Thing 12 - Wikis

These are not new, of course. Anybody who uses Wikipedia and has a feel for how it works understands the basic principle. It used to be everybody had a personal web page and wikis and blogs were not around. Yes, the advantage is that the software behind the web page is invisible to the end user, no html coding is necessary and it's fast and easy. Maybe TOO fast and easy because everybody feels they can edit, modify, vandalize and practically make these wikis unusable.
High school students can be particularly obnoxious when they think contributions are anonymous. Of course, in some cases it is possible to track down the offenders, but policing a wiki is really not one of my favorite activities.
Among adults this is a great collaborative tool and, even though some novices can cause havoc, wikis are usually manageable and great opportunities for collaboration. Book clubs could meet online, schools in a district could publish and modify selection policies, regulations, procedures, etc. Collective journals as byproducts of professional development are also possible.
I find that most wikis are abandoned after a fashion. They seem to be more suitablemfor short term collaborative projects.

Thing 11 - Social Media

I had fun with the "Liar, liar, pants on fire" story about a boy's iTouch catching fire in his pocket. I am sure this has to do with the battery manufacturer and not with Apple, so I suppose they aren't going to be able to get money out of APple for this lawsuit.
I use Stumble Upon because when I have the time to surf the web I like to be amused... the Stumble button sits in my browser and, when bored, all I have to do is click... and some picture, video, story or amusing story it brought to me instantaneously. If I don't like it, I click again.. but I can (and do) customize my preferences so now I only get stuff I like. I'd a great boredom buster, but, let's face it... who has time for this?
I like to go directly to CNN or NYT or pull news in my cellphone when I want to hear news. I don't particularly want to read weird stories from all around the world, so I find Mixx a bit awkward to use. What other people like to read is not necessarily what I want to see in my front page. I prefer to start with international news and move to local, sports being at the bottom of my reading pile.
So, no, mostly I wouldn't use these pages and, if anything, I'd like to have links to "mail this to a friend" on regular news sites so I can share with particular people. This social tagging concept is interesting to see who likes what and may be useful to somebody in advertising or journalism, but I can't see any application to my classes in the media center.
I have run across some pictures and flash animations using Stumble Upon that I have enjoyed: the program keeps a list of my favorite sites so I can always revisit them. But, again, this is mostly for personal use and I can't think of uses for other purposes. Perhaps I should read other NEFLIN blogs to get further ideas for using this in instructional situations.

Thing 10 - Tagging and delicious

Ok, something happened to my Thing 10 and it is not showing up... so here it goes again.
I have been disconnected from the Internet thanks to ATT's incompetence... now on Cox cable hoping to stay on. I have developed serious empathy with those students who use the media center because they don't have internet access at home. After two weeks of interrupted service, I totally understand.
I have never been tempted to use delicious, even though I have visited the site. My Google search skills are good - and I don't bookmark a lot, anyway - so my mind and Google's seem to work well together so it is easy for me to find stuff by typing the right keywords. Delicious doesn't use Google's mathematical algorithms for tagging, so it was hard to find the stuff I wanted ... too many unrelated URLs.
I can see how this could be useful for a group of students researching a topic... some collaborative project online where all the players need to have access to the same information.