Not So Distant Future

As I watch the news about Virginia Tech tonight, I can’t help but think of a memorial I read about Kurt Vonnegut in the New York Times.

“To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ “

Pbwiki has a handy new tool –a voice-chat box you can install within a wiki.   Anne Davis explains that Yackpack and Pbwiki have combined forces to create this handy tool.

Several classes here have used pbwiki–for a government project, for a Vietnam wall project, and for creative writing, and we’ve used them for several committee projects as well.   I use one for library training and workshops also.   

   We’ve also had student council leaders using Yackpack, which is software that lets you record a chat directly onto the site, and then saves it until members of your yackpack group “hear” it and “yack back.”   It’s a very user friendly tool, and useful because it stores the “chat,” so if you are trying to communicate with schools in other time zones, it’s convenient.   I’m sure the combination of these tools will generate even more creative ideas–I’m eager to try it out!

This week is National Library Week and to celebrate, we’ve invited all staff on our campus to pose for a photo with their favorite book, which we’re displaying in the library.

And as our “library 2.0″ feature, we’re setting up an empty table for students and asking them to “create” a display by placing their favorite book on the table and then we’ll take their photos as well as making space for them to post on our student blog.

The National Book Foundation asked some of the National Book award winners the same question and have shared those at  A book that changed your life.

I picked out my favorites too.  (As you can see, ms-footes-favorite-books.doc, I ended up picking a little stack of books, which was sort of cheating but I figure as the librarian, I’m allowed!)  So, here’s some of my favs:

Little Women –maybe an embarrassing choice, but I have to be honest and say this book influenced me a great deal

Farewell to Arms –my high school senior English teacher, Bill Warren, and my journalism teacher, Mike Nowland,  gave me Hemingway to read, and I think that  caused me to embark on a literary journey because they took my interest in literature seriously.

Desert Solitaire –Edward Abbey blends a reverence for the natural world with a curmudgeonly irreverance for our attempts to destroy our planet.  Beautifully written book.

Blue Highways –William Least Heat Moon captured the roadtrip wanderings of my childhood driving vacations and reflects the desire I always have to explore the “blue highways.”

The Day I became an Autodidact – Kendall Hailey’s account of how she taught embarked on teaching herself the last two years of high school with a literary reading list captured my imagination about the power of literature.

Slaughterhouse Five and Palm Sunday –Kurt Vonnegut’s wry, clever writing and his deep and fiery kindness for the human race has always charmed me.   So in memoriam, I’m selecting the two titles of his that I liked the most.

The Back Country –poems by Gary Snyder who blends the East and the West so beautifully

Whole New Mind –I wish Daniel Pink’s book had been written 20 years ago–it would have made me a better educator and parent.

What is a book or books that changed your life?  Share your list!

I’ve been “tagged!”  If you aren’t familiar with this, it’s a blog game where a theme or question circulates, and people tag other people to respond to the theme or question.

Scott Schwister of Higher Edison tagged me(which I have to say made me feel really honored because I think he’s a very interesting writer). Now I’m supposed to share five to ten “simply successful secrets”  and then tag a few more people to share theirs. 

Here’s the full description:

“List the top 5 to 10 things that you do almost every day that help you to be successful. They can be anything at all, but they have to be things that you do at least 4 or 5 times every week. Anything less than that may be a hobby that helps you out, but we are after the real day in and day out habits that help you to be successful.”  

I have been struggling with answering this because I don’t know how I feel about the word success, not to mention that I think it might come across as a little arrogant because I work with a lot of excellent and talented people.   So in pondering this, I researched a few quotations and found this one that I like:

Try not to be a man of success, but rather to be a man of value.
     - Albert Einstein

I assume Einstein would have applied this to women as well ;)  Einstein’s exhortation appeals to me because there is something in the word success to me that implies the idea of failure as its opposite, and I believe every person has much to offer and success is defined differently for each of us. 

In any case, here are a few things I do daily that hopefully might contribute to me being considered a person of value –

1.  Try to cultivate good relationships with people

2.  Experiment with new things

3.  Read widely online and off

4.  Have quiet time

5.  Encourage others

6.  Be open

7.  Share

8.  Be enthusiastic

Here’s a few things I should do more often:

1.  Go to yoga

2.  Sleep more

I’m usually too excited about things I want to do to sleep as much as a human being should!

Now I’m supposed to tag a few more folks.  I’d like to hear from Chris Lehmann(principal at the Science Leadership Academy),  Kelly Christopherson(an administrator who blogs–but I see he’s already been tagged),  Patrick Higgins (who I just “met” on Ning.com), and  Vaughn Branom (a librarian in Houston).

Also, if anyone here feels compelled to share how they try to be a “person of value,” please join in and post your ideas here!  Tag, you’re it!

  We’ve requested six iPods from our PTO for use in the classroom, for checking out audiobooks to students, and for podcasting use, and they’re arriving next week.

Want some ideas how to use them in the classroom?  Check out this incredible presentation by Gloria Woods from the Bolles School at NECC last summer and at FETC for a creative wealth of ideas for using iPods across the curriculum!

(A few of the slides wouldn’t play for me, but the presentation is chock full of ideas!)

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/zengame/272483282/

Want to be a celebrity?  Put yourself on the cover of Wired magazine!

Michael Stephens woke up a session at the Texas Library Association in San Antonio this morning with that question.   I’m just back from the conference and mulling over a Library 2.0 presentation by Stephens and  Jenny Levine (the Shifted librarian herself).

If we approach everything about the library with a ”user centered” approach(Casey), from how the library is set up, to how our web pages are designed, to how online catalogs work, to what services we provide–then how does that change the library?

Stephens shared a statement from the Cluetrain Manifesto: 

“We are watching. We are not waiting.” 

How applicable that statement is to web 2.0 and our students.  They are already instant messaging, texting, you-tubing, myspace-ing, facebook-ing.  They aren’t really going to wait on us to figure this out because it’s part of their lives.

I’ve already been thinking about all this in terms of research class projects, but for some inexplicable reason, I hadn’t really thought of it in terms of all the library’s services in general, so I’m pondering some of the examples they presented.  

Here are some ideas they shared for creating a web 2.0 library environment (mixed in with a few of mine): 

Have students create their top ten list of books (like you can on Amazon) either on paper or online to share with other students.  Get more input from students on our library renovation project.   Add more interactive reference features to our website–like instant messaging using meebo or a “text the librarian feature”(there’s  a service that changes the message to an email which the librarian receives). 

Levine also mentioned having a student or patron give a podcast or video tour of your library, which I think is a great idea.  It’d just be fascinating to see how they “view” the space and what some barriers are for them as well.

I’ve also been thinking about this idea in terms of school more generally.

Are there ways we can take in more student input on the school in general?  Suggestion boxes?   Student surveys on what courses they’d like us to add to the curriculum?  Instant message tutoring in the evenings?   Student planned and created displays?    Student narrated video tour of the campus?  Student interviews about customer service on campus?  All these are ideas that come to mind.   As Stephens pointed out, the “2.0″ part is about people contributing content and sharing their ideas–whether it’s advertising 2.0, business 2.0 or school 2.0.

The first thing I’m planning to do?–change my web page title to “Your Library.”

More tomorrow after some sleep!

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been participating recently in a social networking site–Ning.com.   It’s like Facebook or Myspace, but has several education groups going, like Classroom 2.0, Teacher 2.0, and Library 2.0.  You can also set up your own “Ning” groups.

I’m still finding my way around but if you are interested in trying out a social network like Myspace, but talking to educators, it’s worth trying out.   There is a blog, place to upload photos, “friends” you can invite (many of them bloggers or teachers), discussion forums, informal “chatter”, etc.

You can also set up your own Ning discussion group, so you could set up one with a group of teachers on your campus, or teachers you know across several campuses on a theme or topic.

It’s worth trying if you just would like to dabble in social networking to see what it is like(and see what your students are doing), or if you have a group of teachers or students you’d like to network with.

One thing I like about it is that you can interact informally with educators from all over the world (or librarians from all kinds of libraries).   You can comment on other people’s questions or conversations, and can participate as much or as little as you have time to.  So if you aren’t into the idea of blogging, Ning is a way to network with others, but without the time commitment of maintaining your own site.

    Libraryman has begun an interesting project on the Flickr photo-sharing site called 365 days.   He invites librarians to post 365 photographs to Flickr  of their libraries in action during the next year.

I’m actually thinking this would be a great project for a school as well.  What a great way to show what goes on at the campus all year long.  You can pull your flickr photos into your blog and have a running photodocumentary of what happens on campus.  

Even a 24 hour project like Dan Rather’s show would also be fascinating photodocumentary for a high school campus.  Or it might be inspiring for a particular class–you could document 24 hours of Spanish, or 365 days of geography?

I’m considering joining the 365 library days project–especially with our upcoming renovation, it’d be an interesting visual documentation of the planning for it and a great means for communicating visually with our own campus and our community.

What do you think?

photocredit:  http://libraryman.com/blog/

Anyone want to take a guess what Kiplinger.com thinks are the seven best careers for 2007?   Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian points out that one of the careers selected is librarian!

Levine shares Kiplinger’s catchy job summary–

“Librarian. Forget about the image of librarian as mousy bookworm. Today’s librarian is a high-tech information sleuth, a master of mining cool databases (well beyond Google) to unearth the desired nuggets.”

To find out the other six, which are somewhat unusual choices, check out the Kiplinger’s article!   I’m not used to being grouped in with the company of audiologists and optometrists. But since I’m an  ”information sleuth”, I posted the link anyway.