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Please help Abby with her Homework

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2008/09/please-help-abby-with-her-homework.html

Karl Fisch, whose blog I really enjoy, posts about an assignment his daughter has: to create a travel journal and write to friends to ask for postcards. Karl thinks like I do. What about the online component?

I think this assignment is fine as far as it goes, and we mailed it off to a friend [...]

PBWiki Challenge

http://www.backtoschoolchallenge.com/

How The Back to School Challenge Works

Join the Challenge
Earn points by learning to use your wiki and sharing it with others.
Join the Winner’s Circle at 100 points, and get your free upgrade. But don’t stop there–keep going to earn gift certificates for your classroom (including the $1,000 shopping spree grand prize), books, and other great [...]

Announcing All Together Now: Learning 2.0

Brian Kenney writes:

Have you heard of 23 Things, the self-guided program for learning about 2.0 web technology? It was developed by Helene Blowers a couple of years ago at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County and since then has been adopted across the country by public and school libraries, districts, and even entire states. It consists [...]

Britannica Goes Wiki

Via Gerry McKiernan:

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3064/

Josh Fischman writes:

Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, theEncyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly [...]

How Wikipedia stacked up against subscription databases

Stephen Francouer writes:

http://tinyurl.com/556pof

My Plan
Do quick look ups of nineteen terms and concepts discussed in Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody to see what reference sources would be more helpful to the students I work with.

Methodology
Using quotation marks around search terms to force phrase searches, I looked in the following resources:

Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Gale Virtual Reference [...]

Learn More: Wikis

Check out Steve Campion’s newest installment – yet another perfect resource for your Learning 2.0 endeavors!

http://librarystream.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/learn-more-wikis/

If you gather a committee, write a draft document, and solicit feedback, you might receive scores of revisions in email and on paper. Compiling all those changes back into a single coherent document could be a long and tedious task. [...]

Students should use Wikipedia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130325.stm

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are “bad educators”.

Speaking at the Online Information conference at London’s Olympia, he played down the long-running controversy over the site’s authority.

He said young students should be able to reference the online encyclopaedia in their work.

Mr Wales said the site, which [...]

Pew Report on Wikipedia and Reference Sites

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/212/source/rss/report_display.asp

Pew reports that 36% of online American adults consult Wikipedia. A table included in the report details to top sites used for reference and education. Wikipedia has 24% use in a table provided by Hitwise of those types of sites.

The National Library of Medicine is featured, but all of the others are not library sites. [...]

ALSC Wiki

Teresa Walls, the chair of Children and Technology Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) wrote to announce the committee’s new wiki at:

http://wikis.ala.org/alsc/index.php/ALSC_ChildTech_Wiki

I’m impressed with this fledgling wiki. The Currently Reading page looks interesting. I hope more librarians add to that page and the others. Let’s watch this resource grow!

Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006

Dion Hinchcliffe posts an overview of the best of Web 2.0 for 2006:

http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2006.htm

Amongst the choices are some of my favorites as well: Netbvibes and YouTube.