Week 8: Thing 19

I feel like a broken record, but I'm not going to register on yet another website for another tool that exists elsewhere. Ellen sent out a great tool a few years ago called Shelfari. It was really cool for about a week, but then I realized, "Okay, now I have a digital bookshelf just like my bookshelf at home... now what?" I can see where a tool like this would be great if you were really in a community to share books, or, like it suggests, for small libraries to catalog their books. However, for personal use it doesn't show much promise beyond a passing fad.

Additionally, there is a widget on Facebook that is almost identical to Shelfari. This allows me to share with an existing network (my facebook friends) and allows me to keep it all in one place with one website to visit, one password to remember, and one network to share it with. Once again, I played with it for a week and then never touched it again.

The one place that I'd eventually like to go with such a website is to create a community where I would have students write book reviews of books they're read and allow future students from year to year to select a book off of the "virtual shelf" when they're trying to decide on an outside reading book. Hopefully student reviews will help them recommend books to each other, help them get excited about certain books, and help me select books that they may be interested in reading.

I'm still investigating how to do this best and how to make the reviews required in such a way that it lends itself to a good meaningful task and not "one more thing to do". I'd also have to find a way to setup a classroom bookshelf that all students could access it with a common username/password, or some other form of group access. I've thought about setting it up as a "Google site" or wiki instead to allow for easier access and bookmarking. I'm not sure if it's better to use an existing network like shelfari or to establish something a little more tailor-made. I'm going to try and experiment with this likely in the 3rd and 4th quarters when they have to write book reviews. I'm excited about the potential for long term digital archiving of outside reading.