Welcome to What IF Web

What if you were working in an office at UCF whose mission was to help students learn to integrate the digital and the academic? Then you would be me, grad student Christine and you would be working at the Office of Information Fluency. That said:

What if this was a running blog on my adventures with Google, Pandora, Del.ic.ious, Wikis, anti broken computer free-ware and all that other fun stuff out there? What if people read it? Leave me comments with useful information or fun tips, your feedback matters!

Google:

Google runs my desktop. Not literally because I don’t use the “desktop search” function anymore, not because it wasn’t good, but because it doesn’t fill a need I didn’t know I had. Not like Google Earth. I plot my runs each night, using the “ruler-path” function; getting rough approximations on a street by street level. No more driving to determine my running distance. Mapquesting is so 3 years ago, last stop Las Vegas and the great computer reformatting; I am a total Google Earth convert! I am drinking the kool-aid.

Google Earth brings out everyone’s inner cartographer. I just touch the outer fringes on what the platform can do, but I am getting more literate as I remain enthralled by the constantly updating program. The other day I found that Google lets me plot my photos (which I manage with Picasa) on Google, uploaded to some Google server if I want to go public. Or I can link my photos to Wikipedia if I want to leave a geographic description.

http://www.earth.google.com/

Google can also be great for research. Google Scholar helps me look up books, articles, and various other academic papers. Some books are partially available as e-books and the meta-search often turns up the full article. If you are on campus, or have logged into the library from home, then many articles will display a SFX link: that will take you to the article through our library’s database subscriptions.

http://www.scholar.google.com/

Do you use any Google products? Write me and tell me about how Google runs your computing experience.

Next week – Wikipedia: Why I have feelings for you but you just aren’t reputable enough to be on my works cited page.

-Salud
Christine
(cbatson@mail.ucf.edu)