This is a webquest designed by Camilla Elliott.
"A new tourist company, 'Antarctic Tours', wants to establish monthly trekking tours in the Antarctic for four months from November to the end of February. They plan to take 400 trekkers to Antarctica during this four months each year. The Australian government has requested that an Environmental Impact Team explore the impact of this tourism proposal on the animals and natural environment of Antarctica. The Environmental Impact Team will be made up of a Tour Operator, an Environmentalist, a Scientist and a Politician. This Team will present a report to the government with recommendations to either support or argue against giving the go ahead for 'Antarctic Tours' to begin operations in November this year"
"So what is the vessay? It's a voicethread essay. My students are required to write their persuasive essay. It will require a thesis that can be argued, transition words to make their writing fluid, and evidence from the text to support their point. Then they will need to find pictures to represent their argument and, finally, record it as a voice thread."
second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces
other reader's aids
codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
fourth great change, electronic communication
movable type to the Internet, 524 years;
writing to the codex, 4,300 years;
codex to movable type, 1,150 years;
would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
Internet to search engines, nineteen years
search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years;
continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
News is not what happened but a story about what happened.
aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission
Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
eighteen of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio had never before been printed
only two were reprinted without change from earlier quarto editions
extual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.
Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
We have come to the problems posed by Google Book Search.
Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford
scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
will make research libraries obsolete
2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
5. Google will make mistakes.
Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better.
6. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google's copies will last.
all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species
7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology.
No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library.
I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
May 15, 1924 issue of Library Journal, Helen E. Haines wrote about contemporary fiction
It offers constant problems and perplexities
strong role in domesticating
Booklist, Bill Ott, likes to say that librarians are divided into information people and story people
Librarians, historically, have been at the place where new formats and new technologies happen to people in their daily lives.
argued between those who consider all fiction foul or useless and those who see no harm in it at all
even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally
I thought perhaps she would extend the You-Tube example back to the oral and getting away from the written word
change is our only certainty
Plato was concerned that the new-fangled idea of writing stuff down would dilute scholarship and make men lazy
Jamie Larue, director of the Douglas Public Library in Castle Rock, Colorado, calls librarians �the keepers of the books, the answerers of questions, and the tellers of tales.
librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas
Le Guin's words remind me of is how important it is to keep ideas that we do not comprehend, or believe in, or agree with; to keep them safe, and to keep them available. If librarians don't do this, who will? There is no other profession enjoined to preserve and disseminate all the truths of humankind that is our job.
also need to remember that some ideas thought worthless today may turn out to be the bedrock of tomorrow's truths
available not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas and silly ideas and yes, even dangerous and wicked ideas.
Our job is to keep ideas and make them available.
readers need to have available to them truth in all its myriad guises, light and dark, easy and difficult
core values of librarianship are access and service
always like to mention a few books that I think my audiences would enjoy
Susan Patron's The Higher Power of Lucky.
Ann Bausum's With Courage and Cloth
Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel
nformation person and a story person
Technology is our campfire. Change is what happens:
“I think the definition of writing is shifting,” Boardman said. “I don’t think writing happens with just words anymore.”
In his classes, Boardman teaches students how to express their ideas and how to tell stories —and he encourages them to use video, music, recorded voices and whatever other media will best allow them to communicate effectively. He is part of a vanguard of educators, technologists, intellectuals and writers who are reimagining the very meaning of writing and reading.
The keys to understanding this new perspective on writing and reading lie in notions of collaboration and being social. More specifically, it’s believing that collaboration and increased socialization around activities like reading and writing is a good idea.
“We find when writing moves online, the connections between ideas and people are much more apparent than they are in the context of a printed book,”
transmedia work
The MIT Media Lab tagged collaboration as one of the key literacies of the 21st century, and it’s now so much a part of the digital learning conversation as to be nearly rote. In his new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Stephen Johnson argues that ideas get better the more they’re exposed to outside influences.
Laura Flemming is an elementary school library media specialist in River Edge, N.J. About three years ago, she came across a hybrid book—half digital, half traditional—called “Skeleton Creek” by Patrick Carmen.
“The 6th graders were running down to library class, banging down the door to get in, which you don’t often see,” Flemming said.
It is not only the act of writing that is changing. It’s reading, too. Stein points to a 10-year-old he met in London recently. The boy reads for a bit, goes to Google when he wants to learn more about a particular topic, chats online with his friend who are reading the same book, and then goes back to reading.
“We tell our kids we want them to know what it’s like to walk in the shoes of the main character,” Flemming said. “I’ve had more than one child tell me that before they read ‘Inanimate Alice,’ they didn’t know what that felt like.”
Stein says it’s better to take advantage of new technologies to push the culture in the direction you want it to go. Stein is fully aware of the political and cultural implications of his vision of the future of reading and writing, which shifts the emphasis away from the individual and onto the community. It’s asking people to understand that authored works are part of a larger flow of ideas and information.