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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”
Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
“The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”
But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.
(POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)
We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”
Libraries are also being used as social spaces,
In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian.
On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.
it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”
"This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information."
"How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?"
Pegby wants you to stop using those sticky notes that seem to be everywhere on and around your work desk, and instead use their cards and stacks to manage tasks. Their task management board is divided into mainly three columns - pending, in process and done (you can add more columns if you need them), and in each column you can add cards which are basically tasks and their descriptions. Different cards (tasks) can be combined together into a named stack, each card or stack can be dragged or dropped across columns. You can also invite people and jointly create and manage tasks.
Each card can be customized in various ways. Its color can be changed, it can be tagged and much more. There's a way to filter your board too if you think it's full of clutter.
Features:
* Manage tasks through online cards and stacks.
* Have family members use it along with you.
* Add columns to the board, drag and drop cards.
* Similar tools: Corkboard, Pindax and WallWisher.
Authority. Authenticity. Ownership. Perspective. These four pillars make up the critical facets of the information we consume -- and understanding them makes us and our students wiser users of information.
However, on the web, people often make assumptions about the authority and authenticity of information, and it can be challenging to understand ownership and perspective. The Glean Who-Is Tool help you and your students learn to investigate web-based content sources. By using technical information about websites ("whois"), along with historical and factual information, the tool encourages us to dig more deeply, to understand more thoroughly, and to critique more closely.
Public libraries have long lived by the "Blockbuster model": require people to drive to a physical location, pick up a physical book, then drive home, only to repeat the driving a few weeks later when the book is due. And how well did that approach work out for Blockbuster as iTunes and Netflix made digital delivery a reality?
But books haven't gone digital as quickly as music and then movies did. Early attempts at e-book lending were execeptionally clunky affairs involving special OverDrive software, few choices, and a poor browsing interface. Getting books onto devices involved downloads and usB cables.
Enter the Kindle. Amazon's hugely popular e-reader hardware and apps recently opened access to public libraries in the us, which can use the Amazon account and distribution infrastructure to control and distribute time-limited e-books to library patrons. Will we ever drive to physical libraries again? After testing the new system, it's safe to say: yes. Yes we will. But Kindle library lending provides a glimpse of the future rushing so quickly at us.
"How To Learn Spanish For Beginners" is the best Spanish learning book, which will really help you to understand the sounds and structure of the language. It consists of consists of examples of mostly commonly used phrases, commonly used greetings, commonly used Help and Directions, Wish Someone Something, Spanish Expressions and Words written in Spanish to English. Download the Book from here - http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Spanish-Beginners-Phrases-ebook/dp/B00L85OCLE/.
"In the past few years many of us have re-imagined school library for learners using the array of new tools and abilities in front of us today.
And in my humble opinion some aspects of emerging practice are nonnegotiable."
Technology and the internet are two very useful tools that help us navigate through each day with more ease. It's helped us in several ways such as research, social interactions and even making money. With that being said, here are a few ways to make money online! Read more http://www.make-lots-of-money.com/make-money-online/
"On this site, you will find message templates (sample e-mails, letters, newsletter blurbs, brochures, and even videos) containing these taglines and targeting specific stakeholder audiences in order to promote school librarians as 21st century skills experts. We hope that these sample templates will be used by school librarians and school library advocates to inform their communities about the vital and irreplaceable role that school librarians play in teaching and learning. Maybe you'll get inspired to create something for us that we can use, too. In the meantime, we hope you find this site helpful."
"The purpose of this website is to provide a place for
K-12 school library media specialists to learn a little more about web tools that can be used to improve and enhance school library media programs and services, to see examples of how they can be used, and to share success stories and creative ideas about how to use and integrate them. Hundreds of free and inexpensive web tools are available for school library media specialists to use that can make us more productive, valued, and, perhaps, more competitive."
Public libraries in rural areas really don’t have a large enough donor base to make extensive fundraising worthwhile. The other problem public libraries have with outside fundriasing is that if you start taking in a lot of major gifts and donations, then your steady stream of revenue, the local government, may just wind up cutting your funding.
True with school libraries as well; can't fundraise because can't lose current funding, but then feel sense of lack of control over revenue streams? = ick.
“Students who pick their major based solely on postgraduation salaries, as opposed to passion for a field, will in all likelihood struggle in both school and career.”
would agree that public librarians questionably need a library specific degree, or a degree at a graduate level anyway, as evidenced by the wealth of paraprofessionals who often do at least as good a job in that setting, though for management I think you would want someone trained in public management with library experience. In an academic setting, there is a credibility issue that begs credentialling in the areas of research and education, and credentialling to a higher standard than is now present in library schools, hence the inadequacy of the degree university libraries particularly, or at least that degree alone. The degree needs to be reinvented and would best partner to at least confer joint degrees in librarianship and business, education, and other disciplines
The piece I was missing was how to develop workable ideas that were well researched and aligned with the basic tenants of Librarianship.
philosophy and values of librarianship. It also grounded me in supervisory skills, in library management, and collection development.
Paraprofessionals here have been the ones leading the discussion on topics such as fair use, copyright, RDA, cataloging standards, FERPA, etc. There are several levels of paraprofessionals from pages/shelvers, circulation desk workers, catalogers (copy & original), acquisitions, IT Systems, ILL , etc. MLS Librarians are mostly reference & instruction positions, collection development and/or managers. Education is absolutely needed for some positions, but experience should be recognized as well. Our newly hired MLS people would be lost try to perform original cataloging, acquisitions/budget or ILL just as the paraprofessionals may lack the knowledge in instructional pedagogy, management/leadership, etc.
Much of my practical learning during grad school came from my classmates that had worked in libraries for years and were just then getting the degree. They had a MUCH better context for what was going on than I did at 23 and straight out of my undergrad
Require the masters in a specialized field rather than the MLIS. That could definitely work in academia. And you can require directors and managers to have the MLIS, but not necessarily the librarians at the reference desk or running a department like circulation.
But why do acquisitions, CD, or e-resources librarians need the degree? Those are practical jobs, that you do need practical experience for.
Any self-starter with a library job could easily supplement training and hands-on experience with reading books from leaders in the field on the subject, starting a blog, getting involved in conversations in the library community.
But for colleges, this becomes a game of perpetual growth – to secure funding and improve programs, we need more students, more alumni to donate! Job markets shrink, shift and dry up all the time, but rarely does a degree program shrink proportionately
Why I couldn’t pick up a book here, attend a webinar there, and get the same place eventually through grit and dedication like the librarians just a generation before me.
I am a Library Director in a hamlet (pop 3,000) in NH. The likelihood of my ever advancing to a larger library is categorically denied by that degree requirement. It doesn’t matter what experience I bring. Paying for another degree (I have a B.A. and an M. Div.) is out of the question for me, and, certainly, out of the question for the trustees of the library I serve
Laura is correct – being in a rural library is actually very challenging. There are far fewer resources for our patrons – so good luck directing them to the resources they need.
The public school teachers (including the school librarians) in my area have a starting salary that is about $10,000 higher than the starting salary of the public library system. Yet only the school and (some) public librarians are required to have a Masters before applying for their jobs
They are responsible for recruiting too many librarians, and the schools need to take responsibility for over saturation. If not, how are they any different than for-profit colleges or career colleges.
This is a women’s profession. Women are not valued. Hence any professional education we may have is useless in the eyes of…. us. Ah, feminism we’ve come so far.
I realized when I went to library school that it was merely a sham union card for a lowly paid job.
Library school does need to emphasize more about management – not just one class. This is what will make us more useful. The best library directors are those who kept their libraries afloat during the economic downturn. This is because they have the fundamental ethics of a librarian coupled with mad management skills.
This isn’t just in the public sector. Academic librarians have crazy politics to wade through as do school librarians.
What if we migrated from our current degree to a B.A. in Education (with a focus on libraries); an M.A. in Education (with a focus on a particular library type or area); and a Ph.D. in Education (with a narrow focus on a particular library type or area)?
This would also serve to define who we are (educators) and what we do (education: through self-directed, research assistance & instruction, instructive & enlightening experiences
Honestly, I privately refer to this as my fake master’s degree.
There is no unified body to convince that the MLS is somehow superfluous to needs; you have to convince these individuals, 99% of whom have an MLS and probably can see the value in it.
When I first became a librarian, I found that my past experience working in a bookstore was far more valuable to me than my MLS program.
For many, it clearly does not provide necessary or useful theory and practice opportunities.
I think some programs, like the one I attended, relied a lot on theory, and that meant that my dream, of creating better technology, was not quite realized as I needed the practical skills at building technology
A classmate of mine jumped ship and attended a business school in New York, and now works at Goldman Sachs…I stayed on board hoping to do meaningful work; that hasn’t quite happened yet, really because of the emphasis on theory..I think my classmate saw the writing on the wall and made a smart calculated move; I do not like to start something and leave it unfinished,
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows:
Learning to know Learning to do Learning to live together Learning to be
Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy – Remembering
1. Remembering: Retrieving, recalling or recognising knowledge from memory. Remembering is when memory is used to produce definitions, facts or lists, or recite or retrieve material.
Advanced and Boolean Searching
Bullet pointing
Highlightin
Bookmarking or favouriting
Social networkin
Social bookmarking
“... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations. ”
Understanding: Constructing meaning from different types of function be they written or graphic.
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows
Searching or “googling
Blog Journallin
Categorising & Taggin
ommenting and annotating
Subscribin
Linking
Running and operating
Playin
Uploading and Sharin
Hacking
Editing
Analysing: Breaking material or concepts into parts, determining how the parts relate or interrelate to one another or to an overall structure or purpose. Mental actions include differentiating, organizing and attributing as well as being able to distinguish between components.
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows:
Mashing
Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing or implementing. Applying related and refers to situations where learned material is used through products like models, presentation, interviews and simulations.
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows:
Reverse-engineering
Cracking
.Evaluating: Making judgements based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing..
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows:
Blog/vlog commenting and reflecting
Posting
Moderating
Collaborating and networking
Testing (Alpha and Beta)
Validating
Creating: Putting the elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganising elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning or producing.
The digital additions and their justifications are as follows:
Programming
Filming, animating, videocasting, podcasting, mixing and remixing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Welcome to "Googlios" where free Google tools meet ePortfolios.
This site is intended to be a collection of resources for those interested in using ePortfolios in Education.
Watch the 2 minute Intro video here
Many of the participants in the UW-Stout E-Learning and Online Teaching Graduate Certificate Program use Google Sites to create their e-portfolios. The portfolios are created and used throughout the program. During the practicum, when students become teachers by teaching in one of our graduate classes, they also refine and polish their portfolios. Ultimately the online portfolio becomes a job search tool that helps our graduates show a potential employer what they know.
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:
Unless you use images or music from a copyright-free site, you will need to obtain permission from the copyright owner to reuse/ remix them in the format you would like. Often the hardest part is finding who the copyright owner is.
This site gives the contact details for many music and movie companies, as well as sample permission letters for you to use and adapt.
Turnitin created the SEER (Source Educational Evaluation Rubric) to help teach students how to evaluate the sources they use in their writing. A number of educators tested the rubric on the most popular websites that students use for sourcing material. How did these websites rank? Take