ADS! in Pageflakes!

I have been a fan of Pageflakes for some time, and am using it in a class this semester as a "scholarly communication" tool. I was shocked today to see forced ads on my class assignment page!
Ack! I knew that they had been bought by a company earlier this year, but am very suprised by this.
I love igoogle, but it doesn't have the pagecasting capabilities of Pageflakes. I wish google would make wegoogle!
So, what do do now!? Go to netvibes?
Phil Bradley has blogged about this too:

http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2008/11/pageflakes-forcing-advertising-onto-users.html

Netvibes

I love Pageflakes, and have been teaching it as a web2.0 tool for a little while now. New to me is netvibes–
http://ginger.netvibes.com/overview.php
which seems to be able to create a "pagecast" which is why I love Pageflakes.   NetVibes
has full integration with Facebook Connect. My jury is still out, but it looks like this might be a great addition to the web2.0 tools out there.

Great article on Scientific podcasts!

The October 20th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has a great article about scientific podcasts, and lots of links to favorites. The article mentions that, "ChemPod" is aimed at listeners ranging from scientists who read NPG
journals to members of the public "interested in learning a bit about
scientific research in chemistry," Wilde says. Each episode reaches
about 5,000 to 10,000 listeners. Wilde adds that feedback from the audience indicates "ChemPod" is
used in one way that NPG never anticipated: Researchers in Asia listen
to the program to learn scientific language in English. "
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/education/86/8642education1.html

Dealing with Information Overload….or how do I keep up with all of those RSS feeds…

I taught a demo class on Pageflakes to an Experimental Physics class today: Assignment Page:
http://www.pageflakes.com/dkolah/24549111

Demo Page:
http://www.pageflakes.com/dkolah/25240862

It was a great way to start the conversation about incorporating web2.0 tools into your everyday scientific life. Many of the students use Facebook, but they aren't using it to collaborate with any of their science mentors or publishers, etc. Of course, you have to be careful to "clean up" your profile, but I think it is a wonderful collaborative tool.
The students had a couple of great questions. One was, "How do you know that you aren't missing articles in the RSS feeds." This is, of course, a downside to Pageflakes–you can't mark an article as read which you can do with some of the other readers. But, as I see it, the strength of Pageflakes is the collaborative part–really sharing your page with the community, whatever community that is, and maybe having text boxes where readers can leave comments, etc. I think if you are using Pageflakes to entirely keep up with your literature reading, you might, indeed, miss something. Better to set up your RSS feeds in a different way.
http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/27/sink-or-swim-managing-rss-feeds-better-groups
recommends a folder system. Perhaps, even better, is simply to do a full-out literature review at certain periods, and scan the results of those. I'm thinking a search in Scopus, archive.org, and Inspec, for example. Anyway, this is something that I'm going to think about for a few days. That is the great thing about teaching a class–the students always push your knowledge!! Thanks!

Why Information fluency is important…

This article by my fellow SLA/PAM librarian came out in the summer, but is a great source for why we need to be working with students to increase information fluency.
http://www.aps.org/units/fed/newsletters/summer2008/viele.cfm

Pat cites examples of how universities have included fluency in their physics curriculum: Brigham Young University has a formal class called "Writing in Physics"
for their senior physics majors who must write a mini-thesis.The physics department at the University of Buffalo asked librarian A.
Ben Wagner to design a course for physics graduate students.
Pat also recently blogged about Felicia Smith's article "Games for Teaching
Information Literacy Skills". It is an open access article:
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/f-smith.htm
  Awesome!