Monday, July 30, 2007
where do we go from here?
Another thing I'm really happy about is that several people have commented they would like to stay in touch after the class. I think this is really valuable - as we actually try to use these technologies in our workplaces, we can share stories and ideas, successes, and roadblocks.
I know I will stay on twitter(and investigate pownce), and I will keep looking at classmates' blogs, but I wonder if we would use a common space if we set one up. For example, we could - very simply - share a Google docs document and just keep adding onto the end of it with our thoughts, concerns, experiences, as we try our new tools out, kind of like a message board, just in a document. Or we could set up a wiki. I guess I would vote for a wiki (not that I've set one up yet, but this would be the perfect time to learn....) only because we could use RSS to know if someone has added a new comment.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
DOPA
DOPA is very disturbing, but reading the ‘talk’ page of the DOPA Wikipedia page was pretty disturbing, too. Some nasty behavior by participants is perpetually there for all the world to see. (as an aside, it certainly didn’t encourage me to make a contribution to a Wikipedia page anytime soon..)
Reading the ‘talk’ page did, however, give me some insight into the history of the bill, and the implications. One interpretation of the law that was voiced there mentioned that the law may actually prevent access to Wikipedia itself (due to the “unregulated” content of the talk pages). That would be a real loss. Reaching back to last semester’s reference course (seems like a long time ago already…) I went to the Thomas website, and see that it is still in the House Subcommittee on Technology and the Internet. So, it’s not carved in stone yet. (And hey, isn’t that’ an RSS aggregator collecting information on DOPA at http://www.andycarvin.com/dopa.html ? One more link for my Google Reader….)
You know, I can understand the thinking behind H.R. 1120. Do we want people in libraries, public, or school, to be able get to a porn site, unrestricted? Do we want them soliciting minors? I think most people would say ‘no’. But, don’t most libraries have acceptable use policies that rule out using the internet for pornography, etc? So really, it’s the ‘social software’ that’s presenting the difficulty here; it’s open, so anyone can register, and that includes people you don’t want to be talking to your teenager. But, lots of software is going ‘social’. You can have a chat session within a Google Spreadsheet from the ‘discuss’ tab! So how on earth do you enforce restrictions?!?! You effectively can’t, and so you just have to teach kids to not do things that are dangerous. Repeatedly. And hope they listen.
Technology isn’t bad or good, it’s what we do with it. But it is certainly a big part of our lives (and getting bigger by the minute). That’s sort of the theme of this course, isn’t it? It’s up to people in education to find ways to incorporate it, explore it, find positive uses, in short, to use it to help us and our students work and learn.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
selling tech & keeping up
A library blog seems like a great place to start - it seems like it will give us so much freedom to communicate with the entire school community. I am hoping we can get permission to have a link to it from the school website, that's the first hurdle to overcome. It won't do any good to have these tools if no one can see them! That's a big benefit of our final project - thinking through all the steps of actually using some of these technologies in a real setting. If we can make a library blog and teachers start to use it, they may think about it as a teaching tool in their own classrooms.
I'm wondering how well I'm going to do, after this course, and after my program is over, staying on top of new technologies. I know there are many ways to do that (and RSS will be very helpful!) But then there's library journals, professional organizations, our regional library cooperative, school and professional listservs. It seems a little overwhelming, but hopefully I'll figure out how to do enough of it to stay current. Even as we take this course, things are changing underfoot! Understanding that we are never finished learning is key.
Friday, July 13, 2007
converging worlds
My work and school worlds really seem to be converging, which is an interesting and wonderful phenomenon.
During the course of LIS460, I began to explore LibraryThing – a classmate is making an encyclopedia entry for it, and it caught my eye. I’ve been communicating with the folks who provide LibraryThing, and it looks as if it might be a very nice interim (or even final?) solution for storing book data for our little library. I can, pretty easily, retrofit the circulation software that I wrote, so that it works with an Excel spreadsheet exported from LibraryThing. And– when you give LibraryThing an ISBN, it looks the book up in LOC and/or amazon.com and returns nearly a full MARC record – including Dewey Decimal number! Two birds with one stone!
I also started to investigate open source software for libraries, and the other day a library listserv that I monitor had a message about code4libs, a forum of developers who write software (open source, mostly) for libraries, in which they share their expertise. So, while I don’t know what ILS system we will ultimately choose, it certainly is fascinating to me how all these things are coming into my field of vision, from different directions, informing me, and giving us so many more options that I would have imagined a year ago.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
more on podcasting
Once again, this past week, I took my laptop in my car (not recommended) and played it, full-volume, so that I could listen to a podcast as I did one of my many errands behind the wheel. Good thing I didn’t have to stop short! It certainly was a far cry from the portability of an iPod or mp3 player, but it solved the problem of the moment. But I bet it looked pretty strange to anyone who might have happened to notice what I was doing :-)
I was a much happier camper when I finally figure out how to “rewind” a podcast that I was playing in iTunes or Windows Media Player. It’s easy to do on an iPod, but it wasn’t obvious to me when running the software on my computer. Learning how to do this definitely let me be a lot friendlier to people who tried to interrupt me 35 minutes into a 40-minute podcast.
Making a podcast, on the other hand, was an entirely different experience. I definitely had fun playing with Audacity, and I thought it was very easy to learn. Compared to multimedia software I struggled to learn this past year, it was a dream, and I expect it will be much more useful to me in a school setting, in the long term, than being able to design webpages and build animations. I haven’t yet listened to all of the podcasts that our class has recorded, but the ones I’ve heard thus far were excellent, and so varied!
On the other hand, I was totally unprepared for the way I reacted to being recorded – initially, I completely froze! It’s really funny, I didn’t expect this at all, because I didn’t have an audience staring at me. I didn't expect stage fright!
Friday, June 29, 2007
podscast ramblings
Warning – whine ahead.
I took an informal survey of the handful of people in my life who use iPods & mp3 players regularly. All of them do not update them frequently. They (or someone else in their family) set them up periodically with new playlists, and off they go. When the player doesn’t work, they leave them alone for awhile, and hope for the best. Sometimes they work later, sometimes not. Not very comprehensive or scientific study, I admit, but it makes me wonder about how many students really would/could use this technology for educational purposes, and how much teachers can rely on it. It would seem that if you were to plan a lesson around it, you would have to have a good backup plan!
Monday, June 18, 2007
me + blog = ?
I am, however, a muller and a polisher, which perhaps lends itself more to message threads, where one can - and I do - revise endlessly before "publishing". My sense is that blogging is more off-the-cuff, perhaps more like a casual discussion than a carefully worded comment. I'm just not used to the idea of my conversations appear online, for anyone else to read! Perhaps I will become more comfortable with the concept as the weeks go by.
It's not that I'm not a reflective practitioner, as they say. Perhaps I reflect too much! Regardless, I wonder why anyone would want to read my ramblings, or would have the time to do so. I guess I fall into the category of those who would prefer to ignore blogs, as Will Richardson says, in our textbook, because of the difficulty in assessing the reliability of the information therein (even at the risk of missing some important ideas).
However, information literacy education is near and dear to my heart, one of the primary reasons I want to work in a school library. It has become abundantly clear to me in reading Richardson that the world our students do - and will - live in is markedly different from the one I grew up in, which means they will need to become expert at dealing with Too Much Information. So I can't really keep my head in the sand about blogs any longer. As Richardson says, "there is no better way to understand the impact of the Read/Write Web than by becoming a part of it." (p. 40)