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why books such as Markus Zusak’s Book Thief and Annika Thor’s Faraway Island, both set during the Holocaust, and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains, set during the American Revolution, weren’t given any “educational value.” The editor in chief had no clear answers, but those books have now been awarded “educational value” on Common Sense Media’s site. It is clear to the nine organizations that are working hard to protect children and young adult’s freedom to read that Common Sense Media is a moving target, and their piecemeal response to such questions won’t fix what is at heart a misguided and dangerous concept.
Wow! I had no idea. I've used the Internet saftey information and videos but didn't know about the book ratings.
While Common Sense Media isn’t censoring anything, it is providing a tool for censors. There is already a documented case in the Midwest where a book was removed from a school library based solely on a Common Sense review. Common Sense Media allows users to filter books by “on,” “off,” and “iffy” ratings. And reviewers are instructed to point out anything “controversial.” Such warnings encourage site browsers to take things out of context instead of looking at books as a whole.
Bombs, lips, and martini glasses! Indeed, let them be a warning. We must be proactive in helping parents understand that rating books is dangerous. Otherwise, more censorship bombs are sure to explode.
If you had asked me a year ago what bombs, lips, and martini glasses have in common, I would have answered, “A fraternity party.” Now I have a different answer. It’s called Common Sense Media. This not-for-profit Web-based organization is in the business of using a “rating” system to review all types of media that target children, but their “ratings” of books are especially disingenuous. They claim that they want to keep parents informed. Informed about what? What their children should read or what they shouldn’t read?
"Research Entrepreneurs," lays out a future in which "individual researchers are the stars of the story."
Reuse and Recycle," describes a gloomier 2030 world in which "disinvestment in the research enterprise has cut across society." With fewer resources to support pathbreaking new work, research projects depend on reusing existing "knowledge resources" as well as "mass-market technology infrastructure."
The "crowd/cloud" approach is widespread, producing information that is "ubiquitous but low value."
"computational approaches to data analysis" rule the research world. Scholars in the humanities as well as the sciences "have been forced to align themselves around data stores and computation capacity that addresses large-scale research questions within their research field."
"Global Followers," describes a research climate much like what we know now, except that the Middle East and Asia take the lead in providing money and support for the research enterprise.
nstitutions as well as individual scholars will follow the lead of those parts of the world, which will also set the "cultural norms" that govern research. That eastward shift affects "conceptions of intellectual property, research on human subjects, individual privacy, etc.," according to the scenario. "Researchers bend to the prevailing wind rather than imposing Western norms on the cultures that increasingly lead the enterprise."
"I plan to use the scenarios to engage staff and key stakeholders in mapping things out,"
The cumulative point made by the scenarios is that librarians should think imaginatively about what could happen and not get hamstrung by too-narrow expectations. (The phrase "adapt or die" comes to mind.)
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.
Plato was concerned that the new-fangled idea of writing stuff down would dilute scholarship and make men lazy
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
argued between those who consider all fiction foul or useless and those who see no harm in it at all
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.
Our job is to keep ideas and make them available.
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.
librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas
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:
For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends
typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
ACT ONE : NETWORK EFFECTS
Friendster was designed as to be an online dating site.
MySpace aimed to attract all of those being ejected from Friendster
Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions
And only in 2006, did they open to all.
in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred
college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook
urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace
At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site
the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.
do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users
all fine and well if everyone can get access to the same platform, but when that's not the case, new problems emerge.
ACT TWO : YOUTH VS. ADULTS
showcases the ways in which some tools are used differently by different groups.
For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls
Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena.
Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.
Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no.
many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue
We design social media for an intended audience but aren't always prepared for network effects or the different use cases that emerge when people decide to repurpose their technology.
The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.
you are probably even aware of how inaccurate the public portrait of risk is
ACT THREE : RESHAPING PUBLICS
I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the crux of what makes the phenomena we're seeing so different from unmediated phenomena.
1. Persistence.
The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.
You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it
2. Replicability.
much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.
3. Searchability.
Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips
4. Scalability.
Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school
5. (de)locatability.
This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.
Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics.
1. Invisible Audiences.
lurkers who are present at the moment
visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment
having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience
2. Collapsed Contexts
Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
3. Blurring of Public and Private
As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.
One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem.
Important summary of how social media works for youth and adults, and how five properties and three dynamics have a systematic affect that we all must deal with.
On a path to boost student research skills, I have been working with freshmen English teachers and administration to evaluate the research skills of incoming freshmen. This past week, we had all freshmen classes take an assessment that is considered a standard in this area. (The test shall remain nameless.) Its focus is on particular research skills. It asks questions about things such as Boolean searching, MLA format, etc. etc. I immediately follow the test by teaching a class about information during the second half of the period.
What about unemployment is the exist question in the heart of every job seeker to the government of his country. Very first we should be known what is the exact meaning of unemployment ? unemployment's exact meaning is the less number of jobs in front of the job seekers quantity.
Many parents want to spend more time with their kids, but don't always know what to do. Parents needs something that can help educate their kids, that is where The Idea Board comes in. The Idea Boa...
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Homeschooling can be a good way for your children to learn, but if they don't have a good teacher, then your homeschooling efforts will be worthless. A good teacher is one of the most important asp...
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Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
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Sharon talks about inquiry being a disposition cultivated during teaching and learning, rather than a process that "gets done" by students. She talks about successful inquiry leading to deep understanding, giving examples from her own experiences.
jenibo on 20 Oct 13"Although Wikipedia is a great place to find information, it's subject to incomplete citations, biased views, and inaccuracies. And when you absolutely have to have undisputable facts, that's just not good enough. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives out there that can deliver with high quality accuracy, and we've listed 25 of the best here."
Karen Keighery on 31 Oct 13this article written in 2008 is a bit old now and some of the 25 online sources mentioned no longer exist and are of questionable quality
