Almost halfway through ... Light at the end of the tunnel (or the proverbial approaching train??).
I have once again decided not to sign up to a Thing. I don't at the moment create presentations in the course of my work, and even if I did, I'm not sure that I would have a lot of time for entering material in this site. There do, however, seem to be some possibly relevant presentations that I might embed into my library's webpages (if allowed by my institution). Whether students would go and view them, I don't know.
I have once again decided not to sign up to a Thing. I don't at the moment create presentations in the course of my work, and even if I did, I'm not sure that I would have a lot of time for entering material in this site. There do, however, seem to be some possibly relevant presentations that I might embed into my library's webpages (if allowed by my institution). Whether students would go and view them, I don't know.
Here is an (American) view on libraries and social networking:
Friending Libraries: Why libraries can become nodes in people’s social networks
View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
It's quite long, but it is interesting, defining different groups according to their skills and knowledge, age, etc., and relating them to what a library might offer.
Once again, as with Flickr, I would say that you need quite a lot of time to use this site to find material. It is hard to do searches which don't generate hundreds of hits, and many hits will not really be relevant (tagging again ...). It seems, from a search on one of my leisure interests, that quite a lot of the documents are basically advertisements for books, DVDs, etc. In addition to the number of hits, assessing quality is also very time-consuming. It is quite a lengthy process with Flickr, where you are only viewing a selection of single images. With Slideshare you are frequently considering a number of screens/pages for each hit, and it is difficult to be sure of the quality of the presentation without reading (viewing?) each offering in its entirety. Obviously, it will rapidly become clear that some hits are not what you are looking for, but others will take longer to evaluate, maybe looking promising at first, but then disappointing, and you may also be faced with a number which do some or all of what you want, and have to spend time choosing the most suitable. I guess that the creator of the presentation might give some indication of whether it is worth looking at, though I must confess that I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the ones in the Thing list. I have no idea if any of the presentations have sound, as I don't have speakers on my work computer.
As with Flickr, I applaud those who are willing to share their work with others.
Once again, as with Flickr, I would say that you need quite a lot of time to use this site to find material. It is hard to do searches which don't generate hundreds of hits, and many hits will not really be relevant (tagging again ...). It seems, from a search on one of my leisure interests, that quite a lot of the documents are basically advertisements for books, DVDs, etc. In addition to the number of hits, assessing quality is also very time-consuming. It is quite a lengthy process with Flickr, where you are only viewing a selection of single images. With Slideshare you are frequently considering a number of screens/pages for each hit, and it is difficult to be sure of the quality of the presentation without reading (viewing?) each offering in its entirety. Obviously, it will rapidly become clear that some hits are not what you are looking for, but others will take longer to evaluate, maybe looking promising at first, but then disappointing, and you may also be faced with a number which do some or all of what you want, and have to spend time choosing the most suitable. I guess that the creator of the presentation might give some indication of whether it is worth looking at, though I must confess that I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the ones in the Thing list. I have no idea if any of the presentations have sound, as I don't have speakers on my work computer.
As with Flickr, I applaud those who are willing to share their work with others.
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