Group items tagged

This article mentions the court case involving the Camdenton school district, where the library's use of filtering was found to be unconstitutional. The school district agreed to stop blocking LGBT websites, submitted to 18 months of monitoring, and had to pay $125,000 in attorneys' fees.

What sounds like a cautionary tale about keeping libraries open in a time of slashed budgets and electronic resources becomes a concerning episode of institutional decline of libraries in the Philadelphia school system as some "libraries" have operated for years without staff and functioning as essentially a store room.

I posted something about this a couple weeks ago and then found this. Very interesting. We'll see how it plays out, but feels very 1984.

A TED presentation from Sugata Mitra about designing a "School in the Cloud," to create a SOLE or Self Organized Learning Environment.

Big brother indeed. This article talks about using RFID tags to track students for attendance so schools can get funding, which is good. But then they go on to say the cards aren't encrypted so it would be super easy to clone one, which is bad. The first thing I thought of was, why not just hand it off to somebody you had your first class with then you would present and accounted for-doesn't seem hard. I also liked that the parents were up in arms some places about their kids being tracked, but kids are used to it. If they aren't tracked by their parents, they are most likely online via social media and are being tracked there too. Also the only health risk mentioned is radiation not the fact that you have to carry this thing every where-gross, I hate to see what these cards look like at the end of the year.

Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational thinking and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. The cloud hosted system is now available to teachers, schools and districts

The third of four New York Times articles; written by a school librarian and focusing on how libraries are a participatory culture.

When I read the first part of the article I thought "Oh e-books and other electronic resources. That's cool." But then I read on-I just couldn't believe the books were "lost" where have all the books gone? Very interesting article and some of the comments brought up other good points too.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design's website for their "Labrary" (Library Laboratory) that tests out library design ideas on a real world 1:1 scale.

Librarians may find this paragraph interesting: The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

An article I find interesting not so much because it says anything new but that it repeats something that was said even when I was in library school, that with electronic communication we have too much information which leads to burnout or being overwhelmed, and all this time there still has not been a consistent approach to managing or streamlining it.

This article is notable for how the New York Public Library is dealing with changes in technology and readership with the Central Library Plan, which is generating controversy. In steps similar to what other libraries have done a good portion of the books will be stored at an off-site facility, while older buildings will be sold and services centered on the main library. Interestingly, the off-site storage will also be used to allow New York City schools to order books directly from it.

Normally I'd link to the article itself but the comments on the slashdot page are worth a read. "Will they ban 3D printers?" "Knowing our congress they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools... you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!" Sad but true. These are really the kinds of discussions that we will have to have as a society in the very near term. Libraries should be at the forefront of this discussion - they've always had to fight to protects peoples rights to access information. If they have public access 3D printers it's only a matter of time before the government comes knocking wanting to see the shape files that their patrons have been printing just like they do with circulation records and internet history.

"In Our Mothers' House" was removed from shelves of elementary school libraries after a group of parents objected to the content. Librarians are being asked to supply names of other books containing gay and lesbian characters.

After the opening keynote at our conference, this seemed relevant.  I think the need for data curation will become more and more relevant as we move to a paperless society.  Though, given the challenges of what to preserve and how, that day may be long in coming.

Supreme Librarians in Metaspace! Definitely take a look at this promotional comic by Emporia State University School of Library and Information Management. Click on the cover to go to the comic.

Surprise, surprise... Metaspace is populated with cats.

This was another session which showed that with community spaces if you build it they will come. I interviewed at this library in 1996 right after graduate school and it was and still is a large warehouse type building in 70's style. One of the substantial changes to Chattanooga since then is it is known as the "Gig City" for large deployment of gigabit Internet which has brought may Internet developers to the area. The development of the attic into a community space stressed the importance of community outreach and feedback as a sort of ecosystem to keep a project viable.

An outsider view of how Overdrive presents itself as a corporate entity to those not in the library profession, and apparent plans to expand into the school library market.

An interesting project that intends to combine Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) with Art to make STEAM and thus make these programs accessible to more students. While it has practical use at the pre-school and elementary level I can't see much use it would be for higher levels of education.

This article is about Google Cultural Institute. So far there are 42 exhibitions about 42 historical events. This article is pretty straightforward, but you should checkout the real deal : http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/#!home All of these are beautifully done and full of great detail. Would be perfect for school projects.