff.
Connecting and networking with other folk is easy with blogging. It doesn't matter if you're in the same town or half a world away. The sharing of information is the most valuable tool there is to learning. The trick is to be able to have the skills to evaluate/filter/examine/critically think about that shared information- be selective. Passing these skills on to folk is very important. Good decisions can be made by following some simple rules. Here are a few sites I've found useful
http://www.big6.com/ http://www.virtualchase.com/quality/checklist.html http://www.studygs.net/evaluate.htm
http://www.slu.edu/departments/english/research/index.html

Ooops gotta go, more later...