Training Wheels

Engaging Generation Y(ouTube)

2011-05-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Creating Video for Instruction

Ben Archer, Linda Zehr, and Mary McGlasson from Chandler Gilbert Community College created a web page for their session that includes sample videos.

A faculty colleague, Matt Fisher, has filmed YouTube accounting lecture videos shot with a Flip video camera. They have tested video quality using a range of basic and more advanced Flip cameras and haven't noticed a large difference. They advised buying the least expensive Flip model.

Archer uses Camtasia to create instructional videos for online classes and discovered students have responded better to these than the narrated PowerPoints he previously used. Why? He includes an inset video of himself talking in the upper right corner of the videos. It establishes a human connection. Camtasia allows the scripts for lectures to be imported and converted into closed captions. This supports the college's goal to make online courses accessible.

Mary, aka mjmfoodie on YouTube, writes scripts, creates storyboards, and draws pictures on large index cards. She scans the cards in a receipt scanner and then uses MovieMaker to create her movies. Washington State University has asked permission to use her videos and agreed that their Open Course Library Project would create closed captioned versions.

Mesa Community College's video library is compiled at video.mesacc.edu. They used an OpenSource system provided by MediaCore.

Mary has assigned students to create video posters with Pluster. She shows them how to access Creative Commons-licensed videos on Flickr for these projects.

Mary's Delicious site with links to resources she has bookmarked is here.

OER (Open Resources)-- What, Where, Why and How

2011-05-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

Donna Gaudet and Roberto Ribas, mathematics instructors from Scottsdale Community College, introduced Open Educational Resources (OERs) using a Mindomo mind map Donna has been compiling. Most of the resources -- including textbooks, labs, videos, animations, learning resources, graphics -- are licensed so they can be redistributed and repackaged.

Another good source for OERs is the OER Commons.

Gaudet's and Ribas' motivation was to find free resources so students would not need to purchase expensive textbooks. SCC is starting to note courses that don't require a textbook in the schedule of classes as are other colleges.

Ears and Hands-On Learning

2011-05-17T10:03:00.001-07:00

The Library iTour for Developmental Education Students

Candace Komlodi, a GateWay Community College reading instructor in Phoenix, Arizona, and GateWay librarian Lili Kang use Sansa Fuze media players with developmental education students. They have designed the iTour, an interactive library tour to introduce the library and build information literacy skills through hands-on activities. The tour is preloaded on the player and is used in combination with a printed worksheet.

The iTour offers an alternative, self-paced delivery method. A key goal is to reduce research anxiety. The worksheet incorporates basic reading and critical thinking components beyond information literacy. Some of the activities require summarization.

The iTour has been used with students in a number of classes, including ESL classes.

As the program was in the planning process, a couple of students volunteered to be recorded for the iTour and offered to contribute their sound editing skills.

The project was funded with an Innovation Grants mini-grant from the Title V Grant Administration. Lili developed the goal and objectives for the project, researched the players, collaborated with faculty, IT staff, and the students and staff who did the recording and editing.

iTours began during fall semester in 2010. Ten classes participated in the pilot -- six RDG, one CPD150, and two ENG091 classes were involved in the iTour as an outside classroom assignment. An ENG071 class comprised predominantly of ESL students completed the iTour during class time with the instructor and librarian to help.

The iTour offered a solution to the frustration students experienced when more than one of their developmental class instructors scheduled library introductions. Instructors agreed the iTour would take the place of a traditional introduction.

Lili visited classes during the final ten minutes to introduce the iTour using a Prezi presentation to minimize student anxiety about the assignment. Lili also has created an iTour page on the library's website. One student provided feedback saying he would have liked the tour to be more difficult. There were several positive comments.

Circulation staff at the library resisted this program because it added to their workload. Equipment needs to be checked out and in and charged to be ready for the next student.

Lessons learned:

Add a library jargon glossary.
Have two versions of the worksheet available to accommodate different student reading levels.
Order enough earbud covers. They are replaced for sanitary concerns. Students are encouraged to use their own earphones.
Increase communication with library colleagues to discuss the extra workload.
Offer handheld equipment assistance to ESL students.

In the future, Lili wants to expand the iTour to CPD/AAA students by collaborating with the counseling faculty. When the new library at GateWay opens, a video tour will be added.

Image: Amazon.com

Keynote 2011 Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference

2011-05-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

EdTech Transmissions: We Control the Vertical and Horizontal

Jim Groom, Instructional Technologist and Adjunct Professor at the University of Mary Washington introduced blogging at UMW. Now there are 5109 UMW Wordpress blogs posted by 6656 users at this small university in Virginia. It's a community of students and faculty working together.

They used a blog to distribute student research on Civil War markers and realized how the community could be reached with this approach. They didn't dictate how students could use their blogs and Groom appreciates the creativity and the ability to capture and aggregate what has been happening at his institution. It's important to give students their own space -- "a domain of one's own" -- that they can take with them when they graduate.

Examples include an online exhibit, History of American Technology, has aggregated student research blogs on different aspects of the topic. Other blogs include documentation of the struggle to offer a women's studies program at UMW. Student travel blogs are aggregated in Study ABroad Blogs because over 35 students responded to the invitation to add their travel blogs' URLs to the site. Art students have used blogs as portfolios of their work. Some students are using their blogs to document all of their academic work. They post their research, writing, resumes, etc. The blog is a consistent space that can then be transferred to a post-graduation domain. Faculty who move to other institutions do this as well.

UMW analytics track visits, page views, and average time spent on the site. It's obvious from this data that the content the UMW community has created is generating hits.

Groom challenges MCCCD not to invest in Blackboard but rather to invest in people. It's a bigger institution and could really control the vertical and the horizontal!

The great Wikipedia project involved a faculty member whose students did library research to improve Wikipedia articles. The FA.team got involved.

An Asian American literature class started using the UMW Wiki to share resources for the class. Blog content can be moved into wikis to serve as an ongoing resource.

How are we thinking of the classroom itself as a space for revolution?

#ds106 is a digital storytelling course Groom has taught for three semesters. The last class was completely open. Anyone could submit assignments. It was available as an open online noncredit class. 150 people who were not students participated. He wanted to put students in a position of power. Students were told to obtain their own domains. They added their work to a central site. MOOC Students could submit their own assignments. Over 800 students submitted work. An assignment regarding iTunes playlists was permutated and appeared in various places online.

Take iconic media images from a movie or TV show. This became a dynamic repository to which many contributed.

DS106 Radio was an attempt to get away from Elluminate, which was dismissed as follows: "It's a box." They used a Nicecast server to broadcast from computers and used it to tell stories and play music. People from around the world could participate.

The next step was DS106TV for live broadcasting. Old media can be used in new ways. We need to imagine new uses for old tools that can be changed and reimagined.

Twitter offered a way for former students to participate in the class.

No one dropped the class. "They were in for life." This is a class about consistent engagement over time, not just a couple of papers and a final exam.

Minecraft, an online sandbox building video game, also was utilized.

This summer he'll teach the class as a character. When the instructor and students are all playing characters isn't that the ultimate digital storytelling class?

#4life - DS106 isn't necessarily a class. It's an experience, a way to share. Education is packaged but it should be a process, an experience.

You can listen to Jim Groom's keynote here.

Come In We're Open image: www.flickr.com/photos/gsimmonsonca/3285952133

Retronym Contest: What Do You Call a Non-Internet Librarian?

2008-10-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

Last year, Information Today, the organizers of the Internet Librarian conference, held a contest to find a "retronym" for a non-Internet librarian. A retronym is the revision of a word or phrase necessitated due to technological advances. For example, acoustic guitars were just guitars until the electric guitar came along. Other examples of retronyms are rotary-dial telephone, snail mail, nonfat milk, and analog watch. Information Today's President and CEO Tom Hogan announced the winner of the contest this year as he presented the list of finalists in reverse David Letterman style.

10. Shelf pointer librarian
9. Analog librarian
8. Legacy librarian
7. Librarian unplugged
6. 3x5 librarian
5. Internot librarian
4. Retrobrarian
3. (Insert the name of your supervisor here) librarian
2. Wallenda librarian (flying high without the net)
1. Librarian 1.0 - the winning entry!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aswhelan/2806849990

Digital Marketing: Successful Plans and Organizations

2008-10-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

Presenters:
Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager, San Jose Public Library and
Aaron Schmidt, Director, North Plains Public Library, Oregon

The goal is to connect users with librarians. Libraries want and need to transform lives but this requires the establishment of relationships.

When serving people online, we’re serving everyone, even people who aren’t carrying one of our library cards. Serving all digital inquiries should be a cooperative arrangement between libraries like interlibrary loan service.

What Are You Marketing? Snake Oil or Substance?
Make your library website two-way. Can people register for cards? Share their opinion? Have an identity? People expect these possibilities today.

Be good! This is crucial. It’s imperative to have great content online. Develop a plan to get it, update it, and make it relevant to your community. It’s the number one thing you can do to get people to your website and engaged. Once that happens, they’ll return.

Free Is Nice!
Take advantage of library directory listings using LibDex, MapMuse, Libraries411, PublicLibraries.com, and Libraries on the Web. Make sure the information on these sites is correct. Many offer links to your catalog.

Blog Search Engines
Feed Submitter submits your RSS feed to 15 sites at once. Good for posting your programming calendar. Consult Robin Good’s list of where to submit your blog and feed. RSS Specifications provides a list of where to submit your feed. Enter your feed URL and your email address and you’re done.

Blog Geo-Search Engines
List your library blog on geographic blog search engines such as Frapper, Feedmap, Blogwise, and gFeedMap. Sarah finds these get used a lot and brings people to her site.

Wikimapia is like Wikipedia but with a map. Add locations for your libraries and other community features of interest by drawing a box and adding a link. It's great to bring in visitors to the community.

Search Engine Findability
Search for variations and mispellings of your library’s name. Try minor non-Google search engines and metasearch engines, too. Buy AdWords from Google. (The words libraries need are inexpensive.).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a professional service that will cost money but is well worth the expense. They will help you get noticed and give you a plan to keep their efforts updated. Get teaser information out in as many places as possible.

Wi-Fi Service
Get your library listed in Wififreespot, Wifihospotlist, Wifi411, Wifinder, Jiwire, and Wi-fi zone. These listings will get people to your website as well.

Community Website Presence
Americantowns.com, booksalescout.com, artsopolis.com; Eventful, and LibraryThing Local. The latter catalogs local collections. You can click on the Do You Work There? link and prove your relationship. They’ll let you update your library information regularly. Be sure you’re listed on Yelp! and other community ratings sites. You can use positive Yelp! quotes -- short and pithy -- on your marketing materials. If you get five 5-star Yelp reviews, you'll get a sticker to put on the front door.

What Are They Saying?
Searh link:yourlibraryURLhere in Google or Altavista to find sites that mention your library.

Social Review Websites
What are your customers saying about you? Be there, compliment good comments, and initiate conversations. Offer explanations and apologies for bad experiences. Use negative comments to plan changes in service.

Where Are People Looking for Phone Numbers?
For many, they're not consulting a printed phone book! They look online. Make sure you’re listed in AskCity, Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, and MSN. Tiy can add photos to your entry and harvest Yelp reviews and reviews from similar rating services. It can take a long time -- up to two months -- to get information corrected.

Make Your A/V Content Findable
Make sure your podcasts and videocasts are listed in YouTube, Google Video, blip.tv, Blinkx, Singingfish, Yahoo Podcast, Podcast.net, and Podcast Alley.

Be Sociable
Create a profile for your library on social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and Ning. People will friend you and form positive relationships with your library. Being in these spaces communicates to people in a way they understand and are comfortable with. You must have follow-through!

Aaron's plea: Please don’t use your building as your avatar image on these sites!

Iowa City Public Library has a lot of fans on Facebook. Yes, friends, reference transactions are taking place in public. Some is fun stuff, just talking back and forth.

Yep, it takes effort to keep interesting content on these sites. You get results if you make the commitment.

Find Local Blogs
Use Blogdigger Local, Metroblogging, Feedmap, and Blogs by City to establish a community and interact with it. Don’t intrude but be available. Don’t talk like a librarian! Don’t be heavy handed. Have authentic interactions. Don’t exhort everyone to “come to the library” on every post. You need to build your street cred.

Monitor blogs and forums and offer help and information.

Aaron featured Hennepin Public Library’s Bookspace, which offers one-stop shopping for avid readers. Readers are discussing their love of reading with each other. They can sign up for a newsletter. People can create book lists similar to the ones on Amazon. There is book club and audio book information. There are links to research books and authors. Featured lists, book events, new titles, etc. are included.

Aaron’s point: Readers are featured here instead of being faceless and nameless. This is a way to drive traffic to the site. Input is allowed from anybody anywhere.

List your staff as experts in free expert finding tools such as Allexperts.com, Ziki, Illumio, Qunu, Yedda, FAQQLY, Otavo, Yahoo Answers, or Ask Meta. Since these sites offer payment for correct answers, it could be a revenue stream for the library.

Slam the Boards is held on the 10th of every month. Librarians jump on the sites listed in the paragraph above, answer questions, and then identify themselves and gently mention that this is what librarians provide as a free service.

Push the information on your site OUT!
Invest in newsletter software or use free Open Source software. You can get email addresses from your ILS if you have had the foresight to specify that the library can send promotional emails in the user agreement your cardholders sign when they apply for a card. Send updates periodically but don’t spam. Only send news out once a week or once a month, not every day. Offer a way for users to specify the frequency for these updates and to opt out.

Get an entry on Wikipedia. Promote free wifi, reference service, and programs. Some libraries attempting to do this have been contacted by Wikipedia monitors and asked to remove the promotional content.

Make sure you have a short URL that people can remember. Register variants of your URL including a variety of domains such as .com, .org, .net, etc.

Instant messaging should be a primary form of communication. It's free, easy and therefore has a huge rate of return. Choose a fun screen name and advertise it.

Text messaging: Cellphones and SMS continue to grow. Offer both circulation and reference information via SMS. Distribute hold announcements and overdue notices via SMS. There’s software for this.

Text a Librarian combines instant messaging and SMS into one web-based monitoring system that allows for queues. Can have 20 people monitoring one screen name. Can form text messaging and IM cooperatives with other libraries similar to the Ask a Librarian service.

Twitter - Use this microblogging service for short informational messages. Be clear about what you’re sending out -- book recommendations and program announcements, for example. Casa Grande Public Library is using Twitter very effectively.

Second Life: Aaron isn't a fan. He says it's a huge time sink. There are many more things you can do that offer more bang for the buck.

Conclusion
Be tech leaders in your community!

Contact information:
Aaron Schmidt
librarian@gmail.com
Walkingpaper.org/presentations/outreach
AIM address: xxagentcooperxx

Sarah Houghton-Jan
librarianinblack.net

2.0 Learning and 1.8 Users: Briding the Gap

2008-10-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

This session was presented Rudy Leon, who is the Learning Commons Librarian at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Colleen Harris, a Reference and Instruction Librarian at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Myths about College Students

All students are skilled online searchers
At ease with new gadgets
Always connected
Effective multi-taskers
Require constant stimulation
Must be entertained
Learn by doing

In reality, our generation is the one that doesn’t read the manual and is cyber-connected.

Myth Busting

Student do use the stuff, but in a dummy box way. They don’t understand the information environment --for example, they don’t know the difference between Google and the library. They don’t understand how Google works. They don’t have a mental map and don’t realize the tools they are using. We have to build the mental map for them.

Student don't have transferable skills. They can’t remember resources or apply research skills they learned in previous classes.

The Digital Divide Is Alive and Well

Statistics
Only 61.8% of U.S. homes have computers, while 99% of U.S. schools have computers. Newer schools have newer equipment and software while older schools have older machines and students are trained by drills.

Class
83% of those with a household income of $75,000+ have a computer at home.
62% of households with an income of $25,000-35,000 own a computer.
31% of households with an income under $15,000 own a computer.

Persistent Effects
In colleges, the expectation is that everything will be done online. Course syllabis, corrections to those syllabis, term papers, wikis, class work, etc. However, there is little training in the use of these technologies. “Welcome to Blackboard. Click on what you want.”

Statistics issued by the National Science Board indicate computer science BAs show racial issues. More Caucasians and Asians, fewer blacks and Hispanics.

Faculty Issues
What faculty know (or don’t) - Chicken burrito syndrome - focused on one type of research style, which is what they and their forebearers did
Beliefs about students - they’ll figure it out. Sink or swim! But students need context just like everyone else. We need to break professors of this belief. Get students away from using technology as equipment. They need to build their skill set.
Equipment - Teaching faculty to fish
Challenges - Faculty II
Faculty not highly trained in teaching, but they’re hostile to the implication.
Tech training is also Educational Tech training. Who does it? How do we discuss tech as teaching? How can we implement these technologies as educational technologies?
We can make a huge difference on campuses by sharing our skill and love of technology as a tool.
If we spend the time upfront, we won’t have to spend a ton later on working with students.
Getting Faculty on Board
Owning our own expertise - don’t think profs know everything. They’re experts about their subjects. We know about organizing and accessing information. We need to evangelize about this expertise.
Competitive processes for course development. Faculty seminars and workshops to improve their courses. An exemplary one is a 3-day session with lots of one-on-one time with librarians. Free lunches and a stipend are offered.
Getting out there to make connections. Embedded librarian programs with librarians as part of departments. Coffee works wonders. Make a personal connection. Let faculty see you as an intelligent person.
Faculty attend class instruction with their class. Single most useful tool ever! Ensures students show up and prof. is trained, too. Afterwards, when prof is raving, say “I’ve got more!” Word of mouth starts working for you. Especially effective if you’re a good instructor.
Leveraging reaccreditation processes. Get put on committees and inject yourself and technology and the library into future programs. Way to force people to deal with it -- it’s part of the university’s curriculum.

Campus IT
What they do - emergency hardware folks at some institutions.
Scarce resources - campus ref. libns. and liaison libns. take on some tech. roles
Kittens and beer - free software requires upkeep and hours to develop and to keep functional. Otherwise library tab in Blackboard will result in broken links.
Multiple models: Who trains? Why? Why librarians? Figure out model and where libns. fit in. We’re at a unique nexis of faculty, students, and technology.

Learning Spaces
Safe learning spaces; students can experiment and fail without consequences
How to strategies for engaging students/faculty
Workshops aren’t intimidating when librarians conduct them for students -- professors are intimidating
Make equipment available - check out laptops, cameras, etc. for student work
Actionable assignments such as creating a documentary, shooting and writing a photojournalism essay using the library's equipment
Partnerships on campus - integrate yourself. Go out to lunch with support staff. Build bridges
Moving Forward: Learning Spaces
Libraries are safe learning spaces.
Tech is fun and libraries are for learning.
Promote critical thinking and mental maps
“Ripped from the headlines” night sponsored by the library. Ask professors to discuss news stories with students. Not a lecture opportunity. Invite media folks to discuss coverage. Learning is not tied to a discipline. Professors will like getting off the beaten path and having contact with their peers from other departments.
Movie night
Game night
Building the Bridge

Actionables

Create a service to build student and faculty skills
Realize that gadgets support learning
We decide what must be; we’re the grown-ups. Students want Cliffs Notes, MTV and to buy their tests. They don’t always know what they need.
Space and structure for play are needed.
We need to exercise more skepticism about the assumptions we hear regarding student mastery of media.

Questions/Comments
Colleen S. Harris
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Colleen-Harris@utc.edu

Rudy Leon
University of Illnois Urbana-Champaign
rudyleon@illiniois.edu

Tips for Keeping Up

2008-10-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Steven M. Cohen, who is a senior law librarian at Law Library Management, Inc. and blogs at LibraryStuff, stepped in to pinch hit for Gary Price, who is recovering from surgery. Steven is IL's version of Woody Allen. He is quite articulate and rapid-fire funny.

Steven's advice: "Listen to your peeps" -- the people that you’re serving -- and promote yourself as an information professional. Steven works with lawyers and makes sure to conduct his own personal PR campaign daily. The attorneys he serves love his personal touch and he sometimes gets requests to compile a "Cohen book" when he's handed a research project.

Why keep up? To market yourself and make your employer happy that you’re there. It's job security! Having fans is very important. They provide an important PR function for you.

When does the reference interview end? When the person he’s working with says to stop. Until then, Steven sets up alerts and continuously feeds his attorneys more information as it becomes available. When people pay attention to your needs, you love it and so do the attorneys he serves.

How does Steven train attorneys to use RSS? He doesn’t. They’re too busy. That’s his job!

The Goal
Information should come to you via RSS and other updating services.

What to Monitor
New articles, press releases, and changes to web pages. Steven has set up 200 Google alerts. When he receives an update from these, he checks a research project database to see who needs to receive them.

What to Look For

Employee changes (hires and fires)
New products and development
Look beyond the initial question for additional information that might be relevant

A Tool to Get the Job Done
Google Reader -- Steven has 1500 RSS feeds that he quickly scans in about an hour and a half every evening. When he finds information that would be relevant for one of customers, he uses Google Reader's email link and types “Dear So and So, I just saw this information, which was published xx minutes ago. [He says including the currency is quite important. It reflects on your skill as a researcher and it makes the recipient believe s/he is in possession of cutting-edge information. He contends lawyers love that feeling.] I recall that you were interested in this topic.”

Cohen's allegedly trademarked quote: “It’s not rocket science -- it’s library science!” (Steven, if you can track me down I'll pay you for this use.)

Recommended Resources

WatchThatPage - a free service that monitors pages and extracts new information. Checks pages at an interval that you select -- hour, day, etc. Enter URLs to monitor. Can file in user-specified folders. Can monitor links on web pages.
WebSite-Watcher - This desktop-based software costs $30/license. It highlights URLs that have been changed.
Page2RSS - Here's a way to get an RSS feed for pages that have stable URLs and are on the open web. Creates a feed for pages that don’t offer one. “Free is as free does” Steven said because this service only has daily updates.
ReloadEvery is a Firefox add-on that reloads a web page automatically every minute. It's good for Outlook’s Webmail because you'll never be logged off for lack of activity. Good for getting Southwest Airlines check-in too. Could you use it for eBay?
FeedSidebar - Another Firefox add-on for Live Search bookmarks. Pops them up in a box on the left side of the screen. You can specify the frequency of updates.
Update Scanner - Yet another Firefox add-on that scans selected web pages for updates. You specify the frequency and level of change so you won't see minor changes such as updating today's date and correcting mispelled words. Changes are highlighted. Update Scanner provides faster notification than Google email alerts.

Steven's Favorite Web Tools

Please email me if you can't find these sites. I'm not providing links because of time and web access limitations.

Internet Archive
ScreenGrab
Cool Iris - Add to toolbar, works great in Lexis
BugMeNot
TinyURL
AwesomeHighlighter
Picnik - Photo editor
Invisible Auctions - Looks for mispellings commonly used on eBay. Use it to get good deals on items because no one else can find them. Example: Thomas the Tain gear for his son
PDF Escape
PDF Me Not
CiteBite - Copy and paste an item on a website and paste it and the page's URL into CiteBite. It will create a static web page with the information highlighted. Great to send to others because they can quickly see why you've sent it.

Contact information:
steven@lawlib.com
917-837-9706

Presentation slides: tinyurl.com/keepingup

Search Engine Land: What’s Happening Out There?

2008-10-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Danny Sullivan, editor-in chief of Search Engine Land, presented today's keynote address.

Danny maintains "there ain’t no Google killer" on the horizon. A new search engine, Cuil, recently played the “biggest is better” card when it was released. Danny said that Google and Yahoo! had agreed to back away from this type of size claim, which is why you no longer see the number of websites in the Google universe listed on its search page. He compared a search for Sarah Palin using both Cuil and Google. It was easy to agree with Danny's contention that Cuil has serious relevancy issues.

Danny's contention is that Wikipedia by law has to be at the top of Google search results. Powerset, the Wikipedia search engine that Mary Ellen Bates included on her top list yesterday, has proved that natural language searching isn’t a natural killer. It’s overkill for what most people are doing these days. You don’t need a lot of syntactical analysis for this type of search: hot photos Sarah Palin. Most search engines are matching patterns and have no understanding of concepts.

Microsoft has fumbled with Yahoo! and, as a result, Google is more powerful than ever.

Pax Googlecana

Google has 60+% market share in the United States. It's higher in many other countries (in Germany, 90-95%) but hasn't taken over in China, South Korea, and Russia. Is it all over? Does Google now rule everything?

Google Killerettes

Google isn’t the top tool of choice in everything. Google has nothing to compete with the following:

Twitter - hyper real-time tool to see what’s being buzzed about. Danny recently experienced a minor earthquake at his home in Los Angeles and his first thought was "I should Twitter about this!"
Urbanspoon - You never need to wonder where to eat again. This iPhone app knows where you are and can randomly select a restaurant based on what type of food you want to eat. It works from a huge database of reviews from newspapers and users. Chowhound offers a similar service.
Eventful will tell you what’s going on, from music to community events and more. It's also offers another iPhone app that knows where you’re at. Upcoming, owned by Yahoo!, is similar.
Yelp offers local reviews of all types. You know it's a player when you can hire someone to make sure you have a good rating. Google Maps is trying to grow a community of reviewers but it’s not a real competitor.
Trulia and Zillow offer information about homes for sale, local real estate-related data, etc.
Travel sites such as Kayak (multisite) and Farecast, which is owned by Microsoft
Craigslist - Buy and sell related in your local area. Still a powerhouse compared to Google Base despite being very “web 1.0ish” in appearance. Why hasn't Craigslist mapped its search results?
Jobs: Indeed
People search: Pipl, Spock
News/discovery: Digg
Video: Blinkx and VideoSurf
Gas prices: GasBuddy

Killerette Challenges

It's difficult to remember all the ones that are out there. People will use a site once and when they don't remember it the second time around, they go back to Google.

Bigger Challengers: Yahoo!

Yahoo! continues to face uncertainty. They have been innovating with mobile applications, BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), and SearchMonkey, which offers a way for publishers to blend information of their own into their listings.

However, uncertainty leads to brain drain. The assumption is that Microsoft will eventually take over Yahoo!, which makes for more uncertainty. The user has to ask "Should I start using Yahoo tools and get comfy with them or will they be going away?"

Microsoft

Microsoft bailed out of non-consumer search services such as Google Book Search.

Microsoft has always focused on ads first and search second. Compare this approach to Google, which built a search engine first and then figured out how to make money from it. The soul comes through online.

Microsoft has major branding problems. SearchPerks is its latest in giveaway attempts and they're dangling the carrot getting a free XBox controller after searching Livesearch.com for four and a half months. It’s just good marketing since they don’t have word of mouth.

Microsoft has some good stuff, but will people notice? Will it grow?

Google’s Master Plan?

There is some planning, of course. They've been working on Chrome (a new browser), Google Checkout, and Google Shopping. But much comes naturally, through a “hive mind” mentality.
Expect perhaps more focus as economics get harder — and there will be many more ads everywhere, even places such as image search and maps where they traditionally have not placed them!

Googlettes

Google Video now continues to host videos but can't really compete with YouTube. It's become more of a video meta search service.

Universal search mixing continues.

Google Trends continues to grow, providing data about web site traffic.

Community editing on maps grows, but has spam problems.

Google does blog search clustering.

Search 4.0: Personalized and Social Search

Google reshapes your search results based on what you do or visit. Results are reordered based on your personal preferences. Pages move up, down, in or out of the top ten. You need to have Google’s web history service enabled for this.

And Now, Search Customization

Google is tailoring results based on geographic location, previous query, and web history. Some of this has happened before, but searchers are now being told and Google is likely ramping up for more.

Conclusion

Google will continue to dominate the search space. There's no margin for people who want to start up to compete with Google. There's a degree of vaporware or a “Googleware” chilling effect for those who try. However, mobile and vertical (industry-specific) applications do offer new opportunities.

Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular!

2008-10-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

Mary Ellen Bates never fails to expand my web toolbox. She whittled down her customary 30 search tips to 20 this year so she could spend more time exploring them with us. Since one site apparently has disappeared into limbo, make that 19!

Google Translated Search - Why let your monolingualism restrict your web searching? Enter your search terms, then select your language and the language of the pages you wish to search. Google seamlessly translates your search terms into the target language, runs the search, and then retrieves and translates the results into your native language. Wow!
Ever tried using Google's date restrictor to get current results only to find your results littered with sites with older dates? Google News Archive Search is new and improved. You can limit your results in a number of ways including those published within the last hour, day, or week.
Google Trends offers a way to graph the news. It charts the frequency of the word searched and also its frequency in the news. A search volume graph is presented along with a news reference volume graph. The cities where searchers live, calculated using IP addresses, is shown. You can track when the interest in a topic peaked.
Yahoo! Search Assist - Have you ever noticed a small downfacing tab on the upper left side of your Yahoo! search results? Click on it to view suggestions for related or complementary terms to expand or narrow your search.
Yahoo!’s brackets are easy peasy. Just enclose two words in brackets [like this]. This signals Yahoo! to retrieve the words in that order but not necessarily next to each other. The first word you enter will precede the second word, which can be located anywhere on the page. Example: [subprime crisis] retrieves "subprime mortgage crisis," "subprime lending crisis," "subprime mortgage industry," etc.
Yahoo! Glue is from Yahoo!'s India bureau. It offers a veritable cafeteria line of blended search results that are not displayed linearly. Handles different types of information well. Click on the Glue Page tab in your search results. You'll find Related Pages links along the top. A snippet from Wikipedia will be offered. Quick facts are listed below Wikipedia snap, which can lead you to more information and ways to search your topic. Google Blog search results are included. Your actual boring search results list appears on the left side while images are displayed on the right side. Try searching "United Nations," which was Mary Ellen's example.
Live.com’s product reviews are wonderful! Run a search for a specific brand and Live will compiles reviews from other sources. Great for shopping because user reviews of product features are compiled and graphically portrayed. For example, searching for a digital camera shows recommended models for features, size, ease of use, photo quality, screen, affordability, portability, etc. The criteria displayed changes by the type of product searched. Once again -- here's the theme of Mary Ellen's presentation this year -- here's a search service that tries to aggregate results and make sense of them.
State your preferences in LiveSearch. Sample search: “hybrid cars” prefer:convertible. Doesn’t drop searches that lack the preferred word but the results that include the preferred word do display at the top. Related searches also are suggested.
Searchme has an amazing user interface that detects the different meanings of your search term. Example: Icons appear under the search box when you pause after typing sun. Is your interest astronomy, software, etc.? Click on an area for focused search results. Mary Ellen didn't mention this feature, but you can create Searchme stacks. Here's a link to the demo video. It lets you group sites you select and then scroll through them using an interface reminiscent of iTunes Cover Flow. You can email SearchMe stacks, which could be great for answering reference questions!
Powerset is another sense-making search engine that at this point only works with Wikipedia. It's good for extracting information about your terms from all of the Wikipedia articles that contain it. Check out its Factz feature by searching plutonium. You'll see your search noun combined with verbs and facts: plutonium forms, plutonium contains, and plutonium makes and about fifty other pairings are presented to communicate key ideas and shows you ways to expand or narrow your search. Powerset recently was purchased by Microsoft, which leads Mary Ellen to expect that it will be expanded to include beyond Wikipedia searching to include the rest of the web.
searchCrystal offers a way to "search and compare multiple engines in one place.
It is a search visualization tool that enables you to compare, remix and share results from the best web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, Flickr images or RSS feeds." It's a type of metasearch engine that attempts to group results by looking for key phrases and words. You can navigate the content from a lot of different sources. Mary Ellen believes its ability to distill information is an automatic version of what we do when we skim results.
Carrot2 provides clustering on demand and, unlike Clusty, offers you a choice of sorting algorithms. For example, enter aviation safety in the search box and click on the Show options link. The maximum number of results on most clustering sites is 100 but you can get up to 400 search results. Show option on right side of search box. Can get up to 400 search results. Don't like the results? Choose another clustering algorithm from the pulldown menu. Don't worry -- the names of these puppies aren't going to ring any bells.
Silobreaker, which boasts "insight as a service" helps you visualize the news by aggregating it in a number of ways. See relationships between people and emerging industry trends. Identify unexpected relationships. It offers a trends search, network search, hot spots (where news is happening) search, 360-degree search as well as looking at the latest blog postings. It compiles updated fact sheets. You also can filter results to limit them to specific types of news such as environmental news.
You've seen those tag clouds that indicate how many results each word has by its size. If not, look at this one at Flickr. SearchCloud gives you a comparable way to weight your search terms! Enter search terms one at a time and select the text size that indicates the importance of the term. The larger the text size you select, the more heavily weighted the word will be in your search results. Mary Ellen's example: solar nanotechnology in large text and green renewable in smaller text. You can even select a "cut to the chase" grid view of your search results that include srelevancy rankings.
Loki is a toolbar you download to work in your browser. Mary Ellen does a lot of travelling and sometimes she wakes up uncertain which city she's in! With Loki, she can ascertain her location and, most importantly, quickly find the location of the closest Starbucks without needing to know the address of the hotel where she's staying. Loki works with your computer's IP address or nearby wi-fi signals to map where you are now.
Serph is a Web 2.0 metasearch engine for blogs, social media sites, social news, and social bookmarking sites. Downside: It caps out at under 300 results. Results include Bloglines, Technorati, YouTube, etc. It's a way of finding where to search, which -- as previously mentioned -- is the theme of this presentation.
Twing mines discussion forums and online communities. It can be an effective way to locate an obscure expert. It works best when you’re looking for something very focused. Example: 800 mhz interference. Mary Ellen claims only 40 people care passionately about this topic and Twing helped her find an expert when she was researching it for a client.
Get the conference buzz when you have to stay at home by searching Technorati with the conference's blog tab. (IL2008, for example.) Bloggers sometimes transcribe conference slide shows so you can get a sense of a conference's key themes and ideas. This is also a way to catch live blogging during presentations. (I suppose this strategy will work at conferences that offer web access!)
Spokeo collects postings from lots of social sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Amazon Wish List, Blogs45, Flickr, YouTube, and even includes some web content. You can search by a person’s email address. Verdict: Creepyo -- but it might be an effective way to convince teens to be judicious about postings that might catch up with them later. Spokeo's home page has a yellow banner that reads: "HR Recruiters: Click Here Now."

Quotes du Jour

2008-10-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

I collect thought provoking, inspirational, and/or humorous quotes about teaching, learning, technology, books, and libraries. Here's today's haul:

“Don’t keep up with the technologies. Keep up with the literacies!” - Howard Rheingold

"It's not rocket science. It's library science!" - Steven M. Cohen

"I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book." - Groucho Marx

"We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn." - Peter Drucker

"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim." - Linton Weeks

The last three quotes were collected on bookmarks distributed at the Scholarly Publishers' Collaborative Network booth.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/melancon/2617198782

Smart Mobs and Smart Classrooms

2008-10-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

Howard Rheingold appears to cherish individuality -- and color. The lid of his MacBook Pro is slathered with stickers. He was sporting a bright green and purple shirt today. He paints -- yes, paints -- his shoes, which today quite logically had canvas tops.

Rheingold teaches at Stanford and Berkeley and is the author of Social Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, which traces the use of technology to communicate and coordinate human activities. When he noticed Finnish teens sharing smiles and quick looks at a cell phone that belonged to one of them, he asked an adult that had been visiting with the teens about it. The man replied, "Kids today flock like birds." Rheingold traced the development and history of social behavior and communication, which he maintains began when non-related people started hunting together in prehistoric times. He offered several inspirational examples of how people around the world have collaborated for good using the web as a medium.

Most interesting to me was Rheingold's brief description of his brand-new project, the Howard Rheingold Social Media Classroom Notebook. He mentioned a site, Socialtext, which provides information and directions for using different social media, including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting, video blogging, chat, digital storytelling, RSS, and mashups, in the classroom to promote "participatory media literacy."

Click here to listen to the podcast of this morning's keynote presentation.

I also located this blip.tv video Rheingold created to introduce his Social Media Classroom project.

Welcome to Internet Librarian! Did You Expect Web Access, Too?

2008-10-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

Once again we're fighting a lack of web access at Internet Librarian. I can't connect in the San Marco Ballroom in the Marriott -- the very hotel I'm paying $9.95/day for Internet access in my room.

It was announced before the keynote this morning that every meeting room at the conference -- with the exception of the Ballroom -- had wireless access. So far I've only connected once!

The $10/day connection in my hotel room failed when I raced in to upload the keynote recording during our lunch period today. I phoned iBahn, the company that supports the service for the hotel. I hung up without web access. In a few minutes, there was a knock on the door and a fellow handed me a new Ethernet cable. He couldn't leave fast enough! No offer to come in and see if it worked. By then, however, I'd fiddled around and restarted my computer and was online. But there was only enough time to quickly scan my email before the next session started.

I'll attempt to post this. Blogger keeps informing me that the web is down and saving and publishing might not be successful.

More later tonight after the conference -- maybe!

Photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/noii/2327713880

Introducing the Book

2008-07-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun video from TeacherTube that we viewed this week in my Blogs, Wikis, and Other Tools of Web 2.0 class at tech camp.

The video parodies how we've all been dragged into an understanding of how new technologies work. Viewing it might be comforting to some of us who occasionally get overwhelmed by how to make all this new-fangled gear work in our daily lives.

Greetings from Tech Camp!

2008-07-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm attending Camp Plug and Play 3.0 in Tucson this week. It's a rigorous week-long training session -- held at a 5-star resort! -- that's conducted by the Arizona K-12 Center.

Yesterday all of the campers went on field trips in the area. I visited Biosphere 2 in Oracle. The University of Arizona is leasing it from the real estate developers who now own the property.

We toured the biomes, which include a rainforest, savannah, desert, and ocean under the glass. We went underground and walked through the basement filled with pipes and interesting signs such as "Upper Savanna Basement" and "South Lung." We left with some insights about how the eight "terranauts" lived (and suffered) during the two-year self-sufficiency experiment in the early 1990s.

We returned, downloaded our photos, made a slide show in iPhoto, converted it into a QuickTime movie, and uploaded it on TeacherTube. Here's a link to my hastily created movie. I shot over 250 photos (as well as shooting video and recording audio files to make into podcasts). However, we were encouraged to upload short videos because we're suffering the bandwidth blues this week as 133 campers and their instructors all try to search, use online tools, and upload content.

#23! Is This Really the End?

2008-03-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

I've reached item #23 -- the final one! -- in the Learning 2.0 training. This is the opportunity to reflect about the training. The following questions were provided to aid in this activity.

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
There weren't that many new discoveries among the 23 items. I enjoyed exploring the 2007 Web 2.0 award winners. There were new discoveries on that list that I'll be exploring. I also revisited several services that I had not focused on and decided to adopt several of them into my online activities.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I am an enthusiastic lifelong learner! I enjoyed the way this program was organized because I could work on it at home when I had the time to focus, explore, and blog about my discoveries and thoughts. I consider this preferable to being away from my duties at Palomino to sit in a more structured training session.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
This is a good way to learn -- as long as the learner is self-motivated (or otherwise incentivized) and believes that learning is fun. The incentive provided by offering an MP3 player to those who complete the program is a good perk and it's motivated many staff members. I plan on advocating for and adapting this type of program for teaching teachers (and perhaps a few librarians, too) about new technology.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
Learning 2.0 and its list of 23 Things date back to August 2006 when Helene Blower initiated the program with the staff of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Web 2.0 tools continually are proliferating. Newer, better tools have been introduced for several of the items. The training needs to be frequently updated and the learner offered the opportunity to compare several tools.
I also would like to see ability level options for each item. I quickly lost patience with the podcasts, which were designed for beginners.

And last but not least…

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again choose to participate?
Absolutely! Count me in.

The Greater Phoenix Digital Library Meets the Digital Divide

2008-03-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

You might imagine that someone who is an avid podcast listener would also enjoy listening to audio books. Absolutely! I check out audio books on CD and transfer them onto my iPod shuffle, which I listen to while I'm commuting.

Unfortunately, I'm on the wrong side of the digital divide when it comes to downloading audio books from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library.

The Overdrive console is Windows-only and my family are die-hard Mac users. "Yes, but Mac users are such a small segment of the computer market," you might reply. Look again. Windows Vista and the popularity of the Apple iPod have doubled Mac's market share during the past year.

The books will not play on iPods, which have cornered approximately 75% of the market for MP3 players.

I don't understand how libraries and many librarians have been wooed and won by Overdrive when we are the people who have been spanning the digital divide.

If it's any consolation, I'm going to help a friend learn how to download books from the GPDL on her Plays for Sure MP3 player next week. Maybe some day I'll be able to do the same from the library's public computers!

Of Podcasts and Podcasting

2008-03-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

Item #21 in the Learning 2.0/23 Things training focuses on podcasts. I'm quite the fan of both audio podcasts and video podcasts, also known as vodcasts or vlogs.

At the Microcomputers in Education (MEC) conference in March 2005, I attended a session about podcasting conducted by ASU's Guy Mullins. I returned to Palomino Library and told Krissy, my colleague and future TACkies leader, that podcasting was a technology to watch. When iTunes debuted a podcast directory in June 2005, we went to our supervisor, Ted, and asked him to find a way to get the gear we'd need to start podcasting.

Ted located the funding, we bought the gear, and in late October 2006 the DMHS PodSquad, an informal student group that meets in the library after school, recorded and edited their first podcasts. The PodSquad is listed in the iTunes Store's Podcast Directory.

We've learned that podcasting is easier to do on Macintosh computers, although Audacity, a free Open Source audio editing program, is cross platform. We've learned that the fancy USB mics we bought aren't as convenient as either the portable Edirol R-01 MP3 recorder with a 2 GB SD card or the inexpensive Belkin Stereo TuneTalk mics that plug into student iPods. We've taught students all about broadcasting and copyright and Creative Commons licenses.

After two years of extracurricular podcasting, I've lined up funding that will buy a mobile Mac lab so we finally can do, among other nifty Learning 2.0 activities, curricular podcasting. We plan on recording podcasts of conversations our DMHS Spanish students will be having with English students in Chile -- if the technology there will support it.

In the past, I have recorded podcasts of conference presentations and posted them on this blog.

But it's not just about recording, editing, and posting podcasts. I'm an avid listener (and viewer)!

Sorry to veer away from the directions, but I use the iTunes Podcast Directory to track down new ones. Here are SOME of the podcasts I download either regularly or intermittently:

This American Life -- I enjoy this whimsical radio program but usually miss it when it airs on Saturday afternoon. Yes, podcasts of radio shows are rather TiVOesque, but this is a perfect for public radio junkies who can't always catch the shows.

The Writer's Almanac -- Garrison Keillor's daily podcast covers today in literary history and includes a poem that is usually short, accessible, and enjoyable.

Future Tense is another American Public Media production billed as a "daily journal of the digital age."

The Tech Chicks podcast is a bit amateurish but these two tech teachers help me find great ed tech sites and services that I occasionally blog about on my Information Goddess blog.

TED Talks -- "inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers" -- really amp up my brain. They provide some of the best content out there because the speakers are all very accomplished in their respective fields and do have "ideas worth spreading." I think the audio version of this podcast has been discontinued, but the vodcast is alive and kicking.

Library Geeks -- This is one of the intermittent podcasts I download. It's not regularly updated and it's too long in my opinion. However, "library geeks" I respect such as Gary Price and Jessamyn West are interviewed so I cherry pick the episodes. I learned about Zotero from a Library Geek podcast.

RocketBoom -- Watching this wacky program on my video iPod Nano in bed just before I doze off is one of life's guilty pleasures.

DMHS PodSquad -- OK, I might be a bit biased about this one!

Other podcasts I enjoy include Slate V, Unwired, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, NPR's Story Corps, etc. Although I have a video iPod nano now, the audio podcasts are especially appealing to me because I can download them and listen while I'm doing something else!

YouTube

2008-03-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

I've arrived at item #20 of the Learning 2.0/23 Things training, which is the exploration of YouTube.

I have the perfect YouTube video to embed! It's Mike Wesch's The Machine Is Us/ing Us, which most likely is the best commentary of Web 2.0 available on YouTube.

"Who will organize all this data? We will. You will."
"We Are the Web."
"We are teaching the Machine" with all of our searches and our tags. "The machine is us."
"Web 2.0 is linking people....people sharing, trading, and collaborating."

Web 2.0 Toolbox

2008-03-23T23:45:00.000-07:00

I explored the winners of the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards for this item. Many are sites I've already discovered such as Craigslist, One Sentence, Picnik, Flickr, Pandora, Podomatic, Zillow, Etsy, StumbleUpon, iGoogle, Twitter, etc., etc.

When I saw Statsaholic, I hoped it would help me collect visit statistics for a podcast I post. I entered the URL as directed and was disappointed to discover it only tracked statistics for the entire web.mac.com domain and not my site on it.

I found other interesting sites on the awards list and will spend some time exploring them.

Google Docs

2008-03-23T23:35:00.000-07:00

I explored Google Docs for #18 in the SPLS 23 Things/Learning 2.0 training. I've used Google Docs for a while now. I appreciate the simple interface and the fact that I can access a document from any computer that has web access.

The following is a document I created in Google Docs and posted to this blog.

More Vacation Snaps

Also on Galiano Island, we spotted these colorful star fish in the water along a dock.

This black slug was heading in the opposite direction on the Pebble Beach trail on Galiano Island.

There were quite a few farm stands scattered around the Gulf Islands. This one, on Salt Spring Island, had delicious cookies for sale and was operated on the honor system. After a while, however, a black dog came trotting down the drive to inspect us.

PBwiki Post

2008-03-23T23:10:00.000-07:00

Item #17 in SPLS's 23 Things/Learning 2.0 training gives students the opportunity to try posting in the "sandbox" of a wiki. I added a rave about my favorite vacation destination. It was very easy to do!

Wandering Around Wikis

2008-03-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

Item #16 of the 23 Things/Learning 2.0 training focuses on wikis. I'm planning on building a wiki from scratch soon for an educational project so I enjoyed looking at some other wikis.

However, I noticed a few drawbacks:

1. The design of most of the wikis linked to in the Discovery Resources are visually stark. Templates need to be developed that are more visually appealing.

2. Some libraries are not taking advantage of the participatory nature of wikis. I noticed only librarians can edit St. Joseph County Public Library's Subject Guides. We don't have the market cornered on information. Why not devise a moderation system and let users add great resources?

3. Too often library users are not taking advantage of the participatory nature of wikis. The Butler WikiRef is a ghost town.

How can a wiki be effectively used in a library setting?

For staff, a wiki could be a useful way to replace local information files. It also seems more effective than Google Docs for "today in the library" communication because information can be categorized for quick access.

When I attended the University of Arizona back in the Paleozoic era, David Laird was the University's Library Director. He had a bulletin board in the main library's lobby for Q&A about the library's policies, services, and collection. Quite low tech, but I often stopped to read the cards on it and I learned a bit about the library this way.

Why not share our customer comments with the community? If these could be moderated so inappropriate comments could be screened, we could share answers with all who are interested. The questions/comments could be solicited on the page where they will be posted with the staff response. There also could be a page for purchase suggestions where the selectors could note what has been ordered and why vetoed suggestions were not.

MySpace and Facebook

2008-03-22T19:41:00.001-07:00

#12 in the 23 Things/Learning 2.0 training focuses on the two preeminent social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook.

I've explored both sites. MySpace allows the unregistered visitor greater access than Facebook. I tried searching for Desert Mountain High School students and alumni. I found up-to-date news in MySpace on a number of DMHS grads. I also learned more than I wanted to about some of them!

Students in the library where I work seem especially drawn to MySpace, although school administration prohibits the use of social networking sites during the school day. I wonder how many of them would find visiting a library's MySpace a draw? I checked Denver Public Library's MySpace for eVolver, the teen program. The profile claims eVolver is single, female, 18, and a Capricorn. "Lite" rap music played as I perused the page.

Sorry, but this is L-A-M-E! Most of the friends are either authors promoting their books or other libraries trying to pass as fellow cool entities. I connected to "nobody's home because this was a phishing attempt" error messages when I tried to link to the Find a Good Book or Good Music or Movie Reviews by Teens pages. The page hasn't been updated in five weeks and the program links are outdated.

At the Internet Librarian conference, Aaron Schmidt has promoted libraries having MySpaces and Facebook accounts. He recommended having a teen design these pages to add authenticity and design chaos. He poohed-poohed concerns about online safety by claiming teens realize the difference between real friends and MySpace "friends." However, I know that MySpace has been used by students to harrass and embarrass other students.

If one of the coolest teen programs in LibraryLand looks lame there, it doesn't bode well for the rest of us. Are libraries on MySpace the online equivalent of the person who attends a party only to make contacts and pass out business cards? Or perhaps they're the middle-aged person who's trying to be cool by wearing teen fashions. Will teens give us credit for trying -- or avert their eyes? I'd be interested in knowing how many teens frequent the library pages on these services, but I haven't encountered any counters yet.

What Is Library 2.0?

2008-03-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

#15 of the 23 Things training focuses on Library 2.0. What does this term mean? I've explored several of the OCLC articles in the Discovery Resources and found interesting ideas and resources to explore.

Rick Anderson's words resonate with me:

"We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning....If our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. One-button commands, such as Flickr’s 'Blog This,' and easy-to-use programs like Google Page Creator, offer promising models for this kind of user-centric service."

Most Web 2.0 applications are intuitive and easily mastered. Why do we have classes to teach customers how to use the library catalog and databases? Why are they needlessly complex? Why can't cookies be used to speed logins? Amazon offers one-touch ordering of a computer that costs $1000, but to access an article on a library database I have to expertly guide and diligently click my mouse and enter a 13-digit library card number and a 4-digit PIN. Is it any wonder my students would rather use Google and Wikipedia?

Michael Stephens (pictured with his ever-present Mac notebook!) writes about Librarian 2.0 who "uses the Cluetrain Manifesto."

I visited Cluetrain.com and checked out the 95 Theses. Although these are directed at commercial businesses, I found many concepts in the list that librarians can easily embrace. I found the focus on the power of the human voice very meaningful at this time when my colleagues and I are being informed that our own words are ineffective in ensuring customer satisfaction:

"Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

"But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about 'listening to customers.' They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf."

Stephens also addresses our need to be more flexible and spontaneous:

Librarian 2.0 "recognizes how quickly the world and library users change with advancing technology. Project timelines that stretch on for months simply do not work in Library 2.0 thinking. Perpetual beta works well for the library’s Web presence. This librarian redesigns for ease of use, user involvement and easily added/re-configured pieces."

Michael Stephens' contention that Librarian 2.0 embraces Web 2.0 tools demonstrates that SPLS still has room to grow in our services:

"This librarian uses Instant Messaging to meet users in their space online, builds Weblogs and wikis as resources to further the mission of the library, and mashes up content via API (Application Program Interface) to build useful Web sites."

I chuckled when I reached the end of Dr. Wendy Schultz's article. She follows the library far into the future when the latest incarnation will be called Library 4.0:

"Library 4.0 revives the old image of a country house library, and renovates it: from a retreat, a sanctuary, a pampered experience with information—subtle thoughts, fine words, exquisite brandy, smooth coffee, aromatic cigar, smell of leather, rustle of pages—to the dream economy’s library, the LIBRARY: a WiFREE space, a retreat from technohustle, with comfortable chairs, quiet, good light, coffee and single malt. You know, the library."

To balance and conclude this discussion of Library 2.0, I'll offer two contrarian viewpoints.

The Annoyed Librarian dismisses Michael Stephens and other "twopointopians:" "I think we can now see the intellectual content of library 2.0. [Note the lower case "l."] I haven't been hearing much from the twopointopians lately, and now I suspect it's because they've been playing videogames, apparently an important part of both library 2.0 and social networking."

A contributor to PUBLIB noted:

"Librarians, ever eager, in their inexhaustible insecurity, to emulate the latest fad to prove their hipness and coolness, have come up with 'Library 2.0,' a term which, as near as I can tell, means we will embrace all the various social-networking sites and tools to reach our patrons, in a sort of vast, blissful emailochattic, facebooky, myspaceish, ningytwittery, blogospheric, flickristic, picasametric, mahalodic, youtubian, wikidly del.icio.us informational" climax.

The library of the past is gone. Intelligently planned and implemented change will ensure our continued value to our communities. However, change for the sake of change is pointless and stressful for everyone.

Enchanted by the glow radiated by those new ideas and programs presented in ALA conference sessions? Ignore the spin and look for the facts. As I recently discovered on a trip to the ghost town that is the Perry Library, all that glitters is not gold.

My respectfully tendered advice is to continually dialog with our communities and with all library staff members as we plan future services and collections. The best change usually is effected through consensus and buy-in.

Say Blogosphere Seven Times Quickly

2008-03-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

#14 in SPLS's list of 23 things in the Learning 2.0 training focuses on Technorati, which is a search engine devoted to delivering results from the blogosphere. (Does anyone else out there feel the need for an antacid when you read this word?)

I ran the recommended search for "Library 2.0" using the advanced search option. As a keyword phrase search, I retrieved 2,679 results with tabs for posts, blogs, photos, and videos -- most of which looked B-O-R-I-N-G except for this one. Why are librarians so incessantly sincere?

I ran a tag search for Library 2.0 and found 806 posts with that tag. Hey, the videos on this search were more promising! Although too long, this one made me laugh. And you've got to appreciate Prelinger Archive's Your Life Work: The Librarian.

Technorati offers RSS feeds for your searches, but you can't limit the feeds by format.

Technorati offers a service that allows you to claim your blog and have it gain admittance to the blogosphere. It sounds a bit like a blog's birth certificate! Two options for doing this are offered. One involves providing Technorati with your blog's login, and the other gives you a bit of code to insert in a posting. After Technorati's spiders detect it, you're in.

Why take the superhighway on this mission? The idea of spiders tippy toeing through my humble Information Goddess blog has captured my imagination! I've inserted the code in a posting.

Let's see how speedy those spiders are! (Update: Read about the galloping Technorati spiders here.)

Tag, You're It, Folks -- Or, What Does Social Bookmarking Say About Me?

2008-03-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

I've reached #13 in the 23 Things training, which focuses on tagging, folksonomies, and social bookmarking in Del.icio.us.

A couple of years ago I co-presented a workshop that focused on cutting-edge Web 2.0 services. Del.icio.us was one of the selections. I set up an account at that time, but I didn't get hooked. Why not? I know people who swear by Del.icio.us. I have three computers that I regularly use, two of which have three browsers that I alternate between using. I NEED a central location for my bookmarks!

My aging brain cells always falter for a beat as I attempt to get the periods in Del.icio.us typed in the right places. I'm not sure I want to share my bookmarks and see how many other people have bookmarked the sites that interest me. Should something as basic as bookmarking be a popularity contest? Do I want to take the time to tag every bookmark? Will I remember the tags? In the past, social bookmarking has seemed more complex than simply bookmarking sites in my browser and tossing them into folders.

The link to "Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users" that's included on our Discovery Resources list isn't working. In searching Slackermanager.com for the article, I found a glowing review for Diigo and signed up for an account. As has been the case with several of the other items I've explored during this training, I think I might have found a resource that's more up-to-date and fully featured.

Diigo has no awkward periods to parse. Diigo can suck up my bookmarks from some of the browsers I use. I can highlight sections of a web page and add comments about them on sticky notes. I can forward individual bookmarks with my highlighted sections to others.

I have added a Diigolet button on my bookmark bar on all but one of my browsers. (There's also a Diigo toolbar, but I'm reluctant to give up real estate in my browser.) Diigo will allow me to export its bookmarks into my Del.icio.us, Furl, etc. accounts without any fuss. I can keep selected bookmarks private or add private comments to my public bookmarks -- this is perfect for stashing account information! I'm going to give Diigo a try.

Quick asides: I understand that folksonomies reflect diversity of thought and make searching easier. The chaos of a folksonomy is its strength! Yes, searchers won't find everything -- as they might using a controlled vocabulary. But who wants to find everything these days?

I really like tag clouds on sites and use them as discovery tools.

LibraryThing

2008-03-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

LibraryThing is topic #11 in the Learning 2.0/23 Things training.

LibraryThing is rather like a noncommercial version of Amazon.com. You can explore it to find good books to read by searching user-assigned tags and reading user reviews. Unlike Amazon, the section titled LibraryThing Recommendations is worth the price of admission (which is free!).

Although I've had a LibraryThing account for a while, I haven't put it to good use.

I used to keep a reading log, but I stopped that when the library catalog added a reading history feature to user accounts. I thought it was a step forward because I could access it anywhere. However, some of the items in my reading history have disappeared because they have been withdrawn from the Library's collection.

I've realized LibraryThing is a better substitute for my reading log. I can access it anywhere, no items will disappear, and I can read my annotations as well as those of others.

Playing Around with Image Generators

2008-03-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

Here I am at #10 of Scottsdale Public Library's 23 Things training, which has given me the opportunity to play with image generators. I LOVE image generators as those of you who read my Information Goddess blog probably have noticed.

The suggested sites were:

LetterJames
The Generator Blog
FD Toys

I had fun testing the available options at these three sites. Here's one of my attempts:

To create this image, I used the Photo Spread Effect Generator and a photo of Palomino Library's exterior.

Finding Feeds

2008-03-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've arrived at item #9 in the 23 Things training, which is titled "Finding Feeds." I'll address the questions that are provided.

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?
Frankly, none of the three resources provided were ones I'm likely to revisit.

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?
I like Technorati's interface the best, although Syndic8's information about the last day of update could prove useful to find sites that are regularly updated.

Which was more confusing?
Topix wasn't confusing, but it's not my cup of tea. If you want to find feeds on the latest celebrity news, try it.

What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels?
I discovered Library Garden. The top posting was about the Webware 100 awards, which will provide hours of browsing pleasure!

What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?
Almost every blog or web page that I'd like to track offers an RSS button. I'd rather search directly for a site than cruising around Technorati or Syndic8.

RSS Feeds and News Readers

2008-03-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

I've arrived at item #8 of the 23 Things training -- RSS feeds and newsreaders. Although the directions instructed me to set up a Bloglines account, I've decided to stick with Google Reader. I appreciate its clean design and navigation macros.

I set up this account after I returned from Internet Librarian '07. Why? I attended Steven M. Cohen's session about RSS feeds and Google Reader. Steven contended that Google Reader has Bloglines beat hands down. At that time, Steven had about 960 feeds set up on his Google Reader account and claimed he spent only one hour a day going through them! He demonstrated how he emails postings to the lawyers in his firm to keep them updated. ("This article was posted by the New York Times five minutes ago. Thought you'd find it interesting.") I currently have 18 feeds set up on my Google Reader account.

On to the questions!

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders? Imagine picking up a newspaper that has been customized to cover all of your interests. There are so many RSS feeds available now that you can stay up to date on just about anything that interests you. The Google Reader newsreader allows me to quickly review the latest postings and distribute ones of interest.

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work or personal life? I'm already using it! When the Scottsdale Tribune stopped delivering to my area, I missed having the paper to read while I ate breakfast. Now I take my notebook to the table and browse the latest news and postings while I munch and sip.

How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology? There are many ways! Here are some thoughts.

RSS feeds of catalog searches would allow library customers to be alerted when new items by their favorite authors or on subjects of interest are added to the collection. (I'd like an RSS feed from our new DVDs page to save the tedium of plowing through the titles I've already reserved!) We currently offer an email alert service but it isn't immediate and frankly it doesn't work very well.

We already offer an RSS feed for account information.

Several of our databases already offer RSS feeds on searches. In addition to doing more training on these wonderful resources, we need to publicize this service!

We could provide customizable RSS feeds for book reviews, library program information, and library news.

As a school librarian, I know the email addresses of the teachers I serve. I can send them (and my colleagues in the public and SUSD libraries) postings from Librarian's Internet Index, ResourceShelf, etc. when I know they will find them interesting and useful.

I've heard both Steven Cohen and Gary Price contend that RSS is not mainstream. People don't "get" it. When they click on those little orange buttons they encounter on web pages they get a page of gobbledygook. Libraries can provide a useful service by offering Web 2.0 training sessions that include RSS and newsreader topics. This is a way of positioning ourselves as goto technology leaders!

Time to post this and go check out the latest from the Annoyed Librarian and Fake Steve...

Blog About Technology: GrandCentral

2008-03-08T06:44:00.000-08:00

I'm on item #7 of the 23 Things training, which is Blog About Technology.

This morning I discovered GrandCentral and set up a free account.

Google recently bought this service that assigns you a phone number. You control which of your real phone numbers (home, work, cell, hotel, friend's house, etc.) ring when someone calls you at your assigned number. Right now the only area code in the Valley that they're assigning is 623.

Log into your GrandCentral account and control your phone calls. You can access voice mail online, block unwanted callers, control which callers get through and which go to voice mail, set up custom rings, etc. Learn more about the service from Business Week and Slate.

I usually give a fax number when I'm asked for my phone number by someone who has no business needing it. Now I can use my GrandCentral number! Because GrandCentral currently is being beta tested, if you go to GrandCentral's home page you can only indicate your interest in getting a phone number when one becomes available. But if you follow this link, there's more information about the service and a link where you can set up an account today.

On to item #8!

More Flickr Fun

2008-03-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm working on the 23 Things training program, and I'm delighted to see that the next two items focus on Flickr, the photo sharing site I've previously extolled on my Information Goddess blog.

Flickr has inspired a plethora of tools and mashups -- ways to use its open programming to concoct unique ways to incorporate Flickr images and data.

One of my favorite tool sites is FD's Flickr Toys, which offers quite a variety of photo manipulation tools.

Need a motivational poster? A magazine cover or movie poster? How about a a trading card or a personalized name badge? Would you like to Warholize a photo so it appears multiple times in an assortment of colors? Howzabout making a jigsaw puzzle or a photo album you can tote in your back pocket? You can do all these things and more with your own or others' photos. Remember that you can easily locate Creative Commons-licensed photos using Flickr's Advanced Search.

The 23 Things of Learning 2.0

2008-02-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not on the road for my latest training -- I'm sitting in my home office.

I've signed up to participate in Scottsdale Public Library System's Learning 2.0 training, which is based on the PLCMC Learning 2.0 program developed by Helene Blowers, formerly of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. I had the pleasure of attending a session at Internet Librarian 2007 that Helene co-presented where she talked about this training and the importance of play when one is learning.

As an incentive, SPLS is awarding a Creative Stone MP3 player to all staff members who complete the training. With any luck, the software needed to download ebooks from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library onto the MP3 player will be available on library PCs. I've served on SPLS's OverDrive committee for a couple of years now but as a Mac and iPod owner I've never been able to try this service.

Tonight I started the training at http://splslearning.blogspot.com and I've already completed four of the items on the list of 23 items!

Step #2 of the training involved watching a video that focused on the 7 1/2 habits of highly effective learners. I suppose it is designed to be encouraging to those who might not have tried self-paced distance learning before. Although I was informed at the outset that "attitude is everything," the presentation struck me as being simplistic and even a bit condescending. Yikes! I'm starting off on the wrong foot!

I may be able to save you some time. Here are the 7 1/2 habits:

Begin with the end in mind.
Accept responsibility for your own learning.
View problems as challenges.
Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.
Create your own learning toolbox.
Use technology to your advantage.
Teach and mentor others.
(Also known as habit 7.5) Play!

As I reflected on this list and my approach to learning, I'm pleasantly surprised. I think I'm on the right path! Here are my thoughts about several of the items:

1. I don't see an end! I plan on continuing to learn about new Web tools, services, and techniques for the rest of my life. Mastering individual tools can be accomplished, but even those are subject to change because features continue to be added in the successful ones or they disappear and another resource jumps into the void. Fortunately, most of the Web 2.0 tools are pretty intuitive. Unlike some expensive software I use on the job (see #6 below), the user interface has been simplified to work for a variety of users with a wide range of abilities on a number of different platforms.

3. This is probably the toughest challenge on the list for me. I'm a reasonably good troubleshooter, but this activity requires time and energy. When I'm attending a conference, I would rather spend both immersing myself in the sessions and activities.

5. I've assembled a great learning toolbag with my MacBook, digital camera, Belkin stereo TuneTalk mic, iPod nano, cell phone, assorted cables, and, occasionally, my video camera and/or PDA. These allow me to record podcasts, shoot photos and videos, type notes that I can convert into blog postings, and then, if web access is available, post the podcasts, videos, photos, and blog postings.

6. While I'm at home, I think I do use technology to lighten the load. I carefully research new acquisitions to ensure that the technology I buy is the best that I can afford. However, this isn't the case when I'm on the job. Regrettably, the library automation system occasionally works against us, not with us!

7. My goal is to teach others by sharing my training and new Learning 2.0 services in my two blogs.

Folklorico Las Alacanas

2008-01-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

Folklorico Las Alacanas from Cholla High School danced for AzTEA conference attendees during our lunch break. Enjoy a QuickTime clip of this colorful entertainment!

AzTEA Keynote: From Classroom Knowledge to Global Contribution

2008-01-26T23:35:00.000-08:00

AzTEA schedules conferences every school year in Flagstaff, Tucson, and Phoenix. Each conference has unique content but all focus on educational applications of technology. On Saturday, January 27th, I attended the Teaching and Technology: Students in the Global Village conference at Pueblo High School in Tucson, Arizona.

Dr. Tim Tyson is presenting the keynote addresses at all of the 2007-08 AzTEA conferences. He is the former principal of Mabry Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia. Mabry students hold an annual film festival. Student film teams are encouraged to identify an issue, research it, and present their work in a video. No grades are assigned for these projects. Dr. Tyson has shown several impressive student videos during his keynote addresses in Flagstaff and Tucson.

Here are some highlights from Dr. Tyson's keynote:

Kids are facing foreboding global issues. We’re not doing enough to prepare them. We’re so out of touch.
The new oil will be bandwidth. “Bandwidth is this generation’s oxygen.” - Steve Jobs, Macworld 2008 keynote speech
Brainwidth can’t keep up with bandwidth. Developing and distributing transformative ideas is growing exponentially, not linearly. How do we keep up? We don’t! Don’t focus on technology. Let kids handle it. Focus on making the connections in students’ minds.
Students want an emotional connection with their learning. We’re teaching kids with tools that they have no emotional connection to and we’re wondering why they’re not engaged in learning.
Technology is not a tool for students -- it's a habitat, an ecosystem.
iPods can be Trojan horses because students love them. Load them up with educational content!
Students crave educational experiences that leverage their unprecedented interest in technology.
Video is the language this generation speaks. Adults think in the two-dimensional world of words. Students think increasingly in the four-dimensional virtualized world of connected, interactive media.
Videos are a studio for students' creation, a stage for sharing, and a community for collaboration.
Kids are writing more now than ever but they're using different tools.
The use of technology tends to be at a very low level on Bloom’s taxonomy. We need to raise the bar to increase the scope and quality of what they’re producing.
Teach students in a language they understand.
Dr. Tyson predicts that public schools will join universities in a digital distribution model similar to iTunes University. Lectures, instructional activities, assignments, digital media objects, and student-created learning objects will be databased and available.

I've posted a podcast of the full keynote here.

Online Outreach and Marketing

2007-11-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

Not all insights come from conferences. I try to continue learning while I'm waiting for the next conference!

Those who read my blogs probably have figured out that I'm an unabashed fan of the LibrarianinBlack, Sarah Houghton-Jan. I regularly read her blog.

This week she posted a .pdf of a presentation she recently gave at the Hawaii Library Association conference. It offers useful advice if you're interested in finding ways to publicize your library and its services. Many of her tips are free or inexpensive. Sarah was a virtual librarian in her last job, so she knows her stuff. Take a look!

Information Goddess

2007-11-13T22:43:00.000-08:00

I've been coming across so many great Web 2.0 tools that I decided to devote a separate blog to them. Take a look, mortal!

Learning 2.0: Tools for 21st Century Learning

2007-11-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

Diana Laufenberg is a young social studies teacher at Mount Elden Middle School in Flagstaff. I rarely miss one of her sessions at the Peak Performance conference. Diana is enthusiastic about using technology to further the cause of learning.

Diana arrived at this conference with over a dozen of her students. Their charge was to interview and photograph speakers and those in attendance and to create a conference wrap-up slide show to be shown at the closing of the conference.

Diana devoted a section of her wiki to her Learning 2.0 session. Here's her introduction to this page:

"It's all about the learning. Tech tools and gadgets are fun, no argument there, but they don't necessarily make for good teaching or learning without sound pedagogical footing. Asking compelling questions, focusing on process, pushing the envelope on critical thinking are all goals of the learning and we live in an age where there are tools to serve those educational endeavors. Do not confuse a fun gadget with something that is necessarily good for the learning. First define the learning and find the resources to support. In my humble opinion, this is the key to effective teaching in the 21st century. Work to carefully define what are the goals for learning and use the most appropriate tool for the task."

Diana always schedules hands-on presentations in a lab and gets her audience involved in creating or exploring something on a computer. This year we explored the wiki page and I went nuts when I found this link: Top 50 Web 2.0 Sites. What a treasure trove!

I'm not going to post my notes on Diana's session because her Peak Performance wiki page is almost an exact duplicate.

I will report on two items of interest:

1. Diana also is a fan of TEDTalks! I'm addicted to them and, in fact, recently purchased a new video Nano so I could watch the vodcast version. The TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference is held annually in Monterey -- yes, in the same venue as Internet Librarian. They select a theme and gather the great minds of the world to present their ideas. Aforementioned Great Minds are given twenty minutes to share their passions with the world. Visit TED's site or the Podcast section of iTunes, search for TEDTalks, and wallow in free access to either audio or video podcasts! Diana showed a clip from Dr. Ken Robinson's talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"

2. I asked Diana if she was familiar with any web-based audio editors since we still don't have Audacity installed on any computers in my library except for my laptop. She logged into her Twitter account, which is dlaufenberg, and asked her circle of contacts. No one had a solution, but it was inspiring to know that some of the big names in educational technology were being polled for help with my question. Professional collaboration on the fly!

Teacher librarians, Joyce Valenza has a Twitter account! You can sign up for a free account, too, and read what she and her circle of acquaintances are discussing. Or, better yet, ask her a question -- or answer one.

It’s Time to Upgrade: Making the Case for Change

2007-11-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Dr. Tim Tyson will be presenting the keynote addresses at each of the three AzTEA conferences this year. Every keynote will be different. After enjoying his keynote at the Peak Performance conference, I'm looking forward to hearing his presentations at the next two conferences.

Dr. Tim Tyson has been an educator for over thirty years. He currently works as a consultant and speaker. Prior to this, he was the principal of Mabry Middle School in Cobb County, Georgia. School Library Journal has referred to him as the "Pied Piper of Educational Technology." He started a student-led digital film festival at Mabry.

Here are my notes from his keynote:

It’s all about perspective. We get stuck until some tragic emotional experience shakes our perspective. Are we powerful enough to change our perspective without a tragedy?

The nature of work has changed because of technology. Global competition, consolidation, mergers, and layoffs have resulted in a third of America’s work force being laid off. They’re now independent contractors. To thrive in the economy, right-brain skills are essential. (Both Tim and LSLibn highly recommend reading Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.) Unfortunately, many schools still focus on Rules, Rituals, Routines, and Right Answers.

Tim said he worked in a middle school with “hormonally handicapped” kids. (Sounds pretty typical, eh?)

Students sitting in rows is an outdated practice. We need to be doing project-based learning to prepare them for the workplace.

John Dewey (1916): “One learns through direct experience, by being engaged in authentic tasks. Learning is not, then, a process of transmitting information from someone who knows to someone who doesn't; rather, learning is an active process on the part of the learner, where knowledge and understanding is constructed by the learner. Moreover, learning is a social process: learning proceeds by and through conversations....”

A Big Question for Teachers

Who owns the learning? Teachers are working themselves to death and their students aren’t. Students need to take ownership of their learning.

The way we work, play, communicate, build and maintain relationships, travel, etc. have been transformed by technology. But school is pretty much the same. There’s LIFE and then there’s school.

Trivia: People in one out of every eight marriages in the U.S. last year met online.

The New Bad Word (per Daniel Pink) Is Routine

We need routines to be efficient, but anything that can be reduced to routine can be automated, digitized, and sent around the world at the speed of an electron. If you’re engaged in a job filled with routine, your work can be outsourced.

Students believe what happens in schools is irrelevant to both their present and their future. We can’t continue school as usual. It's time for new beginnings! Opportunity! Potential! Transformation! Metamorphosis!

The transformational power of the laptop is more potent than the printing press.

School 2.0

- Authentically engaged learners
- Self-directed learning - “If you require a boss, you’re already too expensive to hire.”
- Project-driven instruction
- Independent problem-solvers
- Empowered by technology innovation
- Collaborative learning community
- Relevant

Connectedness, meaningfulness, significance, and contribution are hallmarks of School 2.0.

We shouldn’t think our job us to pour information into children. Instead, they need to gather information on their own, assimilate it, and then use it to make the world a better place.

Put kids’ work into global distribution. This is the first time in history that we can do that and it doesn’t hardly cost anything. It’s simple and cheap. Tim started the school year at his middle school by asking students: “What do you as a student have to say that is so important that everyone in the world needs to hear or read about it?” This was very inspiring to his students.

His podcast, MabryOnline.org, on iTunes has had 2.2 million downloads so far in 2007.

In New Zealand, every teacher and student has a blog that serves as a digital portfolio.

Authentic Assessment

The concept of childhood is very recent. Tim's grandmother started early to make a valuable contribution to her family. Her contribution was respected and essential. Children today are entertained and minimized.

When does meaningfulness start for a person? When students graduate from high school? College? Get a job? Marry? Have kids? It should start today. It’s time to refocus our thinking.

What’s on Students’ Minds?

Inspired by Tim's challenge, some Mabry students wanted to shoot a video about human embryonic stem cell research. Tim, concerned a bit about the volatility of the topic, told themm “Come up with a plan and keep me informed on every step you take.” Their next progress report was to request a field trip to Emory University to speak with Dr. Chedda, a researcher, who had committed to spending two hours with the students. Tim went with the students and their parents wanted to go, too. The researcher gave the kids the same presentation she gives to colleagues. She didn’t dumb it down, but she drilled down to explain concepts and vocabulary. Students toured the lab, saw actual stem cells, and witnessed experiments being conducted. The video they made after the visit was judged by a panel, including someone from Georgia TV.

Other topics of student-created Mabry Middle School videos:

- Children’s slave labor in the chocolate industry on the Ivory Coast
- Commercialization of pure drinking water
- Saving lives in Africa from malaria - Students collected donations for bed nets when it was aired.
- Captivity of elephants -- The teacher had shot video of elephants during a vacation in Africa. Tim rejected the student request for a field trip to Africa (!), so students filmed videos of elephants during a field trip to the Atlanta Zoo. They discovered the elephants in the zoo had a skin condition because they don’t have enough room. They researched that and raised people’s awareness.
- Organ donation

Students are not assigned a letter grade for their films. Their reward is what a thousand attendees say when they watch the project on Film Night.

The point is not the technology. The effective educator in this age of hyperconnectivity is the educator who uses tools to get students involved in their world.

Children want to be prepared to make a contribution today.

“The self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings.” - John Dewey

Tim claims his greatest fear is that No Child Left Behind will accomplish its goals and will create an entire nation of minimum achievers. Will -- or have -- the students who are achievers be overlooked because we’re emphasizing the bare minimum?

Contact Information

drtimtyson.com/feedback

drtimtyson/blog

tim@drtimtyson.com - He invited attendees to email him “if I can help you in any way.”

You can watch some of Mabry Middle School student videos by searching for MabryOnline on iTunes.

AzTEA

2007-11-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, November 3 I attended the Peak Performance conference in Flagstaff. Two conferences in one week! I was in Web 2.0 heaven! Peak Performance is the first of three conferences held around Arizona by the Arizona Technology in Education Alliance (AzTEA). This year’s conference was held at Northern Arizona University for the first time.

AzTEA conferences provide an excellent way to learn about educational applications of Web 2.0. It's an excellent opportunity to meet colleagues from around the state. Most of the presenters who teaching the sessions are working educators.

The next AzTEA conference, called the Teaching and Technology Conference, will be held in Tucson at Pueblo High School on January 26th. The final conference of the year, the WOW Way-Out West Technology Conference, will be held at ASU West on May 3.

AzTEA annual membership costs $35. Individual conference registration is only $50, and there is a discount when you register for multiple conferences. For example, you could register for the next two conferences for $80.

If this wasn't already a sweet enough deal, here are a few more incentives. You collect a conference tote and tchotchkes from the exhibitors. Breakfast and lunch are provided. A raffle for techno-goodies and gift certificates from local vendors and restaurants is held at the end of each conference. Professional development certificates that will add seven hours to your stockpile are distributed. And, if you're very, very lucky, you might win a free week at Plug and Play tech camp! (I was very lucky last spring and tech camp was a fantastic experience! A week at a 5-star resort with hot and cold running technology!)

I'm going to post some material from Peak Performance and try to chip away on the remaining Internet Librarian sessions, too.

Good Morning, SUSD Librarians!

2007-11-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Need a fun way to deliver a message (or a top notch keynote "speaker")? Try Dylan Messaging.

Be sure to put some text on each blank "page" for the best effect. A nifty possibility is presented after you send off the image to yourself or a friend. Click on the link to view it. In the lower left corner you'll see an option to retrieve the code you need to embed it in a blog -- as I have below -- or on your website.

Who said web ads had to be obnoxious?

Web 2.0 Training - Promoting Play Through Online Discovery

2007-11-02T00:15:00.000-07:00

Presenters:
Meredith Farkas, Distance Learning Libraries, Norwich University, Vermont
Helene Blowers, Public Services Technology Director for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County

Meredith's Training Experience: Five Weeks to a Social Library

Drupal was selected as the online course management system. It allows multiple blogs so each individual in class can have an individual blog but all can be accessed at one site. It can create static web pages. Chat rooms and wiki “stuff” can be employed.

MediaWiki -- the same software used by Wikipedia -- was put to use as a “sandbox for participants to play in.”

Blip.tv is similar to YouTube and is nice for both podcasts and video content. (Linda’s note: I used Blip.tv to post the second batch of conference podcasts.) It’s also a one-stop shop for multimedia. Blip.tv offers a good display of screencasts, which are like showing movies of what you’re seeing on your desktop to others.

They discovered that robust web conferencing software wasn’t free. OPAL -- a membership organization for libraries -- offered them free access to their platform.

They used both synchronous (everyone working online simultaneously) and asynchronous (log in when it’s convenient) sessions.

Examples of libraries that have implemented Web 2.0 resources and done it well are important to include.

Students were required to write one blog posting a week in which they reflected on their learning. Meredith contends this “makes the learning more sticky.” They permitted outsiders to comment on the students’ blog posts and were delighted when some of the aforementioned Big Names participated. They were even more thrilled when the Big Names wrote about students’ comments on their own blogs.

Weekly chat sessions were scheduled. They divided students into eight groups to meet with a facilitator once a week.

The final project was to create a proposal for using one or more social library tools in their libraries. The ambitiousness of some of these projects was quite impressive and very gratifying.

Everything on the Five Weeks website has a Creative Commons license. We were encouraged to steal their ideas and use them!

If you do plan your own class, be sure to provide for both experiential and reflective learning. Provide ways for people to have many different conversations about what they’re learning.

Use tools that aren’t so difficult to learn that they become a barrier. Be flexible when technology problems arise. They will!

Be open about the process and allow criticism from inside and outside the project. You may need to change your plans midstream. It’s all about Library 2.0, which is characterized by being flexible. We’re in perpetual beta!

Lessons

Playing with technology is essential to learning technology.

Reflective learning is critical -- it makes ideas stick.

Learning from peers can be more important than learning from a sage on the stage. Instructors were participants and were learning, too. They “ate their own dog food.”

Online learning can be developed on the cheap. Their only cost was server space and that expense was minimal. This form of training is very doable.

Helene’s Training Experience: Learning 2.0 and Learning 2.1: Explore ... Discover ... and PLAY!

“Learning is more important than the training aspect of it.” Learning 2.0 is another online discovery learning program.

Listen to Helene's hour-long 23 Things presentation on the SIRSI Dynix Institute site. See also: http://marylandlibrarieslearning2.blogspot.com/.

66% of the staff at Helene’s library voluntarily signed up for the program and enjoyed it. She was able to offer an MP3 player as an incentive to those who finished the class.

Explore Discover Play! is a continuation of the 23 Things program. It isn't conducted by a trainer. Each month, a different person takes over and is given the server password to post one or two new discoveries. Everyone -- us included -- can ask to be one of the monthly guides. Recently a librarian from Guam did the posting.

What can we do to keep up with these changes?

Don’t worry about the “What ifs?” Don’t delay to schedule a program until is perfect and you consider yourself an expert. Just consider yourself a player and go forth!

Definition of player: 1. One who engages in a competitive sport. 2. Somebody who plays.

If we’re going to become knowledge players, here are five tips:

1. Devote 15 minutes a day to keep up and explore new things. The information landscape is constantly changing. One of Helen's recent discoveries is Animoto. You can quickly upload photos and create a music video.

Subscribe to at least five blogs using an RSS news reader. Helene’s recommendations: LibrarianinBlack by Sarah Houghton-Jan, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, Nicole Engard’s What I Learned Today, Wired, and Learning 2.1.

3. Tag “play items” in Del.icio.us if you can’t take time to explore when you find good things. Stash play items for others. Helene’s tags her new finds “mustblogthis” so she can quickly find them when she has time to explore.

4. Create a learning blog. Build your own toolbox.

5. Play! Give yourself and others time and permission to play.

How can you help others navigate the learning maze?

Throw away your trainer/teacher title. Become a learning guide. We don’t have to know all the answers. Be like a wilderness guide and cut the reeds out of the way to guide others towards discovery. Participants can share with us and help us learn, too.

This is not about training, which is about us and our goals, but rather is about learning, which is about the learners and their interests and needs.

Two things need to be present to learn:

1. Engagement

2. Motivation

Remove the classroom

Challenge yourself as you develop learning activities. Is there a way to remove the classroom? To encourage the participants to benefit from peer-to-peer sharing?

Remember exposure is the first step towards learning. Focus on exposure to tools that learners haven’t used before. They’ll gain confidence in their skills.

Learners have as much to share as guides. Build an environment where everyone can learn.

Focus on FUN!

Both presentations are posted on SlideShare.

Tardiness Can Pay Off

2007-10-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

I had planned on attending the "Teach Me More! Fun & Gaming in Libraries" session yesterday morning, but I missed a lot of this presentation because of the Pod-O-Matic meltdown that occurred when I was trying to post the podcast of Joe Janes' keynote.

The next session I planned to attend was scheduled in the same meeting room. I tiptoed in towards the end of "Teach Me More" as the presenter was asking attendees for their good online gaming ideas related to library instruction.

I overheard one of the attendees after the session sharing an idea with the presenter. His college is getting ready to hold a campus-wide event they're calling "Are You Smarter Than a Freshman?" It’s based on Jeff Foxworthy's TV game show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” This sounded like an idea that could be “borrowed” and expanded upon in a number of ways.

Gary's Latest Web Research Update

2007-10-31T01:59:00.000-07:00

When Internet @ Schools West co-chair Susan Geiger introduced Gary Price yesterday afternoon, she said he had "librarianship in his blood."

Gary is not the most dynamic speaker at the conference, but he may be one of the most passionate. He believes in libraries and advocates for them.

If you don't subscribe to his weekly ResourceShelf newsletter, I will recommend it. (Another alternative is to set up an RSS feed for it! My notes from Steven Cohen's presentation on RSS feeds will be posted here soon.) It's unlikely that you'll use every resource Gary mentions, but some can be passed along to dazzle library customers, students, teachers, and/or administrators.

Gary likes to proactively build online collections. In a recent ResourceShelf newsletter, I discovered that he's been collecting free sources for audio books. I bookmarked most of them. I'm certain this collection will be a gold mine some day soon.

In addition to ResourceShelf, Gary offers DocuTicker, another free online service where he collects primary documents from government sites and other locations.

Gary also serves as the Director of Online Resources at Ask.com. He's made a great contribution to this search engine. If you haven't searched it since the Ask Jeeves days, go back and try it again. Note for elementary librarians: Gary announces at the end of his presentation that a new Ask for Kids will be available soon.

The podcast of Gary's presentation is here. (Please be patient -- Gary does get closer to the mic after the first minute.) You'll find the links to the resources that Gary mentions during the presentation here.

Hold the P&B, Just Give Me the J

2007-10-31T01:19:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I was delighted to hear Mary Ellen Bates rave about the Jellies as Living Art exhibit at the Monterey Aquarium. Addicts appreciate company.

On Sunday, I easily spent an hour in the darkened room that Mary Ellen finds so mesmerizing. I completely understand her fascination with those glowing white orbs that are gently floating in a darkened room lined with tanks and mirrors. Spending time watching them is close as I can come to transcendental meditation!

I packed my monopod and my new digital camera in the hope that I could finally take some photos that would do justice to the jellies. It's a tough goal. The room is quite dark, the jellies are in constant motion, and the glass reflects pinpoints of light from outside the room.

I got "in the zone" and snapped lots and lots of photos -- so many that I haven't even looked at all of them yet. Here are two to share. I've added them to my Monterey Aquarium set on Flickr. Enjoy!

Hands-On and Minds-On at the Exploratorium

2007-10-31T01:08:00.000-07:00

Presenter: Deb Hunt, The Exploratorium, San Francisco

The images and videos shown during the presentation are free and available to download for educational use.

Deb provided a history of the Exploratorium, which is located in the Palace of Fine Arts that was constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The building was designed to slowly crumble and return to the earth after the Exposition ended. Restoration projects have taken place, however, and the Exploratorium now is a model for other hands-on science museums. It is a museum of science, art, and human perception, not just science.

The Exploratorium's site is one of most visited museum websites in the world. There are over 18,000 pages and everything is free for educational use.

The Exploratorium sends out travelling exhibits to circle the world.

Tools for Teaching are at www.exploratorium.edu/educate.

Digital Library (www.exploratorium.edu/educate/dl.html) includes the Digital Assets Archive, which has 13,000 assets such as images, educational activities, Quicktime movies, streaming media, .pdfs, sound files, etc. An advanced search feature is provided. You can limit a search by resource type.

A resource to know about: The National Science Digital Library at http://www.nsdl.org includes thousands of teacher and learning resources. The Exploratorium contributes to that collection. You can search it by grade level. Links are provided to get to related documents. Many of the items in the collection have teaching tips included.
Microscope Imaging Station offers research-grade microscopes in a museum setting. A team is developing a virtual microscope and more classroom activities. They’re planning live demos and remote operation. High-resolution images and videos are provided.

“Snacks” are bite-sized versions of the Exploratorium’s full-scale exhibits. These have been compiled into books, but many are out of print. One book, Square Wheels, still is available.

The Snack Show is not on the website yet but they’re hopeful it will be soon. Three episodes have been produced.

The Exploratorium is doing webcasting (www.exploratorium.edu/webcasts/index.php or the much more memorable www.explo.tv) out on the museum floor and also in remote locations all around the world.

Also look at the Iron Science Teacher, which is modeled on the Iron Chef.

10 Cool Sites (www.exploratorium.edu/10cool) is similar to Librarians' Internet Index only it has a science focus. Anyone can recommend a cool site, and all sites have been vetted.

Sign up for the free Educator Newsletter at www.exploratorium.edu/educate/newsletter.html.

View the PowerPoint presentation at www.exo.net/dhunt/IS2007.

Contact Deb at dhunt@exploratorium.edu

Gadgets, Gadgets, & Gaming

2007-10-30T22:03:00.002-07:00

Presenters:
Barbara Fullerton, Manager, Library Relations, 10-K Wizard
Sabrina Pacifici, Editor & Publisher, LLRX.com & beSpacific.com
Aaron Schmidt, Director, North Plains Public Library, OR
Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer, and two other unnamed fellows from the Delft Public Library

This presentation is a light-hearted staple of Internet Librarian. This time the presenters snagged the Tuesday evening session.

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt - $30 - Lights up when a wireless network is detected. (“It really works!” claims Aaron, but you can't wash it with the batteries installed.)

Asustek Internet Radio - Can connect to the Internet using a standard LAN connection. Accesses 10,000 stations. $27

64 GB chip coming in 2009 (Sorry, I blinked during this one!)

Archos 30 GB 404 Camcorder - $300

Palm Centro - $399 or $99 with instant discount and a 2-yr. Sprint service agreement. This is a relatively inexpensive alternative to an iPhone.

iPhone - $399

Wireless SMS Keyboard that rolls up. Use it and save your thumbs! Powered by the cell phone. Not yet ready.

The Mandylion Password Manager manages up to 50 login records at one time. Windows only. Keyfob size. Includes a self-destruct feature! $49.99.

Trivia contest: According to Californians, where do you place memory sticks (flash drives) for safe keeping? The freezer! A prize was rewarded for the correct answer.

Cable Cat untangles your computer cables. Looks like a cute cat. $7

Canon Snap Concept. Tiny camera with a one-button interface. Wear it as a ring. Not yet released.

Sunray SX2 - solar-powered golf cart made by Cruise Car. Can go 35mph. $7000

Blackjack cell phone uses Mobile OS and has a 1.3 pixel camera. Download music and videos. $199

Meebo Firefox Sidebar - better alerts, easy link sharing. Price: free!

Touchscreen wireless patient forms clipboard. Bacteria-resistant touchpad computer. Eliminates repetitous filling out of paper forms when you go to see a physician. Use the touch pad for data entry. Free to partipating doctors.

MyGo Cane offers the potential to replace seeing eye dogs as guides for the visually impaired. Mini wheel at tip of can. Smart sensor and a camera combo capable of measuring the ground and pushing auditory feedback to the user.

Format war update: Blu-ray discs are outselling HD-DVD 2:1.

e-ink based ebook readers - Sony Reader PRS-505. Capacity: 192 MB, which will hold several hundred books. $300.

iGo Everywhere85 is for mobile gadget users. Charge all your rechargeable techno-toys for $130.

Vudu - Broadband set top box that’s an on-demand movie rental service. Price to rent a movie can be as low as $.99 up to $20 to purchase it. Price: $249

Trivia: What two computer companies are merging? Acer and Gateway

Darth Vader and Yoda slippers - $34.99. Also look for a complementing Darth Vader flashlight on eBay.

HP: Cloudprint. Print documents on any printer almost anywhere. System assigns a document code, which is transmitted to your cell phone. Print in PDF format. Free! HP has done a "soft opening" for this service so it's not getting any buzz yet.

Skitch is in beta for Mac OS X only. It simplifies the way you take screenshots and will work with Flickr. It's free! Jing is a comparable tool for Windows users.

iPod Video Googles. Plug into video iPod and project a virtual 24-inch TV. Please don't watch this while driving! No external power is required because it's powered by your iPod. 80 GB iPod can run for more than 4 hrs. Cost? $199.99.

Instant messaging: choose your application at www.readwriteweb.com/archives/instantmessaging_round-up.php.

The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is coming soon to Starbucks.

Gadgets Going Green

Pop-open cafe building looks like a folded origami building that just pops up and into place. Could it be converted into a mobile library branch?

A recycling washer and dryer was designed by an industrial design graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. It's presently just a concept design. It will recycle and reuse water while (we hope) cleaning clothes.

Gidget gadget case. Recycled case for MP3 players that's made out of billboards. $28!

Wattson monitors energy use. Price: $300

Marcus Levison-Hays Electrobike Pi is a solar-charged electro bike. It runs on a single charge for 25-30 miles. Only $7200. Get out your calculators and figure the break-even point on this purchase.

Canon Rebel XT uses 35% less power. Self cleaning. (What is it cleaning? The case?) 13% lighter. $480.

Blackle is an all-black interface for Google that uses less power on CRTs. A Desert Mountain High School student was telling me about this last week and encouraging her class to use it to save energy.

GreenPrint software eliminates those annoyingly wasteful pages with nothing on them but a page number or URL. $30-75 at www.printgreener.com.

Staple-less staplers that look like cats. They cut a tiny flap in the corner of the page that is tucked into a tiny pocket. $5.99-7.99

One laptop per child is now a reality with hand-cranked power and wireless broadband. $200/computer. They were designed for use by children in third-world countries. During November, buy one, donate one for $399.

On to the gaming portion of the program. That really was about more than gaming. Four guys from Delft in the Netherlands are visiting American libraries and shooting a documentary. I believe you can learn more about this group and see some of the footage here. I can't connect to the website. Perhaps everyone who was at the evening session is trying to get more information about the Shanachie Tour, too.

They started by demonstrating a push system that works on Bluetooth-enabled phones. What does this mean? They could -- and possibly are -- using it to push out a book chapter every day at busy places, such as a train station, in Delft. The range is 10-40 yards. They told us as librarians they want to reach out to their community and allow them to pick content out of the air.

Then the Dutch Men in Black -- they all wore black t-shirts with shiny silver LBI logos on the front -- shot some video footage of the crowd and interviewed blogger librarians Jenny Levine (the Shifted Librarian) and Sarah Houghton-Jan (the Librarian in Black) about their visions for the future of library service.

They showed clips from the library documentary they've been shooting at public libraries around the U.S. Included were clips of after-school teen gaming programs (including a frenetic Dance, Dance Revolution clip featuring two boys who end up with perfect scores) and a teen music and video production facility. A staffer at Salt Lake City Library showed them the handmade, limited edition zines they collect. Someone dressed as the Statue of Liberty in New York City said the Internet, not the library, was the trusted resource for him. Two staffers at a small library sang a song about the wonders of their Open Source automation system -- this was quite funny and included a line about being able to afford to give the staff raises.

I filled my still camera's memory card with videos of these clips. It was dim in the meeting room, however. I plan on posting some of the better ones.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

2007-10-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

There was a moderate 5.6 earthquake just outside of San Jose about 90 minutes ago. Internet Librarian is held in Monterey, which is about 55 miles away from the epicenter. When the earthquake occurred, I was sitting in a large meeting room in the convention center. We didn't really notice any shaking, but a little later one of the conference organizers announced the earthquake had knocked out the Internet network.

The woman sitting next to me looked behind her and said to the person sitting there, "Oh, I thought you were kicking the back of my chair!"

Another woman who lives in Palo Alto received a call from her husband, who said he had been concerned enough to go stand in a doorway. Another person reported a Significant Other on her home front had noticed the ceiling fan moving around.

I had been futilely trying to log into Southwest Airline's site to snag my boarding pass. My plan was to print it in the hotel's Business Center after the session ended. For the first time during the past two days, I actually reached the point where my computer could detect the wireless network. Joy of joys, I managed to log in! But then the connection stalled.

After the session ended, I returned to the hotel and a wired connection and was able to print the boarding pass.

Some Good News from EBSCO

2007-10-30T18:23:00.001-07:00

I talked with an EBSCO representative in the Exhibit Hall. She reports that Visual Search will be new and improved in January. Grokker has had "performance issues -- OK, it is slow!" she admitted in a moment of candor.

The new Visual Search will be faster. Hurray! Visual Search has been the one bright light of EBSCO database instruction as I work with high school students because the regular search interface is very unappealing to them. It needs the database equivalent of an HGTV remodeling! (Why, yes, I did happen to mention this to the rep.)

21st-Century Libraries - Getting Your Administrator on Board

2007-10-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

Presenter: Carolyn Foote, Westlake High School/Eanes ISD, Austin, TX

Carolyn’s blog is Not So Distant Future, and she’s also been involved in this month’s K12 Online Conference (K12onlineconference.org).

“Part of your schools’ participation in Web 2.0 depends on administrative support and an understanding of the advantages of these tools.” Her goal for the presentation is to share tools that will be useful to principals. Administrators hold keys to budgets and giving permission to use Web 2.0 tools.

“Radical transparency” is a concept that sometimes is associated with students having personal blogs, Facebook and MySpace sites, participating in Rate the Teacher, and snapping shots with their cellphone cameras. Some radical transparency can be negative, but there are good Web 2.0 tools that principals can use to communicate with the school community.

Uses of Web 2.0 Tools for Administrators

Promote work efficiency
Model use for staff
Communicate with parents
Provide transparency about school’s goals and activities - this can help in rough times
Promote a sense of community
Internal planning
They help a principal stay current and aware of educational trends

VoiceThread.com - PowerPoint images can be saved as JPEGs and pulled into VoiceThread. VoiceThread offers a record button so you only need a mic to add an audio track to the slides.

How?: Notes on Sharing

Factors to ponder when sharing tools with principals (from Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog):
- Simplicity
- Ubiquity
- Reliability

Foote uses Twitter to poll her network of contacts on topics, including polling principals on what to put in this presentation! Results were coming in every time she checked.

Recommended Blogs

- Leader Talk is recommended reading
- Mabry Online is no longer current but it’s a good model. Mabry is a middle school where PTA, nurse, principal, cafeteria, teachers -- just about everyone -- had blogs that were more like newsletters.
- G-Town Talks is another good model for principals.

One principal’s take on blogging: “I have been amazed at the response to my blog. It has helped convey the district initiatives, help staff and community better understand me as a leader and individual, and has helped recruit teachers...”

Educational Discourse

The Dangerously Irrelevant blog is highly recommended. See “Creating digitally interested administrators” entry, which models a conversation about blogging.
Castle - Great Blogs for Administrators. Has tools for administrators.
Edublogs - good for educational blogging. It also supports podcasting.

Speaking of Which -- Podcasting

It’s easier for an administrator to podcast than you might think.

Use a Olympus Ws-100 digital recorder (or an iPod and a Belkin TuneTalk) to record podcasts.

Check Tech Tools for Administrators, pt. 1 and 2 on the Podcasting Principal blog. The blogger explains the technology tools she uses for principals.

Gabcast - records podcasts directly from a cell phone. (Could this be Gcast?)

Use Audacity, free Open Source software to record and edit podcasts and the LAME plug-in to convert the podcast to MP3 format for posting.

Wikis

- PBwiki
- Wikispaces
- WetPaint - allows multiple user editing and allows others to be invited. Students apply to be a writer. Can see how much each student has edited. Can see how many minutes students spent on wiki.

Use wikis for inservice planning and/or use them as an internal communication tool.
Connected Libraries offers a jointly editable calendar.

Other Tools

Use the web as an awareness tool. Enter a search term on Google Alerts to have alerts sent to you when sites mention your school. Also be sure to check your school’s Wikipedia page.

Google Docs. and Spreadsheets

Google Calendar allows you to have joint calendars for different groups. These can be migrated to a wiki.

Zoho.com - writer, sheet, show, meeting, notebook, project, CRM, creator, wiki, chat, mail, and business features - all are free

Bookmarking

Del.icio.us or Furl are good services for sharing websites

Tracking Blogs

Use Bloglines to compile a page with the blogs you read. This offers one-stop shopping for new posts.

Pageflakes is similar (as is NetFives) but it offers a graphical interface. Add a “flake” - an item such as a podcast or an RSS feed.

Best source for learning about RSS is Will Richardson’s Weblogged blog. Look for the RSS tab. He’s also written a book about blogs, wikis and podcasts.

Jott

Set up an account. Set up groups within the account such as department chairs, secretaries, English Department, 4th grade teachers, etc. It’s voice activated so the principal can record a message after stating which group is to receive it. The message is processed through voice recognition software and a text message is sent to the phone numbers associated with the account. A sound file also is sent to the group members’ email accounts.

TeacherTube

Like YouTube for educators.
Watch Walkthroughs (http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=7f89ddbebc2ac9128303), an amusing video by principals for principals.

Carolyn has a VoiceThread video on analyzing information resources that she has posted on her blog.

Also take a look at Connected Libraries PBWiki. This has a link on the sidebar to her district’s Destiny technical support wisdom!

Summary: If principals use Web 2.0 tools, they can be more understanding and supportive of their use in the school setting.

Reference 2.0 Keynote -- You've Got to Listen to This!

2007-10-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

If I was one of my students, here's how I'd describe Joe Jane's keynote this morning: "OMG! The dude was so awesome. LOL!!!"

Yes, I tapped away on my computer and took notes. But this is one presentation you need to listen to, especially if you're a public services librarian. Or a library administrator. Or a person who's been a librarian for a long time. Or a person who is a brand-new librarian. Or if you wonder about the future of reference service. Or, hope against hope, if you're someone who can help increase budgets for libraries.

Joe Janes sees the future -- and the past -- and shows us the way. No worries about this being another panicked "You Are a Neanderthal" put-down, folks. His message is positive and affirming, and you'll laugh as you listen to it. Trust me.

(Note: Pod-o-matic still is not sitting up and taking nourishment. The beauty of using Web 2.0 tools is that there usually is another one or two or a hundred that will do the trick. Listen to the keynote podcast on Blip.tv.)

LOL!!!!

Photo credit: Jenny Levine, http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifted/91457978

What Are the Chances?

2007-10-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

The same woman I chatted with yesterday morning was waiting for the elevator as I rounded the corner in the hotel this morning. What are the chances we would run into each other twice in this big hotel?

Making small talk, I asked, “How was your MRI conference yesterday?” “Good, but I flickered off there for a while.”

I told her if she was attending the Internet Librarians’ conference, Flickring off would be a desirable activity.

She described all of the math involved in magnetic resonance imaging. I shuddered as she said, “They’ve done a great job of dumbing it down, though.”

She asked me if the librarians had been having fun. I assured her we were having loads of it and once again gratefully headed off to today’s keynote.

Multimedia Search

2007-10-30T01:40:00.000-07:00

Presented by Ran Hock, Online Strategies

Ran formerly worked for DIALOG. He now has his own business to teach people how to use the Internet more effectively and efficiently. He says that he’s trained more than 14,000 people in over 30 countries.

Trivia: His son is the lead singer in a rock group, the Explosion.

Ran spoke in sound bites!

Some Facts/Observations

Use different tools to search for different types of media.
Use more than one engine. This is always good advice for searching.
Indexing is a problem, but in some cases it’s getting better.
Search qualifiers are often quite limited.
Use the Big Services -- Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Live, Exalead, and AOL.

Trends in the Big Engines

Integration of multimedia results with regular Web search results.
Google’s Universal Search - a bold step backwards. Altavista did it in 2002, only without images. Universal search has maps, images.
Ask.com does a better job of integrating images, and includes news images.
Yahoo! provides images with results.
Exalead does great job of integrating images in results. Links to multimedia on right side.

Image Search Engines

Indexing problem: For most images, there are few words on web pages that are definitely descriptive of the image.
Tagging could theoretically help. But not for a billion images, not with any consistency, not without high spam risks.
When searching, start with not more than two search terms.

Major Image Search Sites

Google has high numbers, but often low relevance.
Yahoo has lower numbers, but often offers higher relevance. Includes audio in addition to images and video.
Ask.com often has very low numbers and very high relevance.
LiveSearch frequently has low numbers. Its relevancy varied.
Exalead often has low numbers; relevancy varies.
Picsearch has lower numbers, but often higher relevance.
For all, there often is very little overlap among the first 10-20 items retrieved.

Search Features

Google - content type (any, news, faces), size, file type, coloration, site/domain, safe searching
Yahoo- size, coloration, site/domain, safe search
Ask - suggestions, size, file type, coloration, related video
Live Search - size, link to video, safe search
Exalead - size, file type, coloration, layout
Picsearch - size, images-animations, coloration
Coloration searching can be useful for locating line drawings.
Limit to .gov domain to find images in the public domain.

Images - Searching Flickr

Can search everyone’s photos, your photos, groups, Flickr members, or by location.
Can browse by month, category (groups from multiple photographers, sets from individual photographers)
Can search for group names
Advanced Search, Click on Search box to get to advanced search page, where you can limit results to Creative Commons-licensed photos. (This is how I locate photos for the DMHS PodSquad podcasts and for my instructional presentations and handouts. It's time for all of us to learn about Creative Commons licensing!)

Searching for Audio

Audio found on web pages is what is usually retrieved -- i.e., podcasts and music

Audio from Web Pages - Search Engines

- Old Timers - Altavista and AllTheWeb (identical results since both owned by Yahoo. These two have better results than Yahoo! Audio Search, however.)
- Yahoo! Audio Search
- Exalead
- AOL Audio Search (music only)
- Internet Archive

Yahoo! Audio Search

Over 50 million audio files
Search by subject, artist, album, etc.
Options to limit by materials, such as podcasts, the web, and online music stores
Refine by song title, artist name, album title, and lyrics

Exalead Audio Search

Do a regular web search and narrow it to audio.
Results are nicely organized.

Internet Archive

200,000 audio recordings, mostly music
44,000 recordings of live concerts and tons of old-time radio programs are available.
Open Source Audio, primarily Creative Commons material, is provided.
Can narrow search by 12 categories

Searching for Podcasts

Yahoo! Audio Search - incorporates capability of greatly enhanced metadata using RSS enclosures
Do an audio search and narrow results to Podcasts
Podscope - speech-to-text using voice detection software. Must look for synonyms sometimes. Example: MRSA vs. staph
Everyzing - speech to text
Podcast.net over 10,000 podcasts

Searching for Music

Sites to search include iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, Napster, etc.

Video Searching

More and more searchability due to tech. apps. such as voice recognition and enhanced metadata using RSS enclosures
Both big and specialty search engines
Google, Yahoo!, Live, Exalead, AOL are big players. Google, Yahoo! and AOL allow you to upload your own video.

Google Video

Archived TV programs, educational videos, and personal productions
Viewing some videos may require a fee. However, this may be going away because Google is offering refunds.
All content is stored on either Google Video or YouTube. No videos are retrieved from other sites.
Google is backing away from transcripts.
Advanced search for language, duration, domain, genre

Yahoo! Video

Gathers video by crawling and from metadata provided directly by suppliers.
Advanced search offers format, size, duration, domain, and safe search.

AOL Video

Some content is offered for purchase.
Contains legitimate clips from news services.
Can narrow results by popularity, ratings, and most recent.

YouTube

Searchability - terms automatically ANDed, can use OR and a minus sign for NOT
Title, description, and tags are searched
Can narrow by categories.

TVEyes

Radio and TV search - real-time monitoring
Aimed at the corporate world, which wants to know what media is saying about their companies.
Fee-based but some free initial searching is available.
Indexes audio feeds.

Shadow TV

Fee-based TV monitoring/ news clipping service
Monitors over 120 stations including all major US networks and cable stations.
Closed captioning is searchable and readable.
Has a 4-yr. archive
Search by keyword and some Boolean operators.

BlinkxTV

This free service searches primarily TV with some radio.
Has 18 million hours of video.
Creates transcripts.
Can search keywords and use Boolean operators.
Can rank results by date/relevance.
Conceptual searching
Has “wallet” feature that allow you to embed a search on your web page.
Advanced search offers exact phrase and ability to restrict by content providers.

Summary

Be aware of the range of tools.
Using more than one tool will pay.
Look for search quality to improve as new technologies are implemented.

www.onstrat.com/mmsearch.html has links to all sites covered during presentation.

ran@onstrat.com
www.onstrat.com

Advocacy 2.0

2007-10-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

Presented by Aurora Jacobsen, Information Services Librarian and Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran, Advocacy Coordinator for Southeastern Libraries Cooperating (SELCO)

They feel lucky to live in Minnesota where the Legislative Library is amazingly resource-full.

Use RSS in Government to tap into your local resources. (Report: There are no listings for Arizona, but there is a link for the U.S. Federal Government.)

Political candidates are utilizing the web. They're using blogs, YouTube, mobile messaging, mapping, and other social networking sites to build an online presence.
Personal Democracy Forum - Technology is changing politics.

According to Mother Jones: “Open-source politics is the idea that social networking...will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence politica campaigns....That kid with a laptop has Karl Rove quaking in his boots. And if you believe that, we’ve got some leftover Pets.com stock to sell you.”

Do social networks make a difference?

- Dallas immigration protests: Students found out about them from MySpace and Facebook sites
- Oxfam is frequently cited for its results in this endeavor.
- Darfur - Social networking is keeping this issue in the news
- 500 volunteers signed up to work on a door-to-door campaign for Obama. All 500 showed up.

Why are librarians afraid to play politics?

Why don’t more libraries have appeals for help on their websites?
They displayed Oxfam’s page with Donate Now links for worthy causes.
Even more in depth is the ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History site, which is "Powered by: You."

Some libraries are getting more proactive about asking for help and support.
ilovelibraries.org - the beginnings of something national
Facebook Petitiion - Petition to save the Portford library from closure
I (heart) the La Crosse Public Library

Who’s doing library advocacy?

St. Paul Public Library Friends have an advocacy page.
Buffalo & Erie County - Advocate for Your Library provides links to finding state officials.
Providence Public Library's Support the Library page mentions funding cuts but donations, not political support, are solicited.
Mount Horeb Public Library provides a script for a conversation with a legislator about the library.

Mary Beth recommends linking to legislators on these pages. How have you encouraged your patrons to speak to their legislators about libraries? Every other nonprofit does it. So should you!

Librarians shouldn’t be shy about asking people to help us. They love libraries and will speak up.

Contact info.:
ajacobsen@selco.info
msancomb-moran@selco.info

Presentation online at www.selco.info/programs-services/training/session-pathfinder

Successful Web 2.0 Initiatives with Students and Teachers

2007-10-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

This session was presented by Michelle Kowalsky from Whippany Park High School in Whippany, NJ and Terry Bese from Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, CA.

Collaborative Tools

- Wiki Tools

- Google Docs and Spreadsheets - Use Google Docs to collaboratively write a piece.

- PB Wiki is quick and easy. Your wiki is up and running in 30 seconds. Students can’t collaboratively write on same document, though.

Edublogs - district IT might like this blogging alternative more than Blogger.

ClassBlogMeister - free from educator David Warlick. It offers good controls to the teacher for managing the student side. You can have aliases for students. Can moderate all comments before they are uploaded. Email David to get an account for your school.

Blog Uses for Teachers

- Establish professional development communities

- Communicate with colleagues and solidify your own thoughts

- Populate your web page with news items easily (offers RSS feed too)

Student Blog Projects

- Teach about plagiarism of text and images. Students will Google items on others’ postings that sound too good and rat out the plagiarists!

- Talk about legality of deep linking

- Integrate with RSS from the start

- Keep it scholarly; use as a resume or portfolio item

- Blog to document an ongoing project, such as a science project. For example, document plant growth.

- Blog about your school's battle of the books planning. Students posted their reviews of the books they wanted included in the battle. Students debated others’ choices. Entries that were better written got more positive comments, which tended to make students write better. Student moderators rotated and were in charge of watching the comments. Let kids be involved in setting ground rules so they will self police.

- Moblogs are cell phone friendly. Good for field trips. People can upload images and comments on site. Turn on or off mobile blogging when you set up your blog. Blogger supports mobile blogging.

Forum Tools

Purpose: To have threaded discussions with a large number of people and/or on many topics at once.

Forumer is free.

Moodle is free and has a good podcasting module. How does library get integrated into Moodle? Can follow link to library databases. Michelle has been assigned as a teacher to every class and can periodically monitor and give feedback recommending books and other information resources.

Blackboard is not free. It has discussion boards. Students have to be assigned to a library resource class to access library databases.

Forum Uses for Teachers

- Whole group discussion
(Sorry, I missed the rest of this slide.)

Forum Uses for Students

- Complete homework in a more honest way.

- Continues conversation after class has ended.

- Encourages in-person shy voices to have their opinions expressed and treated equally.

Example: Cloning forum. Teacher and librarian purposely left material out of class discussion so students could find and share. Forum was for analysis of resources they found.

Working together and giving feedback is a 21st century skill.

IM Tools

TappedIn is available for free to teachers.

Skype - Provides audio IM & video conferencing. Teachers can set up virtual office hours.

Use chat features in Gmail.

YackPack - Click on icon for person and talk if s/he is logged in. You can leave an audio message if not.

Allows Q&A

Instant Messaging for Students

Terry reported on IMing by students during college classes.

- Talk on the back channel to discuss course topics as they occur. "What did the instructor just say?"

- Allows students instant access to the teacher to get their questions answered.

- Allows for personal attention and differentiated instruction.

Instant Message Tips

- Always turn on the history.

(There were more tips but time was running out and they were racing through the final slides.)

The PowerPoint of the presentation will be posted on the InfoToday IL conference site.

Contact michelle.kowalsky@gmail.com and terrybese@gmail.com.

Get Your Game On

2007-10-29T23:04:00.001-07:00

This session was part of Internet Librarian's educational conference, Internet @ Schools West, that runs concurrently with IL. It was presented by Aaron Schmidt, who is the newish director of the North Plains Public Library in Oregon. Aaron has been one the young Turks at IL for about five years, which I guess makes him an aging young Turk. He's embracing new technologies harder than almost anyone and seems to have a heart-felt affinity for working with teens. No surprise that he was wearing a Change Agent pin! (Sharon Ewers distributed these to the SUSD teacher librarians recently.)

This session was subtitled "Gaming and Learning in the Library." He began by saying that gaming inspires creativity and obsession and that librarians should take notice. Gaming is an $11 billion industry -- more than cinema, CDs, DVDs, and book sales COMBINED. It has a huge impact on our culture but is woefully underrepresented in most school and public libraries.

Aaron mentioned a book titled Everything Bad Is Good for You by Stephen Johnson. There is a chapter where Johnson imagines the poor reviews that books would get if online games had been invented first: Reading is a solitary activity, promotes strictly linear thinking, etc.

Games reinforce:

* Risk taking and experimentation
* Collaboration
* Prioritizing
* Continuous partial attention/multi-tasking
* Persistence
* Decision making skills

All of these are skills we teach in schools and are 21st century learning behaviors.

Aaron referenced a white paper that was co-written by MIT's Henry Jenkins on the topic of media education. This white paper was developed for the MacArthur Foundation. Jenkins lists play first in the section titled "What New Skills Matter?: New Social Skills and Cultural Competencies."

"Play, as psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized, has a key role in shaping children's relationship to their bodies, tools, communities, surroundings, and knowledge. Most of children's earliest learning comes through playing with the materials at hand. Through play, children try on roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and explore their immediate environments. As they grow older, play can motivate other forms of learning."

Read this section here. (Or click on the link in the first paragraph to access the whole white paper.)

Aaron reported the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) is studying gaming and mapping information literacy standards to gaming. ASU has an information literacy game called Quarantined. Get the facts straight or your roommate dies! (At least in the game. Not in real life.)

The Nintendo DS (dual screen) has a number of educationally relevant games, including Big Brain Academy; Brain Age; Cooking Mama; Trauma Center Under the Knife (includes medical terminology); Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney (which includes a lot of reading); Hotel Dusk (an interactive ebook with map. Players have to read clues.) DSes are relatively inexpensive at $150.

Aaron delved into the logistics of equipment, which I'm not going to cover here. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send you my notes or listen to the podcast. (Yes, the soft clicking you'll hear is my fingers flying over the computer keyboard.)

The short version of his recommendation is to buy a Wii or two if you can afford them and can get them -- they're still in high demand. Wiis will bring in the kids. Dance, Dance Revolution is hot and it, along with extra dance pads, should be included in the equipment for library gaming programs. Don't have enough equipment to go around? Project the action on a big screen and kids will interact from the sidelines. Feature recommended items from your library collection because some teens will want to check out material.

Let students help by recommending, configuring, and training you on the equipment. They will enjoy this mentoring role.

30 Search Tips

2007-10-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

Mary Ellen Bates, who owns Bates Information Services, is one of the nation’s leading experts in customized information research. Her "30 Search Tips" presentation always is a must-attend session at Internet Librarian. Here's a podcast of it.

1. CustomizeGoogle.com - Firefox fix for Google that offers nice customization features. Removes ads; offers infinite scroll of results; numbers the results so you can tell where you left off; and provides links to let you easily repeat your search using other search engines.

2. Google's Experimental Search offers a new way to see search results. Add view:timeline or view:info to the search query to see different results. Can get dates, measurements, and locations highlighted in search results and images that appear on the web pages are included in the results.

3. Simply Google. Excellent overview site of all Google’s features and sites, downloads, blogs. This is a nice site to give customers to introduce them to Google’s features, filters, etc.

4. Limit your Google image search to retrieving faces by typing &imgtype=face to the end of search result’s URL. In Live.com, add filter:face to the query. Result will present images that include faces. The results are not perfect.

5. Limit your image search results to black and white images. Use the pull-down menu in Ask.com's image search results. Add filter:bw to your query in Live.com. Can combine with face search in Live.com.

6. SearchMash is an unbranded Google site. Results are sorted by web page. “Horn of Africa” was her example. Other search results -- images, blogs, videos, Wikipedia -- are presented in upper right corner of results page. URL in results list provides main URL of the site where the information item found and not the URL of the actual page. You can click on that URL to continue your search limited to the site. This is an easy way to drill down through a site and to teach customers that sites have more than one page.

7. In Google, an asterisk (*) is a placeholder for a whole word. It's kind of a NEAR operator. Example: “tax ** increase” (This tip went by way too fast!)

8. GooFresh limits a Google search to only sites recently added or updated in the index. Great for doing a repeated search. Can limit to today, yesterday, last seven days, or last 30 days. It's not perfect, but this is one way to find fresher results. Side note: Mary Ellen recommends we subscribe to the ResearchBuzz newsletter. It pulls sites that are useful for researchers -- lots of databases and invisible web content.

9. More Google date limiting. In Advanced Search, pull down the Date menu to limit to material first seen anywhere from the last 24 hours to the last year. You also can create your own date limiter by adding &as_qdr=dn to the search results page’s URL, where n represents the number of dayhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs. Her sample search was for the last nine days of results for the Colorado Rockies.

10. DoubleTrust.net compares Google and Yahoo search results. Can “prefer” results from one or the other using the Trust-o-meter. Google and Yahoo orphans -- sites unique to each browser -- are tabs at the top of the results page.

11. Yahoo’s Mindset feature. Are you researching or shopping? Hybrid cars was the example. Use slider bar to reorder results by your intent.

12. MSN’s cool Keyword Group Detection, a synonym suggestion tool. Intended for helping search engine advertisers identify similar words to buy ads for. Example: Searching for "aluminum" brings up "aluminium," the British spelling. This is not a taxonomy or a thesaurus, but it can be helpful for searchers looking for pages created by “regular” people. It also provides a way to find common misspellings. Check “parallel.”

13. I’d prefer this... At Search.live.com, add prefer:word to query. These search results are ranked higher.

14. Live Search Academic offers great search results including page; sort options; and slider bar for verbosity. On the latter, slide it one way to get the petite Cliffs Notes version of the search results, the other way for the full information. Infinite scrolling so you never have to click on a Next link. Mouse over to see abstract in a frame on the right side.

15. MSN’s Keyword Mutation Detection, a common misspelling-suggestion engine.

16. Ask.com's maps offer both driving and walking directions. Walking directions are often shorter. Local topography is taken into account.

17. Exalead.com - Use Exalead’s NEAR/n operator to limit results where words are close to each other. Example: (solar OR sun) NEAR/3 power.

18. Exalead supports true wild-card internal truncation for alternate spellings.
Examples:
- colo?r retrieves color or colour
- globali.ation - The period represents exactly one character so you'll retrieve both the American and British spellings.
- gr(a|e)y whale - a way to limit to specific alternate spellings
- paral+el+ -- The plus symbol is used to mean one or more of the preceding character. Good when you're not sure if there are multiples of a character.

19. Use the search engines’ quick answer feature. Ask’s is especially good.

20. Gigablast's limit to multiple sets. Look at query syntax in the Help file. John | Smith tells search engine to look for first name. Then it looks for sites that contain the word "Smith." Results are ranked only by the second word. Mind you, the first word has to be there, but the ranking is only by second word. Way to get common first word out of results. (I'm not sure how I'll use this, but it's one of the 30 tips, guys.)

21. SnapSearch is very visual and it offer a preview of your result in an actual connection before you visit the site. Helps those who evaluate a site by its look.

22. PageBull is a metasearch tool that's entirely visual that's useful for right-brained searchers. Results are screens of thumbnails from sites. Good for quickly finding a page you remember seeing in the recent past.

23. Squidoo is a hybrid of a web page, interactive polls, Flickr-like photos, notes from readers, and a blog. Great way to share resources with colleagues. Example was Workwalker. It's a way of building your own personalized page with a lot of interaction with users. It's better than enabling blog comments.

24. Factbites.com - The search results deliver small fact-bites in sentences. Maximum of 30 results, however. You may be able to learn what you want without visiting a site.

25. TextRunner for “information mining." It looks for assertions. Example: “what kills bacteria” TextRunner is an experiment from University of Washington that's in beta.

26. NationMaster.com is a great source for international statistics. Cool tool for presenting graphical information. The data is from WHO, World Bank, CIA World Factbook, UNESCO, NGOs, etc. Example: Confidence in social institutions

27. TouchGraph finds relationships among URLs. It's good for finding related concepts. Uses Google’s “similar pages” function. Finds related books in Amazon. Uses subject terms. Use for name searching to see how someone relates to other people.

28. Need to get a crash course on a topic? Check out podcast lectures from Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins professors.

29. OneLook is a reverse dictionary where you can find a word by its definition. Great for those senior moments where you can't think of a word. Example: Large birds.

30. Kosmix.com is a vertical search engine on steroids. Excellent clustering on health, US politics, finance, travel, autos, video games, etc. Filter a search by criteria. Can see more liberal or more conservative sites when you're looking for political views. Still in beta.

Mary Ellen offers free subscriptions to her epublication, Search Tip of the Month. I subscribe and recommend it. You can view previous tips and sign up here.

Monday's Keynote - Rainie on Internet Life

2007-10-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

Lee Rainie is the Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which collects data on social trends in web use. Rainie is a former journalist and is working on a book.

For those of you who prefer getting information straight from the source, visit my podcast of the keynote.

Rainie's keynote was characterized by its rapid delivery and the prevalence of lists.

Eight Hallmarks of New Digital Media Systems

1. Digital gadgets are prevalent.

2. The Internet is at the center of the revolution. 73% of American adults use the Internet and 93% of teens use it. Half of the population have a broadband connection at home. Broadband users are different -- they’re content creators and they also search the web differently.

3. New gadgets allow people to enjoy media, gather information, and carry on communication anywhere. Wirelessness is its own adventure. Users who are wireless, especially those who enjoy mobile wirelessness, are growing. They’re different, too because they're much more into it. They're more likely to be content creators and are weaving the Internet into the moments of their lives. 88% of college students own cell phones; 81% own digital camera; and 63% have MP3 players.

4. Ordinary citizens are content creators. 55% of online teens have created their own profile on social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. The majority of these teens are sensitive about posting personal information online. (Only 20% of online adults have such profiles.) 61% send a bulletin or group message to all of their friends. 82% send private messages to a friend. 84% post messages to a friend’s page or wall. 76% post comments to a friend’s blog. 33% of college students have blogs and regularly post to them. 54% read blogs. 12% of online adults have a blog and 35% read them. Some people don’t realize they’re reading a blog. 19% of online young adults have created an avatar -- “an icon which represents a user in a virtual reality/Internet setting” -- that interacts with others online. A scant 9% of adult Internet users have done this.

5. All these content creators have an audience. 54% of college students have read blogs, and 36% of adults do, too. Political commentators’ blogs get a lot of attention, but many more people are just journalling for their friends and family. Young people don’t like attracting a wider audience -- they’re blogging for their close friends and "two worst enemies." They don’t want parents, college admissions people, and prospective employers accessing their blogs. 14% of young people are podcasting.

6. Many are sharing what they know and feel online. 36% of young adults have rated a person, product or service online. 32% of adults have done so. These people believe this is a community service. 34% of teens have tagged online content, and 28% of adults have done that. 25% of teens have commented on videos and they post comments on blogs and photos. Only 13% of adults do this.

7. Online Americans are customizing their online experience with Web 2.0 tools. 40% of teens customize news and other information pages. Half are on specialty listservs. 25% of teens have set up RSS feeds. Some people don’t know that’s what they’re using.

8. Different people use these technologies in different ways, whether they be men and women, people of different ages, or those representing different ethnicities. Rainie categorized these users.

10 Major Technology User Groups

1. Omnivores, which are 8% of the population, are in their late 20s, are primariliy male, and represent diverse races. 89% have broadband. They tend to be students and are avid users of wireless, photo, and video. They voraciously blog and manage their own web pages. Although they're older Al Gore, and SIRSI’s Stephen Abrams are examples of this group.

2. Connectors, which are 7% of the population, are in their late 30s and predominantly female. They are into the communication aspect and are upscale. 86% have broadband. They're email fanatics + use instant messaging and cell phones. This group suspects their gadgets can do more for them, but they aren’t going to wade into user manuals to learn about the features. Examples: Diane Keaton and Jane Dysart, the IL Program Chair.

3. Lackluster Veterans, which are 8% of the population are 40ish, male dominant, and upscale. 77% have broadband access. They're not thrilled with information and communications technology. In fact, they're grumpy about being always on. They view technology as a necessary evil. Tony Soprano was Rainie's example. He shot his computer in one of the television shows.

4. Productivity Enhancers are 8% of the population. They're 40ish, upscale, and 71% have broadband at home. They represent the flip side of the lackluster veterans. They're not into blogging or creating content. Agent Jack Bauer from the TV series 24 was the example for this category.

5. Mobile Centrics are 10% of the population. They're in their 30s, middle income, and minorities rule. 37% have broadband. They love their cell phones. They're phone texters and photo takers, but not early adopters. They're likely to be single. Paris Hilton and Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless were the examples for this category.

6. Connected but Hassled are 10% of the population. They're in their mid-40s, females, white, and middle income. 80% have broadband. They go online less frequently because technology is stressful, not fun. The GEICO Caveman was the example Rainie gave for this category.

7. Inexperienced Experimenters, 8% of the population, are 50ish, female dominant, represent diverse races, and middle income. 15% have broadband access. They have less online experience and fewer technology assets, but they're willing to give things a try. Example: Marge Simpson Googling herself and finding a photo of Homer sunbathing in the nude.

8. Light but Satisfied, 15% of the population, are in their mid-fifties, white, and have below-average income. 15% have broadband access. They're the people you have to phone to have them check their email. They are late adopters who love their TV and radio as they have always been delivered. Technology doesn’t play a major role in their lives. Example: Your oldest tech-wary relative.

9. Indifferents, 11% of the population, are in their late 40s, white, and have below-average income. 12% have broadband. They don’t like technology and don’t need it. “I don’t even have the Internet. I wouldn’t even know how to use it.” This quote is from Rainie's example who is a football coach. (The Chiefs? Sorry, I'm football illiterate!)

10. The Off the Network category represents 15% of the population. They're in their mid-60s, female, diverse racially, and the poorest group. None of them have broadband. They believe the Internet is full of porn and bad information so they're tech wary. They use traditional media. Example: Aunt Bee from Mayberry

The surprises from this study include how large the low-tech crowd is -- 49% -- and how small the technophile group is -- only 8%.

We're far from the mature phase of Internet technology adoption and use in the United States. There's a lot of technological capability sitting idle in people’s hands and homes.

“Demand pull” dimension of technology adoption lags “supply push” considerably. It’s going to take people a while to tap in. Librarians need to keep this in mind, especially with older patrons. (SPLers: Schedule more Internet classes!)

What type are you? Take the quiz: www.pewinternet.org/quiz/quiz.asp. Rainie claimed we would take the quiz and be mad about the category we fell into.

Here is what connectivity is doing to us:

* As the volume of information grows; the Long Tail expands. Individual books, bloggers, etc. can garner bigger audiences.
* The velocity of information increases and "smart mobs" appear. Simple example of smart mobbing: teens feel they have a social obligation to text friends with movie reviews as they leave the theater.
* Venues of information intersecting with people multiply.
* Venturing (searching) for information changes. Search strategies and expectations spread in the Google era. People think the information they need is out there and can be quickly accessed.
* The vigilance of information either truncates or elongates attention. People can suffer from continuous partial attention or they do "deep dives" into subjects of interest. Some people are always on, even on vacations. They're concerned they'll miss helpful input.
* Valence (relevance) of information improves.
* Vetting of information becomes more social. People ping their social networks to check with friends if they don't trust information. They used to check with their librarian!
* Viewing of information is disaggregated and more horizontal. Per Allen Renear at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, new reading strategies emerge as coping mechanisms. Examples: People scan abstracts rather than reading full articles. They read headlines rather than bodies of stories. They skim everything.
* Voting on and ventilating about information proliferates.
* inVention of information and visibility of new creators is enabled.

Rainie advised us to be confident in what we already know about how to meet people’s reference and entertainment (enlightenment) needs. The elements of our training as librarians are preeminent in this age. We know how to find, assess, and act on information. The value of these skills is more important than ever. Librarians know about citizens and their questions. We just have (or need) new ways of serving them.

Memorable quote: Rainie said people used to just read content, but now they can create their own. "Now the audience is on stage."

Administrivia, Retronyms, and a Beef

2007-10-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

This year there are 1380 attendees at Internet Librarian, up from 1250 last year. There are 102 exhibitors -- meaning companies with booths in the Exhibit Hall.

The Publisher/President of Information Today, Tom Hogan, introduced IL attendees to a new word today. Retronym is "a word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development." The world had guitars, plain and simple, until an electric guitar was innovated. Now we call the original type of guitar an acoustic guitar. Other examples of retronyms are bar soap, mainframe computer, regular coffee, whole milk, classical music, cloth diaper, and day baseball.

Nancy Nelson, who was an editor for one of Information Today's journals, coined the term "Internet librarian" in 1993 as the title of a regular column in the magazine. “Librarians are becoming convinced that the Internet is desirable...” she wrote. Tom challenged us to enter a contest to find a retronym for a non-Internet librarian. One of the attendees sitting close to me muttered, "Unemployed librarian." Do you have a good idea for this contest? I'll submit it!

There is some grumbling about the lack of Internet access at the Internet Librarian conference. Web access in my hotel room costs $9.95/day, but that doesn't mean I have access to the web in the same hotel's meeting rooms. This morning it was announced that wireless access would be available in the main conference center. It didn't work in any of the meeting rooms in which I attended sessions.

This explains the delay in blog postings, folks. I have to come back to my room and plug in my computer!

An Auspicious Beginning

2007-10-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was waiting for the elevator this morning in the hotel with a fellow graying middle-aged woman in sensible shoes. I asked, “Are you going to the conference today?”

“Yes, but it’s a different conference at another hotel. We won't have as much fun as you librarians have.”

Turns out she’s attending a physics conference focusing on magnetic resonance imaging. I wished her a fun day full of new insights and gratefully headed into the IL keynote.

To Link or Not to Link

2007-10-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

Many sessions at Internet Librarian are jam-packed with recommended URLs. Last year I labored late every night to ensure that each site I mentioned included a link to connect readers to it. Given the quantity of sites mentioned each day, this was a HUGE job!

I sat next to the LibrarianInBlack, Sarah Houghton-Jan, at the closing session. She had been effortlessly blogging the conference. Sarah recommended not taking the time to link each and every website mentioned during the sessions. She contended that readers will seek out the resources that interest them.

Rest assured that I'll try to provide links to sites that have more complex URLs. If you can't easily locate a site for which I don't provide a link, please let me know.

Internet Librarian 2007

2007-10-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

Internet Librarian 2007 is my first conference of this fiscal/school year. Please check in Monday, October 29nd through Wednesday, October 31st as I attempt to keep up with the presenters! So much to blog, so little time...

Take a look at the conference schedule and exhibitor list here. Let me know if you have any questions or comments that you would like to have passed along to a presenter or exhibitor.