Thing 11 and 12

THING 11

I did my searches on the term "cerebral palsy". Most people (I would hope) would use more than one term and narrow down the aspect they are searching for.

I found that:

• del.icio.us Was a rather blunt instrument, although much of the focus was on childhood cerebral palsy and family issues, which I'm most interested in.

• Connotea Retrieved "popular" scholarly articles of the soft education, general overview kinds, rather than hard scientific medical studies

• CiteULike Retrieved scholarly articles with much more medical focus.

• Murdoch University Library catalogue subject search A list of LCSH subject headings

• http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ Book records, faceted searches, a tag cloud and enough to make me feel there were threads to follow to get to exactly what I wanted.

• google Wikipedia entry first and then Australian entries. - because google knows who I am and where I am. The ads on the left hand side always annoy me - although I'm not sure there are any searchers who are naive enough to believe they are actual search results.

zuula - I like the ability to pick the search engine, but again a rather blunt instrument.

• kartoo - I'm a very visual learner and I find this suits my style really well. I find it very easy to narrow down the search and find exactly what I wanted - even finding suggested topics that I hadn't realised I want via serendipity. Do I use this in my everyday life? Nope. Maybe I should.

Thing 12

I have been using delicious for a couple of years now - and I use it almost daily. Unfortunately I use like I used photocopying when I was a student .... I presume that if I use delicious I will actually read or go back to the items linked there. I never do really...but I live in hope...

I added 23katethings to my network. I can see this working for groups of teachers sharing their resources. I tend to use Friendfeed to pick up links from my friends on delicious.

I did discover when I did this that I have 9 fans - and real people that I know - but I'm wondering whether it should fan them back, and what the point would be...