ITS Coffee Break – 12/18/2006 – iTunes U, LibWorm, Del.icio.us Tagging

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News about iTunes U tops the ITS Coffee Break this week as Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss Lafayette's Spring 2007 pilot program for Apple's new education-centric service. In Tech News they focus on LibWork, a search engine dedicated to searching over 1000 librarian-related RSS feeds, while in Help News they look at ways that faculty can use the social bookmarking web site Del.icio.us and RSS to share web sites and online articles with students in their classes.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

  • iTunes U Pilot Set for Spring 2007
    • We're looking for content for iTunes U, from staff, faculty, students — anyone with audio or video that they're looking for an easy way to share with the campus community.

Tech News

  • LibWorm
    • A search engine dedicated to searching over 1000 librarian-related RSS feeds.
    • Visitors can browse a tag clouds of indexed items.
    • Searches can be saved as RSS feeds.
    • http://www.libworm.com

Help News

  • Using del.icio.us to share web sites and news stories with students.
    • Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web site — a place where you can store your book marks so that any one can see them. You can also find other people who've bookmarked the same resources, and then see what related topics they may have stowed away.
    • Del.icio.us also creates an RSS feed for any tag you create, so you could easily tag a bunch of stories "MUS104", then have your students subscribe to that feed. Alternatively, you could use Moodle's built-in RSS support to display that feed information in a block.
    • We're also looking into implementing a local version of Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org), which allows you to convert any feed into a simple javascript that can then be displayed within any web page, from MySpace to Facebook to Blackboard.