Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google - Forbes.com

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google - Forbes.com
From Forbes.com's Intelligent Investing column, by Mark Moran, March 22nd, 2010:
The ubiquity and ease of Google searches could make kids' minds go soft without the ability to critique or contextualize the answers....A recent report by the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at Harvard’s Berkman Center stated that "[m]edia literacy skills overlap with safety skills." In addition to learning how to phrase a search query, students need to learn how to protect themselves online, and how to share their work through wikis, videos, and other interactive media. Without a dedicated guide, they end up, in the words of professor Henry Jenkins, as "feral children of the Internet raised by the Web 2.0 wolves."
Mr. Moran, CEO of Dulcinea Media, makes several other points of interest to learners, teachers, and librarians; these are the points most relevant to my current work.

Can You Put a Value on Virtual Relationships?

Can You Put a Value on Virtual Relationships? by Dan Schawbel, March 29, 2010:
We don’t want to waste our own time, and we do want to meet people who have mutual interests. That’s why there are Ning networks, forums, Facebook fan pages (and groups), LinkedIn groups, and other special interest communities.... research proves that even one active email contact is worth $948 (IBM/MIT, April 2009). In the online world, email contacts are still worth more than any other types of contacts, such as Twitter followers, Facebook friends & fans, LinkedIn contacts, Google Buzz contacts, and blog subscribers. All contacts do have some value, whether they generate revenue for your business, support your job search, or link you to people that can support you in various other ways.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Personal top 5 Web 2.0 tools

Not necessarily in order, these are my current top five Web 2.0 tools. I didn't think of the social networking sites while preparing this list, so Twitter might reasonably edge out any of these, if only for the fun factor.

Stumbling around in Second Life

Another thing I forgot to post last week: I had an adventure creating an avatar in Second Life. Funny they use the analogy of being "born", as I found I had to learn how to walk, talk, and get dressed, among other things.
My takeaway was that it was a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Maybe in the summer I'll take the time to build my skills in that and other virtual environments. There might be some MMORPG that I'd enjoy learning to play...

14 Ways K–12 Librarians Can Teach Social Media by Joyce Valenza

14 Ways K–12 Librarians Can Teach Social Media by Joyce Valenza

Posted using ShareThis

eReaders...

My primary experience with eReaders is with the Kindle. I've also used several computers to access and read eBooks, whether with the library OverDrive application, the Follett ebook reader, the Infobase web client or open-source content from Project Gutenberg.

My father has been very happy with the Kindle he got himself last Christmas, downloading fresh books from best-selling authors the day they're released. I won a first-generation Kindle for my library from our library region last summer as they distributed old tools from their Technology Sandbox. It's been a mixed blessing so far: I've downloaded free content (like that from Project Gutenberg) using the USB cable provided with the unit, but I've also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to set up a payment scheme with Amazon so that we can buy additional content for our students and teachers. While the vendor prefers payment by credit card, that is not an option for the schools, nor is the use of gift cards. I've received permission to use our billing account with an approved purchase order, but I've had difficulty making arrangements with Amazon Corporate services to link the Kindle to the account. That's true in part because they organize relationships by email address, and I am not the primary contact with them for our school district (nor should I be). I've heard from other school librarians that this is less difficult with other platforms, but I haven't given up yet.

Social Networks in Education

I forgot to blog about this last week!
I've been active with social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace, oh my!) since my early-twenty-something colleagues at Borders asked if I had a MySpace page ~2005-2006. MySpace was mostly for fun in learning more about those friends and music sites, although I occasionally used it to track an author. I first started using LinkedIn with customers and national sales colleagues around 2007 and have begun using it with colleagues from my school district and other professionals I know. Facebook was primarily a tool to find old friends until I started using it with librarians over the last year or so. I see my involvement with the three sites as a sort of Venn diagram with a very small three-way intersection at the center. I've also tried other business networking sites and Nings and listservs and found I get the most value from the MSLA Yahoo! group and email list.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Nature by Numbers

Thanks to @Pathfinder and @vwpbe (Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education) for the retweets -- Mathematics is beautiful! "A movie inspired on numbers, geometry and nature, by Cristóbal Vila. Go to www.etereaestudios.com for more info: theory behind, stills, screenshots, tutorials and workshops."

Monday, March 15, 2010

Screencasting

Screencast: how to reserve summer reading titles

Audio and Video about Ancient Rome

There's a great deal of material online about Ancient Rome. It can be especially useful in preparing to study Shakespeare's tragedy of Julius Caesar. Check out this link for a page of suggested resources and links to further pages of video and audio materials.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

band vs. label on embedding rights:

Apropos to a discussion this week on online media, here's an article from NPR about a band opting to leave their label:
Damian Kulash, singer-songwriter-guitarist with OK Go, talks about the group's split with its label as the result of a label policy that kept a popular video the band made from being embedded on YouTube. OK Go Fights For Its Viral Video : NPR

Sunday, March 7, 2010

circle effects on TweetCloud via Dumpr

Here's a little Web 2.0 to the Nth power: Tweet about emerging technologies, create a TweetCloud, post it to Flickr, play with the image back in Dumpr, upload the product to Flickr, then Blog that result. A little recursive or self-referential, maybe, but a fun way to play with emerging technologies...

Flickr

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Mimi Ito - Statics: New Media and Its Superpowers: Learning, Post Pokemon

Mimi Ito - Statics: New Media and Its Superpowers: Learning, Post Pokemon presented before the February 2010 National Association of Independent Schools conference:
[W]e need to engage with kids’ peer cultures and recreational lives outside of school if we want to tap into the power that today’s networked media offers for learners. And I’m going to suggest that interest-driven learning is the key to unlocking this power. I’m going to walk you through several cases that hint at the ways in which we can do this, and some learning principles that emerge from these cases. But first I want to paint a picture for you about what new media learning looks like in kids’ out of school lives. 

Facebook | Kathleen Ann Porter | My Top Rated Books

Facebook | Kathleen Ann Porter | My Top Rated Books --  via LivingSocial Book activity on Facebook

Monday, March 1, 2010

"Filter Failure" and a tag diet

Clay Shirky was one of the first to talk about "filter failure". I'm afraid the complete list of my Delicious tags, at the bottom of this page, makes an effective example. Somehow I want to weed through, to get a folksonomic sense of the most popular, or to find a few sources for tags with whom I can agree.

Here's Clay at the Web2Expo:

"Science T&L" by MsPorterAtFHS [WorldCat.org]

Here is a sample list of titles -- on teaching and learning science -- which I've gathered and shared using WorldCat.org. I find the site to be useful not only for comparing cataloging choices to other librarians', but also for finding saved lists by other users which lead me to titles I might not otherwise have found.

"Science T&L" by MsPorterAtFHS [WorldCat.org]