Legal and Ethical use

Next week our team will be contributing to the poster display in Firth Hall. When making our poster, we had to consider certain issues regarding legal use of images and other intellectual property. Specifically, we had to make sure that the material was usable under copyright. To do this, we only used images from certain sources, such as Flickr and Wiki Commons, which show whether images are available under Creative Commons licenses (as detailed in Sheila Webber's blog post). In the end, we elected to use the image below; its about the seven wonders of the ancient world. We got it via the public domain of Wikipedia.

 

From Wikipedia public domain

We also had to make sure to attribute other intellectual material, such as the text descriptions of SCONUL 7 Pillars.

the iTeam

Thing 9: My coursework topic

This entry introduces my coursework topic and my reason(s) for selecting the particular subject area.

At the moment I am split between two broad subject areas namely; "Teaching and Learning" and "Information Behaviour". What I do know for certain is that I have chosen to relate it to "Web 3.0".

My decision to go with Web 3.0 is borne out of a personal desire to understand what is supposed to be the next generation of the World Wide Web and its impact on either Teaching and Learning or Information Behaviour.Whichever subject area I eventually select, my choice would be influenced by my access to resources that can support my work.

Thing 9: Identifying my need---Chang

Chang's topic of INF6350 assignment is "How did the Internet affect students' information seeking behaviour?". Nowadays, it is an important way to seek information from the Internet such as digital libraries and Google Schoolar. As a result, students' information seeking behaviour have been affected by the Internet. Based on this situation, my essay will focus on the changes of college students' behaviour affected by the Internet.

Identifying an assignment topic

My topic of choice for the assignment will be microblogging, with reference either to information seeking and exploration (such as information encountering) or teaching and learning (such as the use of Twitter in the classroom).

This topic is highly relevant to our current information context and I am keen to learn more about the nature of microblogging and the opportunities it may provide. My choice of topic will probably become more specific as I proceed to gather information and determine the scope of the subject.

Thing 9 - Indentying your need - INF6350 Assignment Topic

We've been asked to come up with a topic for our assignment in the Information Resources and Information Literacy module. After some consideration of the broad areas, I focused in on the area of 'information behaviour'.

Specifically, my topic will be to do with Wikis (not necessarily Wikipedia itself), and how they can be used in learning environments (e.g. sharing information and  knowledge, collaborative work etc).

Our Information Literacy in context

This blog entry discusses our common map of changes as regards every member's information literacy context.

We felt that as a group, we all share a changing technical context to get familiar with the University's online learning resources such as MUSE and MOLE2. None of us have used these systems before except Ben who used MOLE1 and MUSE as part of his undergraduate degree here at the University of Sheffield. Nonetheless, he also agrees he has to get used to the new interface.

We all use some social media tools including Facebook, QQ, Twitter etc. On the one hand these tools are very important as agreed by all us, on the other hand, the rate of technical changes and trends make them difficult to keep up with.

Our group comprises two UK nationals and two over-seas students. The over-seas students have found life in Sheffield somewhat different to what they are used to in their home countries. Nevertheless, they have found the culture shocks to be very pleasant, because they found that a good way to adjust involves going out, finding more about the local community from various sources like the Internet, exploring the area, reading newspapers, talking to people as well as Skype-ing to keep in-touch with relatives.

the iTeam

Week 3: Google or database searching --- Chang

In the last two weeks, we have learn Google and Database from Alastair. Today I am going to share one tip about Google and Database searching with you. In the second session, Alastair showed us a useful tool called Thumbshots Ranking which can compare site ranking in different seach tools such as Google, Yahoo and Being. The results are interesting. When we search a same keyword in Google and Yahoo, the ranking of results is completely different between these two popular search engines. After that, we changed the sequence of the keywords and searched again in the same search tools. We found that the rankings were totally different. This meant the sequence of key words had impact on the ranking. When I went home, I wanted to find if the plural of noun could affect the result of ranking. I tried the keyword Car and Cars in Google and found that the plural could also affect the result of ranking. But unlike changing sequence, the plural only affected the part of the result. From these there different types of seaching, we found that one interesting thing was Wikipedia always occurred in the top of the first page.

From this experience, I learn that I need to try different search strategies when searching information.