Thing 15 - Image Generator

Wordle

Thing 14 - Flickr

Created an account and uploaded some pics from UC Berkeley Library. All very easy. I'm looking forward to seeing photos from my daughter's travels in Japan over the next couple of months, so for me Flickr will be especially relevant.

Thing 13 - Upload an Image

This is not a photograph of compactus shelving at Murdoch. Instead I've uploaded one taken at UC Berkeley Library. Pretty impressive stuff. They have kilometres of it.

Thing 12 - Del.icio.us

I already have a Del.icio.us drop down menu on my Firefox browser complete with downloaded Favourites so I guess I must have strayed from my goal into divergent pathways over the last few weeks and hence got ahead of the program (is that what happened?). It's all becoming a blur! I don't feel any compelling need to add tags or share with others but can see their value. I'll probably stick to my current bookmarks unless I'm unable to remote desktop and have to access bookmarks from elsewhere.

Thing 11 - Social Tagging & Search

My medical search terms certainly produced wildly varying hits.
Del.icio.us found 17 hits with 2 terms. Tags used were appropriate but results were newsy and lightweight not medical enough. Some of the advanced search suggestions were useful.
Connotea Gave up on connecting to this - too slow.
CiteULike was good, retrieving 119 relevant hits - not too overwhelming with a medical focus. I would use this again.
Murdoch catalogue subject search provided only 2 hits which is to be expected for this topic.
UQs catalogue was much better at getting to relevant content within books dealing with broader medical conditions. Included ways to quickly refine your search.
Google, well 98,000 hits! Needless to say I didn't proceed beyond the first couple of pages! I found myself becoming strangely less interested in my topic. My librarian ways were beginning to emerge - give me some controlled headings and focused searching techniques!
Google Scholar would be a better way to go than Google but still 633 hits albeit more scholarly.
Zuula This was new to me as were all the search engines on it except for Google and Yahoo. Varying results in each. Too much information on my topic.
Kartoo Maybe I am a visual learner. I liked this very much. I hope to remember to go here again.

Thing 10 - PBWiki

This Thing hasn't been so straightforward. I don't find it particularly intuitive and am not altogether sure that I have the 'hang of it'. A working screencast would have been helpful (and the demo didn't show you how to do it just how it could be used in a school environment). At this stage I don't have anyone to share my wiki with (if you would like to then click here - it's about planning for a walking holiday in France) but am prepared to believe that it will allow me to do the following:

Easily share files with users
Set access controls for pages and folders
Monitor who’s changed each page
Email notifications keep everyone up to date
Quickly add others to the project

I'm going to keep experimenting and will ask questions of those 'in the know'(calling all experts out there!).

Postscript: I've now spent more time on my wiki and know a lot more about it. Still waiting to share with others though (have invited several - you know who you are!!). Have a look here if you'd like to share your knowledge on walking holidays, even if not in France.

Thing 9 Google Docs & iGoogle

Google Docs does what it promises and it's FREE.

Upload from and save to your desktop
Edit anytime, from anywhere
Pick who can access your documents
Share changes in real time
Files are stored securely online

It would be particularly useful if working on a document with collaborators from other institutions.

After Sue's demo on Friday I had fun creating an iGoogle page. Since I seem to need to log in to gmail for so many things now I will probably look at iGoogle more than I would otherwise have done.

Thing 8 - Zotero & LibX

Helen's demo of the LibX Toolbar showed me that there is more to LibX (on the right hand side of the long toolbar) than had met my eye. I feel a bit like a LibX evangelist now!. Dragging highlighted text onto Scholar produces amazing results. I hope I don't forget that this is possible!

I've experimented with Zotero over the past few days and like it very much. I've always found EndNote rather clunky whereas Zotero immediately appealed, although I understand it has limitations. Hopefully further refinement will overcome these. Definitely worth a closer look.

Thing 7 - Firefox customisation

After some intital confusion Thing 7 turned out to be fun, although I did install far too many add ons until I decided to go with some of Aarons recommendations - IE Tab, FireShot, PDF Download, Bookmark Duplicate Detector. Then I added Colourful Tabs which are far too rainbowy for my liking! Themes led me into another distraction, eventually settling on Foxscape (which was described as a full featured retro theme, whatever that is) but I'm sure I'll change when the mood takes me.