Via Peter Scott’s Library Blog, this interesting notice:
YALSA announces new MySpace Page: “The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the fastest growing division of the American Library Association, has announced the debut of a YALSA MySpace Page.
Now is there someway to entice the SLAC-ers into using this?
Faster than a Follett collection management system! (What isn’t?)
More powerful than a loco motivational Web 2.0 speaker! Able to leap
district firewalls in a single wireless connection!
OK, he’s a little early out of his study carrel. First public appearance is scheduled for Internet at Schools West, 10:15 AM, Monday, October 24:
Using a simple Web-based content management system, Galileo Academy of Science and Technologyís library
has ??? yak yak yak??? Using examples to anchor the discussion in real
urban classroom practice, the speakers discuss the obstacles and
rewards that come with ìdigitizingî professional development
opportunities for library media specialists.
The design is by King Chen, Gal ‘05 (who still doesn’t have a DAMN website!), former SLAC-er, former protege of Bryan Bell.
The potbelly and the audience-irritating caption are by me. T-shirts are
available, btw, with all proceeds going to starving student artist King. The
presentation will use print-friendly Li-Blog-ary Man
blog pages as slides. (Hehe - note the image on the laptop screen in
his right hand. King’s got an eye for detail.) No content there yet,
but watch for an announcement on the day of the presentation.
Best part of the event is sharing the LCD projector with Debbie Abilock.
(Debbie appears to have a more refined sense of audience than me.
Shown the L-B-M pic a month ago, she e-mailed back: “Whoa???thatís some
image!”) My guess is we’ll accomplish very little in 45 minutes, but
the hallway discussions will be fun. Steven and Jenny are going to be in town. Is there a libr-blogger dinner planned? Back in my Mandarin study DLI days, there used to be this incredible family-owned Italian restaurant just above Fisherman’s Wharf.
“The libraries of five of the world’s most important academic institutions are to be digitised by Google???”
The ALA president was interviewed by NPR on this and played it diplomatically. I thought she missed an opportunity to give the profession, and its patrons, a call to wake up and smell the increasingly privatized digital paper.
more…
Jenny Levine’s
insistent mention of libraries and librarians at bloggerCon highlighted
categorization of the web as an unaddressed topic. Any librarian or
skilled library-user understands that cataloging systems are nuts. Doug Miller says it with more patience in a reflection on Dave Winer’s latest directory exploration: “???Worse, if someone else creates the taxonomy, it’s almost guaranteed
that it isn’t going to make sense to me. I’m not going to necessarily
see the logic of classifying item A in category X, sub-category X.1,
sub-sub-category X.1.2. I have to first understand the taxonomy ??? learn to
navigate it, and then make judgments on how well I feel the taxonomy
agrees with my perception of how things are organized and relate to
each other. Hence, I’ve never been able to stand Yahoo! or DMOZ or any
other web directory. To me, they seem arbitrary and confining at the
same time??? Finally, at the end of the day, what tends to interest me most are
the relationships???and relationships are often the most relative thing
in the world, at least when one is talking about people or ideas.
Relationships between people and ideas change and evolve constantly,
and so any system that seeks to reflect those relationships has to
change and evolve constantly as well. That makes maintaining taxonomy
and hierarchy, particularly shared taxonomy and hierarchy a very, very
high-cost task, if not down right impossible.”
That last italicized paragraph, applied to teaching practice and the
emerging field of “learning object repositiories (LORs),” explains my
standing contention that learning itself “objects” to learning
objects. I remember teachers from my learning history, moments of being educated, “led forth” to some new discovery. I don’t remember textbooks, those ur-LORs. From my teaching history, I remember
teaching partners, those magical relationships that pushed me to make
something new out of what I already knew in order to keep fresh a
passion for learning in myself and in my students. I don’t remember scope and sequence binders. (And Buddha be praised, I don’t remember any “learning standards.” LOL!)
Blogs, linking and unlinking, are just such non-taxonomic
partnerships. More power to the WWW’s Dewey Decimal System pioneers. As
you proceed, however, revere the unclassifiable.
you’re never quite sure how useful they might be. Certainly for making axehandles, but then you discover other applications. Take the new Weblogger slideshow tool. In the Galileo library blog’s top-of-the-page Spotlight area, I inserted a slideshow of book reviews borrowed from Reading Rants, a great and irreverent source for teen book recommendations. TWe’ll replace the borrowed material with actual reviews done by students at the school and include more than books - movies, plays, music, magazines, museum exhibits, performances, whatever. They are submitted to an editorial team via the Submit a Review form. The slides are running fast for the demo, but can be slowed to whatever speed we want. Note the third slide with a picture of Harry the Dog in the top line, set up as a stand in for a thumbnail of a reviewer, followed by a little description of him or her. As the slideshow tool evolves, you’ll be able to click on that thumbnail and it will take you to that student’s homepage or a listing of all that student’s reviews. The idea is to capitalize on social networks of friends, with interest in the reviews initially generated by recognition of and interest in the reviewers. Suggestions welcome. Use the Submit a Reveiw form if you’d like.
more…
K-12 education focus? Here’s a sample post: “Internet Resources for Children and Teens - This may be old news for some, but I just stumbled accoss it and thought others may not have seen it. Created by the ERIC Clearninghouse on Information and Technology, Internet
Resources for Children and Teens contains a list of different subject areas with excellent websites in each category. Published each year in September, I’ll be on the look-out in two months.”
more…
Cool librarian tool: “isbn.nu offers a quick way to compare the prices of any in-print and many out-of-print books at nine online bookstores. You can view the results with or without the shipping costs of a single book, and also find the fastest source for a book from ordering to delivery” Jenny says Glen of isbn.nu wants feedback: “???Most recently, I’ve been able to add a limited form of title and author authority to ISBN. It’s most notable on books written by authors who have many editions of the same title, such as Ngaio Marsh or Jane Austen. Instead of showing one item per edition, I show one listing per work with the edition information provided below???. I’d love to get feedback on how this works for people: useful? confusing? too much/too little? stupidly implemented? Thanks for any assistance.”