Week 6 Read & Reflect

How frequently do we sit down to the computer to check e-mail and then, hours later, find ourselves on a site far removed from our original destination? The internet is the perfect vehicle for random thought generation. This week’s Digital Diet readings provides tools which enable users to enhance and refine searches and presents the use of social bookmarking sites as a way to save, organize and share URLs .

Chapter Two of The Digital Diet offers the tools to refine the sifting process, using advanced search options with Boolean logic fields. Using critical thinking skills to structure searches, internet users can navigate result pages finding practical and valid results. How true the Yogi Berra quote at the beginning of Chapter Two of The Digital Diet, If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else. I have little experience with the use of Boolean searches. IS it because I don’t know where I’m going? Learning how Google ‘Page Rank’ works, I agree, the specific information Google thinks I need to know is NOT always the information that I am looking for. I have found myself using the advanced search option more frequently this week and have come to the conclusion that I need more practice to perfect this technique of fine-tuning my searches. I definitely need more experience before introducing the concept of advanced search to my elementary age students.

Chapter Three of The Digital Diet presents the use of social bookmarking as an opportunity to save, tag and share bookmarks with members of a social network.
I had reached the point where I seldom bookmarked sites unless it was a place which I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I would use again. My bookmark folders were long and disorganized so much so that using them was only slightly more effective than performing an internet search! The most appealing aspect of social bookmarking for me will be as a convenient means to organize bookmarks. Using delicious, I can also see particular benefit in the ability to search through thirty categories of tags and see what’s popular among the other one million users. (http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/social-media-by-the-numbers-delicious.html)
I would enjoy being able to access my account from work, though, for now, it is blocked.

Duncum’s article likens the internet to the human brain, in that each is based on an immense network of connections. Each capable of sorting, sifting, making connections, and finding meaning. He speaks of multimodality and the fact that no images stands alone but rather is connected via an association of ‘words, music, or other sounds’. The process of using intertexts is offered as a prospect for exploration and inspiration. The world in which we exist presents us with a bombardment of images every waking hour. None of these images stand alone; each is linked in our brain to a vast network of other sources. This week as I explored the concept of image bookmarking, Dumcun’s reading fresh in mind, I delighted in the ability of an image, to provoke a wide range of emotions, giving pleasure, inspiration, and provoking thought. I plan to start a low-technology intertext on my classroom bulletin board and involve my students in the opportunity to explore the potential of image connections and associations.