Week Three Social Networking

This was my very first experience with social networking so I think I was holding my breath during all the exercises! Facebook was especially fun because I found so many colleagues. I think that MLA committees and other units might find these tools useful, but I'm not sure they would be anymore useful than a blog.

Linkedin wasn't nearly as much fun as Facebook. It seemed like it was primarily for job seekers but I plan to explore it a little more.

I've thought about Facebook as an application for the hospital where I work as perhaps a way for people to find others with certain skills. Right now there is a database being developed for that purpose but I wonder if Facebook might be more fun?

The Denver Public Library MySpace was kind of creepy to me. Maybe if they had one for Boomers I might feel differently ; - )

Week Two Wiki's

Our hospital has multidisciplinary groups called clinical microsystems, so I decided to set up a wiki page that might be useful for knowledge sharing between the groups. I am currently working on a prototype for this purpose using an open source content management product called Joomla.

This was more challenging because I couldn't get an attachment to go where I wanted it to go! I suspect that with a little more practice I'll be able to set up the menu and subsequent documents the way I want to. I was able to set up a nice little page of links relating to some of the resources the microsystems might use.

I wish I had more time to work on this, but I am definitely learning!

Week One Blog

I decided to set up my new blog in Blogger because it looked so easy and I already was using Google for my reader. I'm excited about all the new things I can learn in the MLA Web 2.0 class! Setting up the blog was very easy, but doing the PubMed RSS was more challenging. I had to try several times before the reader could accept the feed. I read in David Rothman's blog that people had more luck with IE than Firefox, so I used that and tried to keep it fairly simple but useful. It finally worked! My PubMed RSS is on Sepsis, which is an important topic in our hospital.

For my feeds I added the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care and I have the usual suspects in librarians blogs (Krafty, etc). For fun I added the Huffington Post feed.