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anonymous

Weighing In: Three Bombs, Two Lips, and a Martini Glass -- NCAC - 0 views

  • 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.
    • anonymous
       
      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.
    • anonymous
       
      This is a form of censorship.
  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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?
beth gourley

The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.
  • around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.
  • the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity
  • ...62 more annotations...
  • 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.
    • beth gourley
       
      premise
  • pace of change seems breathtaking:
  • 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.
  •  
    The library as citadel and as the open internet both play an important and distinguishable role.
Fran Bullington

American Rhetoric: The Power of Oratory in the United States - 7 views

  •  
    Thousands of speeches!
Robin Cicchetti

Do School Libraries Need Books? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • constant need to acquire new books
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Still need to acquire digital versions. The spending doesn't disappear with the paper.
  • more efficient to work online
  • went beyond stacks and stacks of underutilized books.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Our library is now the most-used space on campus, with collaborative learning areas, classrooms with smart boards, study sections, screens for data feeds from research sites, a cyber cafe, and increased reference and circulation stations for our librarians. It has become a hub where students and faculty gather, learn and explore together.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      This is a perfect description of a learning commons.
  • But they need more help from librarians to navigate these resources, so we have also increased our library staff by 25 percent.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Relevance is what saves and builds programs and protects budgets.
  • Cushing Academy today is awash in books of all formats. Many classes continue to use printed books, while others use laptops or e-readers. It is immaterial to us whether students use print or electronic forms to read Chaucer and Shakespeare. In fact, Cushing students are checking out more books than before, making extensive use of e-readers in our library collection. Cushing’s success could inspire other schools to think about new approaches to education in this century.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Diversity of format, open access, increased reading.
  • Holding a book in our hands, we orient ourselves within a larger system.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Strong sensory and nostalgic connections to books and the idea of reading.
  • Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? How is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Is critical thinking enhanced by one format over another? I think these skills apply to all formats.
  • knowledge is proximate
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Why is knowledge proximate? Global awareness is a goal for every student. What about POV?
  • The digital natives in our schools need to have the experience of getting lost in a physical book, not only for the pure pleasure but also as a way to develop their attention spans, ability to concentrate, and the skill of engaging with a complex issue or idea for an uninterrupted period of time.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      It is possible to get lost in text, no matter the format. We see it every day. Students engrossed reading off their iTouch, desktops, laptops, Kindles and Nooks.
  • The printed word long ago lost its position of eminence in the American library.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Studies indicate people are reading more than ever - but not from paper.
  • The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      So many references to the tangible experience of paper. Nobody comments on how heavy a book is, how you can't take that many on your suitcase for vacation because of the weight, or holding it in bed at night. If we are going sensory, I'd rather pack/hold a Kindle.
  •  
    Debate on traditional vs. digital reading continues.
Allison Burrell

Circulate This! Stories from the School Library - 0 views

  •  
    "We have created an audio magazine in which we tell the stories of the importance of school libraries and teacher librarians via interviews with teacher librarians, library staff, teachers, community members, parents, administrators, and most importantly, students. The format is along the lines of a 'This American Life' type of audio journal with a narrator, who sets the tone, describes the dilemma, and sets the stage for each interview. Each is short but dramatic and powerful. The intent is to distribute the audio journal widely on radio and across the Internet -- go 'viral' as create CDs to hand to legislators and decision-making administrators. Teacher librarians and others are able to download the journal and burn CDs to distribute to their local administrators and parents. stories from: Dr. Doug Achterman, Glen Warren, David Burt, Winny Duffy, Heather Keaton, APRIL Wayland, Manuel PEREZ, Dr. Leslie Farmer, Donald Gill, Jeanne NELSON, Anne Birchfield, Hannah Jackson, Kathy Green, and Sophie.
Anne Weaver

ALA | Big Six Information Skills - 22 views

  • Several information problem-solving models exist for teaching and reinforcing the research, problem-solving, and writing processes. The Big Six information skills model (Big6) is one that is primarily aimed at kindergarten through twelfth-grade students. This model is intended to foster the acquisition of research, problem-solving, and metacognitive skills through the cooperation of both school library media specialists and classroom teachers. While a strong anecdotal record exists supporting the use of Big6, empirical research support is less evident in library and education literature. This study examines the effect of Big6 on a class of eighth-grade students asked to research and write about events surrounding the African-American Civil Rights movement.
Jenny Odau

AASL Learning4Life Lesson Plan Database | An initiative of the American Association of School Librarians - 46 views

  •  
    AASL's Lesson Plan Database.
Colette Cassinelli

Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century | American Library Association - 21 views

  •  
    Classic book listings and reasons why they were challenged
Cathy Oxley

Browse poems & poets | Academy of American Poets - 13 views

  •  
    "Browse thousands of biographies of poets and poems, essays about poetry, and some of the most important books, anthologies, and textbooks about the art form ever written."
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