FaceBook

Facebook,

So I finally gave in and got a FaceBook page. I only did it, because I heard that two of my friends from high school were on there and I wanted to see pictures and see how they were doing. It was really cool. It has been fairly quick to log on and see what has changed on my friend's pages. I log on take 5 to 10 minutes to read the new posts and then I am off. Is there something like this that could be used for a class? I find this a little easier than all of us having blogs and then going to the e-reader to the updates. Not that reading blogs is that hard, just Facebook seems easier.

I'm curious to see if I will still be using FaceBook a year from now. At the moment it is a kind of fun novelty.

Piknik

I was experimenting today with Piknik. http://www.picnik.com
It is a easy to use website where you can upload your photos and edit them online. The editing features are some of the best free ones I have seen. Doesn't beat photoshop, but it's not as hard to use either. It also has some easy features to send your completed photos to Flikr, Facebook, or other sites.

Thing 8

I have been using online databases like the Discovery Collection and EBSCO for years. When I wrote my thesis, they were invaluable for helping me find professional journal articles.  They were and are an incredible gift. 

I am old enough to remember being in school and looking up magazines in the old readers guide.   Then I would take my list of articles to the magazine archives where I would spend  hours finding and skimming articles.  Finally I would take my chosen articles to the copy machine and pay my 5 cents a page to take the needed text home.

Now these hours of work can be done in minutes from my desk or home.  The ease and convenience is awesome.  

When searching for basic information, I usually start with the Discovery Collection part of the Gale Databases.  For journals, I prefer EBSCO.  My dad, who is not a big reader or a heavy library user thinks the ALLData automotive database is awesome.  

I will say this, when it comes to doing every day research I still tend to use Google. For ease of use, Google is hard to beat.  

That make it hard to promote databases with students.  I can talk to them about reliability until I am blue in the face, but for most of them the most important criteria in a search is speed and simplicity.