Don’t miss: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/10252010/illinois-libraries-talk-sustainability Sixty librarians from around Illinois met at Chicago’s Field Museum October 22 to discuss how they could better help their communities go green. The workshop kicked off the Illinois Library Association’s year-long Go Green @ your Illinois Library program, which aims to develop a group of librarians committed to environmental awareness. “It’s about libraries holding the conversation in their communities about sustainability,” said Denise Raleigh, director of marketing, development, and communications at Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin. “Libraries already connect people to resources; this is about connecting people to each other.” Find out more here: http://gogreenila.info/
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(Higher quality) Use Libraries and Learn Stuff, originally uploaded by GeoShore. For more please see : http://use-libraries-and-learn-stuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/use-libraries-and-learn-stuff.html
I’m not a library director. Heck, who knows if I’ll ever be a library director. But spend some time working in a public library and you’ll see a common theme: most employees and the public have no clue what a library director does. There’s this belief that the library director is some person way high up in the sky making all these decisions and pulling all these strings to make the library work. With such little information known about the day to day happenings of a library director, employees and patrons end up getting confused about the direction of the […]
TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke serves up a mighty fine guest post at Heather McCormack’s blog: http://heathermccormack.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/guest-post-three-punk-rock-lessons-for-surviving-21st-century-library-hell/ For an example, I’m going to turn to Twitter. Just two years ago, I was a librarian in South Jersey tinkering with tweets, not knowing at all what I was doing. I took it upon myself to understand the strange little-big world of hyperlinks and handles. There were days when I didn’t get it and tweeted too much or avoided it out of a lack of confidence. But I kept pushing and experimenting. What finally happened reveals the true beauty of the DIY concept: […]
Kurt Fischer noted (in passing, at a Mind, Brain, Education Institute) that the Conduit Metaphor of Learning is defunct. This is the idea that education is essentially a kind of pipe whereby knowledge travels from the mouth or mind of a more- to a less-learned person. That the learner is a receptacle to be filled with knowledge. Learning, it ends up, is actually much more complex. And knowledge is apparently not a paper package of data tied with string moving across the meat counter. Which is just as well, because the Conduit Metaphor taken to the extreme leads to students thinking […]
Preparing for class lecture in LIS768 Participatory Service & Emerging Technologies as well as the workshop at Internet Librarian International, I overhauled and updated most of my GIANT presentation centered around my model of “The Hyperlinked Library.” As usual, the slides contain citations, Flickr links and is full CC licensed. I already have updates and changes but I thought I would release this version. The original was first presented in Australia in 2008. Download the 303MB file here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/239835/HyperlinkedLibFall2010Update.pdf The Hyperlinked Library by Michael Stephens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at […]
I am very happy to announce I’m writing for LJ again! I thoroughly enjoyed writing The Transparent Library with Michael Casey for over two years – hopefully Michael and I can continue writing again soon! Those columns are some of my favorites. Now, I’m happy to be exploring avenues related to educating future librarians. http://bit.ly/coCkbX WELCOME TO “OFFICE HOURS,” a new space in Library Journal where we’ll explore what’s happening in library and information science education. In the coming months we’ll talk about the ongoing discourse about LIS schools; research that informs us, our users, and our facilities; and stories from the trenches on […]
Take a look at http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/careers/salaries/887197-305/placements__salaries_2010_the.html.csp Dominican GSLIS alum writes a thoughtful piece on job searching after graduation entitled “The Lucky Few.” Breaking into the library world has never been a walk in the park. “Doing time” as a clerk, shelving, or simply working part-time is par for the course in this profession. But as a great man once sang, “The times, they are a-changin’.” There is a drastic increase in the number of degreed librarians taking paraprofessional positions, simply because they need a full-time job with benefits. Also, there are more temporary positions being filled with librarians wishing and hoping […]
Good morning! I’m up at 5:30am EST to present via Skype at Internet Librarian International 2010. Missing this trip because of my knee injury has been rough but I’m happily following along on Twitter, etc. My slides are here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/239835/StephensILI2010Transparency.pdf
From Michael – This is a reprint of a column originally published last year in Digitale Biblioteek. “On average, students in online learning conditions per- formed better than those receiving face-to-face instructi- on”. That was the conclusion of an authoritative report by SRI International commissioned by the US Ministry of Education. The New York Times wrote about it on August 24th: “The report examined the comparative research for on- line versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military”2. Michael Stephens […]