Before I blog about today's topic, I have a Twitter addendum. After I logged off the other day, I listed to more news on the radio about the flu outbreak. A reported noted that MANY people were following the government's public health presence on Twitter, to keep up with the latest information. So for many folks, Twitter is becoming what the radio (or television news) has been for past generations: a way to get current, reliable information where they are. Since I'm not "there" in Twitter very often, no wonder I don't get it!
On to Thing 28, customizing a home page. This covers iGoogle, PageFlakes, My Yahoo!, and other productivity tools. I looked back in my blog, and we first focused on this in Thing 13. I looked at the three, and liked PageFlakes the best, so I opened it up. (I discussed in my earlier post what I liked about PageFlakes over the others, but basically it could tell the difference between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and displayed better.) It took me a minute to remember how to navigate, but it was pretty easy. Had to add that Facebook widget right away! I would like to get more on top of podcasts, but I need to learn more about the relationship between my home laptop, iTunes, and podcasts before I get started. I think I'd like to dink around with it a bit more, but I'm going to do some blogging before fun. ;^)
But wait - this is interesting. I looked at the link to the blog post about PageFlakes, and discovered that there's a teacher edition of PageFlakes that can be customized for educators. How cool is that! I like what's in the example - a to-do list, research link (Google, Google, always Google - funny how it isn't "Link to My Library"), educational bookmarks, etc. When you have your "work" hat on, this makes more sense that all of the entertainment widgets in the regular PageFlakes (I'm not that much into modern entertainment.) I want to look at this more later.
On portals and customized pages: we have been talking at my institution about personalized library experiences for a long time. We'd look around the web and see it done at other institutions; why not here? Either our IT folks didn't get it (for the library experience), or we didn't have the software tools we needed to make it happen, but we made little progress until just recently. This semester the university did a beta trial of a student portal, and over Easter break it was opened up to all students. The library had been consulted on our presence last year, and the subject librarians ranked databases and other content that students could pick. Then, as it came closer to going live, it sounded like we wouldn't have access to it right away (we weren't students, after all!) So our library tech folks made the case that we couldn't help students with library-related portal questions if we couldn't see what they were looking at, so we were given accounts. And I think we're using Google Analytics to get some good data on use. I don't have a good impression yet on how it's going over with students, but I think they'll be comfortable with using it.
Portals for library staff? I think I've pondered in other posts about coming up with a go-to place for my colleagues. We've had Outlook Public Folders, shared network folders, a commercial wiki, a staff presence in the Blackboard course management system. Now we're beginning to talk about Sharepoint, and our tech students are using it already. We need something to get people into the same shared space, which is something of an uphill battle (not all staff seem to be OK with email, for that matter.) We need some big nudges.
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