http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937956-7.html A Republican congressman who has sponsored legislation banning access to social-networking Web sites in schools and libraries has found a new target of displeasure: Second Life. Rep. Mark Kirk, who is seeking re-election this year, staged a press conference at a library in his suburban Chicago district on Tuesday to highlight what he called the “dangers” of the virtual world to children. Flanked by local officials, he also released a letter asking Federal Trade Commission Chairman William E. Kovacic to “take action to warn parents of the similar dangers and sexually explicit content found on Second Life.” Kirk said he was appalled that Second […]
Yearly Archives: 2008
749 posts
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 Library Oxford Reference In any given set of search results, I would look first for main entries that mirrored my search terms exactly and record any such precise hits in a table. If there were no exact hits, then […]
Karen M. Burns, Administrator of the Southwest Iowa Library Service Area, writes: We did a National Library Week project this year–on the Wednesday of NLW we invited libraries in central, southwest and southeast Iowa to take photos of what was happening at the library that day, and upload up to 10 of them to a group on flickr. I thought you might enjoy taking a look, they’re at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dayiowalibraries/ We set up an FAQ page before hand, (http://www.swilsa.lib.ia.us/dayinthelife.htm) and did some “training” sessions in the Wimba online classroom. The Meebo Me widget on the FAQ page was used more often than […]
Mac Central, originally uploaded by Betchaboy. Judy O’Connell & Will Richardson at a workshop in Australia. Read this: http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/the-creative-edge/ Tells a story doesn’t it…bloggers, innovators, champions of change, creators of 21st century learning. Using a MAC of course!
This spring GSLIS students voted for one of our faculty for the Excellence in Teaching award. The winner was Mary Pat Fallon. As part of the award, she gave a brief speech at commencement that really fired up our grads and the gathered faculty in the auditorium. She agreed to let me publish part of the speech here: When I think of messages I think of one of my favorite quotes by Neil Postman, the late education scholar: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”……. No, my use of Postman’s words is more […]
Michael introduces Karen, originally uploaded by Michael Casey. I was nervous!
We now have many new methods for connecting to our users. There is a huge amount of reader enthusiasm happening at Amazon and LibraryThing, but we are not doing it in our own software. DaVinci Code has 3519 reviews at Amazon. WorldCat has five reviews for The Davinci Code, but three say “Test.” Weblogs: Immediacy. Informality. The architecture of participation: blogs are tools. You don’t need to blog, but be the type of library that could be blogging. Twitter: Why would you not use this in your library? Tagging at Flickr: People in the community often know things we don’t. […]
SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting, Atlanta, GA, originally uploaded by mstephens7. I really enjoyed opening the 2008 SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting. The crowd was lively and fun. Download the slides from my keynote here, it’s a customized hybrid of THL. The reception last night rocked as well. I got to mix and mingle with library folk from all over the Southwest. Today, I’m looking forward to Karen Schneider’s closing keynote.
John Klima writes: Here’s the magic of this. I am not confined in thinking that I need to be like everyone else, think like everyone else, or act like everyone else. I can’t be. We’re all unique. And being unique means that none of us are alike. You couldn’t follow the crowd if you wanted to. So how is this helpful? Why would you want to tell this to students? For me, it removed my inhibitions, it removed my fear of failure. No matter how awful things might feel in the moment, you can know deep down that you bring […]
Phil Bradley writes: Now, this is very useful. For pages that don’t have an RSS Page2RSS will basically create one for you. Simply type in the URL of the page that you’re interested in, grab the feed, add it into your favourite reader and you’re done.