The Glossary: a place for shared terms and definitions

Academic integrity: Academic honesty, including displaying understanding and respect for intellectual property.

Blog: Short for weblog, blogs are websites that use special software that provides us with four key capabilities: 1) blogs can be regularly and easily updated using a word processing like form, 2) content is displayed in reverse chronological order so new updates can be easily found, 3) blog posts are tagged with informal subject headings so like content can be viewed, and 4) comments allow blogs to move from a one-to-many conversation (author to blog readers) into a many-to-many conversation (blog readers to blog readers) format.

Content Management System (CMS): Web software that builds a website around modules and text chunks. The coding is all done in the backend, so that users can focus on updating content. Many CMS packages will also have additional modules to provide services like calendars, blogs, wikis, and more.

Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/): A nonprofit organization founded in 2001 around the notion that some content creators may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them. Creative Commons provides set of alternate free public licences to enable content creators to more easily to share their work with others.

Digital storytelling: Making use of the power of digital media to share narrative. See the Center for Digital Storytelling http://www.storycenter.org/whatis.html and The Elements of Digital Storytelling http://www.inms.umn.edu/elements/

Fair use: A provision in copyright law allowing educators and students limited use of material without requiring permission from the content creator. More information can be found on Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use site.

Federated search: A technology that allows users to search across library resources--its databases, OPAC, free Web search tools, etc. with a single execution of a search string.

Feed: The content stream a website sends out using RSS.

Folksonomy: The practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords or tags.

ICT literacies: Information and communication technology literacies

Open source: Computer software released under open source licensing has its source code open for viewing, alteration, and redistibution. Open source software can be thought of as being "free as in speech" in that you can use and change the ideas in the code, but it may or may not be "free as in beer" because there can be a cost associated with acquiring the code initially. In the end, most open source software is "free as in kittens" in that there is no acquisition cost but there are long term costs for the care and feeding of the software.

Podcast: The delivery of regularly released multimedia files—usually MP3 audio, but also video in the case of vodcasting-over the Web using RSS feeds. Podcasts are often described as a web radio broadcast.

RSS: While you will see different expansions of the acronym (rich site summary or real simple syndication) it is more important to know what it is and how to use it. RSS is an internet utility that brings updates from a webpage directly to your computer. These updates are referred to as a site’s feed, and are displayed by a feed reader also known as an aggregator. RSS feeds are most commonly associated with blogs, but can be found on many other types of websites as well. For example, some libraries may provide RSS feeds of new books as a way to keep patrons updated.

Tag: A keyword or descriptor users choose to assign to an object to increase its findability. For instance, users tag photos in Flickr with descriptons of the photo's subject or setting. While formal, controlled-vocabulary subject headings may be more precise, tags tend to be more "right" for users.

Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is referred to as the “read/write” Web, where users are both consumers and producers of information. Unlike previous websites that were focused on information interactions between the website and a single viewer, Web 2.0 is centered around human-to-human conversations and data sharing. It also incorporates the shift to Web as computing platform—-the use of Web-based applications in place of commercially produced software.

Wiki: From the Hawaiian for "quick" this tool provides a webspace that can be edited by multiple users. If you have edited this website, you may also have noticed that wikis are often written using a special wiki language.

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