Thing #16 Library Thing

Library Thing is a book website that utilizes tagging for topics and social interaction in the form of groups, reviews, etc.  I enjoyed looking at some of the profiles of the authors.  Some profiles are more developed than others.  There are so many ways to look at the site its amazing.  I typed in a title to do a search and found many of the same titles with different authors.  The list was expanded to include my title as the basic wording and had added word titles as well.  I found that the tagging words were useful to get a glimpse of what the book was about.  One word can speak volumes.  This is similar to the title of an article in the newspaper.  This made it easier for me to skim over and pass by books I'm not interested in.

I didn't find many book reviews on the books I looked up.  I am assuming this is a fairly new site and is growing exponentially daily.   The Unsuggester was quite intriguing.  I intend to play around with this more.  I'd never thought of the other side of Suggester.  Quite different and very useful.  This was good thinking outside the box to reveal other works.

I have joined Library Thing and did share it with some of my teachers.  I will continue to place my professional readings onto my personal page so that when I conduct book studies these teachers can learn, share, and comment on them as well.   I will encourage my teachers to join and share their books read with their students.  Hopefully this will encourage students to read more and share.  I took this idea to several teachers and asked them to include Library Thing as an 'anchor' activity in their classrooms.  Students will be able to search the site for books and book reviews to encourage them to read them.  Since MISD's school libraries just went digital, perhaps this will encourage these students and teachers to 'check out' the online versions of the books.  The literary/technological world just keeps getting better and better.  The more I learn the more I realize just how much I don't know!  Frustrating and fun all at the same time.