Some topic 2 reflections

The great thing about an on-line course such as this one, is that it gives you the flexibility to study and touch base around your other committments - and that has also proved to be one of the bad things. The last 2-3 weeks I have been flat out covering for sick colleagues, which has meant that the immediacy of that need overrode my study committments. Anyway I have managed to read through some of the resources for topic 2 and this is what I got out of it: 1. Getting my head around the jargon is still not easy. I think I understand what an 'institutional repository' is - but keep thinking of the schoolbook repository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald was when he allegedly shot JFK. I need to read something 2-3 times to start feeling comfortable with all the e-techno talk. 2. When I was looking over the program for the e-research conference in Brisbane from June of this year, it was interesting to see how they 'streamed' their topics. I would have definitely been most interested in attending the Collaboration Environments - the Access and Data Management streams would not have been my 'thing'. I guess this tells me how I view the possibilities of e-research in terms of the potential to collaborate with other people from around the world. I was particularly interested in reading the abstract from Thorns and Allan on video conferencing and real life simulation - that sounded such an exciting concept. I know that Sophie, who is also doing this course, has made contact with the University of Manitoba to establish some forays into on-line collaboration with their staff and students doing dental hygiene. 3. Richard Levy's session on gateways to e-research was very informative (once I had read the PowerPoint 2-3 times to understand what a federated vs native database vs Google Scholar comparison was. It struck a chord with the approach to a simple research project that my students are currently undertaking. I think they have substituted the word 'research' with 'google'. They have needed to be guided onto other pathways of both e-research and more traditional methods. I think that Google has probably changed the way we access information permanently, but we need to see it as a tool, rather than the undisputed 'gospel'. I hope to never hear the gospel according to Google. Hope you are all finding time to keep up with the course. I have crossed off some time in semester break to google - oops - read and reflect some more.