Week 5 Discovery Exercise

Assignment: Create an entry in your course blog for Week 5: Web Office Tools and respond to the following questions: Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?

The future of *all* software products? I'm not sure. However, I don't think web-based office tools (such as Google Docs) are going anywhere. I think they will be increasingly used in the library world, and the world in general. Personally, I'm not going to bother getting Office on the computer I'm buying for myself this summer...I can easily use Google Docs for free instead.

I've been trying to think about how to make RefWorks (something that uses Word) work with Google Docs. I suppose one option is typing a paper in Google Docs, then saving it as a Word file, and from there adding the citations. Perhaps in the future this will be a bit more seamless.

In conclusion, I think web office tools are great, and provide flexibility. Plus they allow easy collaboration and sharing, which I think this web 2.0 thing is all about.

Week 4 Discovery Exercise

Assignment: Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool [del.icio.us]. Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

I found del.icio.us very easy to use, and it was easy to get my account going. Considering that I have a lot of "traditional" bookmarks on both home and work computers, using a tool such as this makes sense. It makes my computer lives portable!

I think this can absolutely be used as a research assistance tool, especially if the research is more web-based than journal & book based (for that we use RefWorks with RefShare). I'm about to initiate a library del.icio.us account that we can all use at the reference desk.