Keywords
Citation
Parry, F. (2010), "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts & More", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 468-468. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011052070
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This is one of several small card‐sized books in a series called “Pocket Study Skills”, which have been devised to appeal to the new student. Other volumes include one on writing techniques, planning your essay and plagiarism.
Writing about blogs, wikis and other web 2.0 tools, the author says that “these terms may currently seem like another world to you”. I find this quite hard to believe. My credulity was tested again in the very next page where in a chapter entitled “What is the internet, anyway?” he deadpans “the internet connects computers all over the world”! Happily, it gets better from that point onwards and the information becomes a little less obvious.
The book contains small chapters of rarely more than a dozen pages broken down into chunks of highly succinct and easily digestible topics. The main sections are information overload, good manners (netiquette), blogs, wikis, podcasts, and two slightly longer ones on searching and assessing information and the literature review.
For the most part, each chapter has a good mix of information, activities and Internet links. It is not too wordy and is liberally sprinkled with some amusing illustrations, which help to break up the text. In most cases, there is enough information to do justice to the subject, but occasionally I felt that more pointers for further reading could have been included.
The format does not allow for much more information to be crammed in and librarians will argue about how much was left out. The author will start a few tongues wagging about the amount of space he devotes to Google and Google Scholar but it should be pointed out that this is a guide to using web resources rather than a guide to using the library.
The book is very reasonably priced and it might well find a market among the more curious students if made available in student bookshops around the country. I cannot see libraries buying it in huge quantities, though, because the information in this book is the sort that a lot of librarians are devising and making available for their new students in online format on library web sites and virtual learning environments.