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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Robin Cicchetti

Robin Cicchetti

Research tool - Google Docs Help - 34 views

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    Google Docs has add a research tool to facilitate web searches. Filters for images, quotes, license, etc. help limit the search.
Robin Cicchetti

Blogs vs. Term Papers - NYTimes.com - 23 views

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    Discusses the merits of ditching the traditional research paper in favor of blogs. Some excellent points.
Robin Cicchetti

The Business Case for Reading Novels - Anne Kreamer - Harvard Business Review - 14 views

  • in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that "a novel is a direct impression of life," he was more right than he knew.
  • they discovered "a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities" allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects' social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.
  • It's when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience.
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    Data on the benefits of reading fiction.
Robin Cicchetti

Ultimate Reading List - 39 views

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    400 high interest titles from Teenreads.com. Consider for inclusion in summer reading lists or for a reading incentive program.
Robin Cicchetti

Ten recent algorithm changes - Inside Search - 13 views

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    Inside recent changes to the Google algorithm. This excellent post gives an overview of recent changes (500+) made over the past few weeks.
Robin Cicchetti

Online LIS Education-or Not | Office Hours - 11 views

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    Michael Stephens sums up the switch to digital resources beautifully.  "I may have a bit of a bias, but I would much rather my students make the short trip to their desks and computers instead of commuting across town or farther. Time saved on travel could roll over into time spent on coursework or finding balance among school, work, and life. " Check out his post for the full article. 
Robin Cicchetti

Wikipedia is Not Wicked!| The Committed Sardine - 9 views

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    Teaching Wikipedia. Great post from Gwyneth Ann Jones.
Robin Cicchetti

It's official: Google wants to own your online identity - Tech News and Analysis - 7 views

    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Users forfeit the ownership of their user data to Google.
  • Google’s purpose was clearly to “provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.
  • obvious search-related rationale for launching a social network like Google+, since indexing and mining that kind of activity can help the company provide better “social search” results. But the real-name issue has more to do with Google’s other business: namely, advertising.
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  • The growth of Google+ provides a reason for people to create Google profiles, and that data — along with their activity on the network and through +1 buttons — goes into the vast Google cyberplex where it can be crunched and indexed and codified in a hundred different ways
  • excludes potentially valuable viewpoints that might be expressed by political dissidents and others who prefer to remain anonymous. In effect, Schmidt said Google isn’t interested in changing its policies to accommodate those kinds of users: if people want to remain anonymous, he said, then they shouldn’t use Google+.
  • the reason Google needs users with real names is that the company sees Google+ as the core of an identity platform it is building that can be used for other things:
  • n identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information
Robin Cicchetti

Setting up a library iPad program - 67 views

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    Guidelines and policies to implement a circulating iPad collection. Good info on settings, management and iTunes.
Robin Cicchetti

Is Social Media Ruining Students? - 27 views

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    Excellent infographic on the impact of social media on students.
Robin Cicchetti

Erasing Individual's Digital Past - NYTimes.com - 31 views

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    Online reputation managers - a new job in the digital age. For a hefty fee they can be hired to clean up your digital footprint. The toughest fix is photos on Google images. Nobody seems to be able to remove images. Useful article for lessons and cautionary tales about your digital footprint.
Robin Cicchetti

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian - 20 views

  • His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      How can this idea be applied to information skills and school libraries?
  • a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: "Yeah – we'll have to keep an eye on that."
  • Until recently, the debate over "digital distraction" has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't.
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  • "we were not meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse."
  • "the dictator's dilemma".
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    Fascinating article about the next generation of the ubiquitous web and the implications. Good definition of "gamification." This is excellent background information for strategic planning and discussing the potential implications on education.
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    Fascinating article about the next generation of the ubiquitous web and the implications. Good definition of "gamification." This is excellent background information for strategic planning and discussing the potential implications on education.
Robin Cicchetti

Invisible Web: What it is, Why it exists, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity - 21 views

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    Invisible web, search tools, curriculum. Incorporate this into web search lessons.
Robin Cicchetti

Born Digital, in Video: Identities | Berkman Center - 20 views

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    3 minute video on digital natives and the permanence of their digital footprint. From the Berkman Center, Harvard University.
Robin Cicchetti

On the Eve of Our Kindle Pilot Project « The Unquiet Librarian - 13 views

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    Buffy Hamilton's excellent guide on her Kindle roll out. Good links with how-to and advice.
Robin Cicchetti

The End of the Textbook as We Know It - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 11 views

  • Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).
  • Why electronic copies? Well, they're far cheaper to produce than printed texts, making a bulk purchase more feasible
  • An Indiana company called Courseload hopes to make the model more widespread, by serving as a broker for colleges willing to impose the requirement on students. And it is not alone.
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  • The real champions of the change are the college officials signing the deals.
  • "Our game plan is to bring the cost of textbooks down by 75 to 80 percent."
  • In its standard model, Flat World offers free access to its textbooks while students are online. If students want to download a copy to their own computers, they must pay $24.95 for a PDF (a print edition costs about $30)
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    Unusually informative article on the state of digital texts in 2010. Short and concise. Good info for librarian tech leaders.
Robin Cicchetti

Rushdie's Stream library & Borges' Print library»Seeing the picture - 3 views

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    Fascinating blog post on the future of libraries, drawing from works by Salman Rushdie and Jorge Luis Borges. This is a quick but satisfying read.
Robin Cicchetti

4 Very Different Futures Are Imagined for Research Libraries - Libraries - The Chronicl... - 0 views

  • "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."
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  • "Disciplines in Charge,"
  • "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.)
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    Discusses changing information formats and scenarios of response. Good article to reference in 5 year plans.
Robin Cicchetti

BBC News - World News America - Why everyone has to be a historian in the digital age - 11 views

  • Physically this data might exist somewhere but the challenge is making it accessible to future historians.
  • "The average life of a web page, as best as we can tell, is about 100 days before it is either updated or disappears.
  • "We are grappling with digital migration as a means of preservation, rather than analogue, paper-based preservation. The Twitter archive ratchets up this activity enormously."
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  • Twitter donated its digital archive of public tweets to the Library of Congress in April 2010.
  • "So not only is everyone producing history, everyone has access to history and everyone has to be a historian in the digital age."
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    Succinct article about the transience of digital information and the impact on history.
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