Week 4

Back and ready for action!

Family Allergy and Asthma (CC) 2012
Retrieved from: http://bit.ly/1elteTn

Since Week 3 I have been reaping the benefits of my Feedly reader.  Stories that interest me are now popping up on my feed for me to enjoy. But now I have a question for you! Does it seem strange that peanut allergies have become so frequent in recent years?! I thought so too! Lucky for me a story came up on my Feedly in relation to this. The article discusses how researchers are trying to find the cause of the increased intolerance of peanuts in children. 2 different studies are summarized. Some children that are slowly being exposed to small amounts (really small!) of peanuts, under professional supervision, gain a tolerance for it. The other study mentioned that previously, women who were pregnant were advised not to consume peanuts, in an attempt to help prevent allergies. Now they are finding just the opposite to be true!! Women that ingest peanuts during pregnancy are more likely to have children that are tolerant to them! As I personally LOVE peanut butter this is good news to me! I will continue eating it whenever I like and someday (far far away) when I have children hopefully they will be able it eat it too! :)

Even though I now have my RSS feed reader, I understand now more than before that it is for constantly updating information, while the function of the bookmark is still required for the static information that I consistently refer to. Now, the idea of being able to access my bookmarks from anywhere is genius! I again can say that I never knew such a tool existed! I have added all of my personal bookmarks, plus a few extra for this class.  I can already see that it is going to be extremely easy to collect lots of them. I think this is where the tagging function is going to be a BIG benefit! Nothing is more frustrating than having your information right in front of you and not being able to easily find it, no worries with Diigo!! I can search a key word and anything that is tagged with that will show up, very nice!

We also learned about curation tools this week. These tools use key search words to pull related information from the Internet. There are a number of tools we explored, but I found most of the tools gathered the information and made it look all pretty so people can share it on social media. I personally, do not currently care about posting information I find interesting for “my followers” to see. The Google Alerts tool caught my eye more for its function. I get notifications straight to my email when there is new content on my desired topic, very convenient!

We also learned about the Good, Bad and the Ugly of online resources! It is very important for us to be conscious of where the information that we are using to build our knowledge is coming from, otherwise, if it is not reputable, we gain nothing! In some cases would could even get ourselves in trouble!

Reflecting back on the week, I would categorize both Diigo and Google Alerts as search tools. Google Alerts I would consider the more obvious search tool (or reverse search tool as I mentioned last week) as it is actively finding the information for me. But I would also consider Diigo a search tool because I am using it to facilitate a search I would otherwise have to do using another search tool, such as Firefox. 

Every week I am learning about so many things I was not aware of before, it is hard to believe how long I have been in the dark. No need to fret, I am now seeing the light! Or maybe that is the glow of my cell phone screen as I get another e-mail from Google Alerts! Only time will tell!

TTFN