2009 November

Entries from November 30th, 2009

What are we really fighting for?

November 30th, 2009 · 8 Comments · Web 2.0

We all talk a lot about tools. About great sites; about Animoto and Twitter and Facebook; about Voicethread and Delicious and blogging. We struggle in our districts to convince them to lower the filter so we can use some of these tools effectively. We fight for Skype or Facebook or Blogger. We fight to use [...]

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Shifting the print paradigm

November 25th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Research, Web 2.0

In his excellent blog post, “What’s ‘Print’?” Bud the Teacher poses a question that we as librarians confront every day as the nature of information sources changes, and one that I personally struggle with. It’s a must read post for every librarian(and English teacher, I might add!) His post encapsulates the research dilemma very accurately: [...]

Using polls to learn more about your customers

November 19th, 2009 · No Comments · Web 2.0

I decided this fall to move my school’s library website to a blog, and decided to embed different user polls once a week; initially just for fun and to make the page more interactive. But lo and behold, I’ve discovered that the polls are a great way to see what student preferences are. And though [...]

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Tags:polldaddy

How to open the doors

November 17th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Web 2.0

A great deal of discussion about filtering regarding Skype and Facebook has been filtering through the blogs lately. Wesley Fryer has an excellent post on the subject, as do Jeff Utecht, Pat Hensley and Paul Wood. This isn’t a new issue of course. Two years ago at Educon 2.0, I presented a session on Best Practices and Internet [...]

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Tags:"filtering" "wesley fryer"

The “desk set” to the “best set”?

November 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Web 2.0

In one of my favorite movies, Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn’s character, a whip-smart librarian, faces off with the EMERAC computer that Spencer Tracy is bringing in to replace her and her staff. (She does short circuit the computer by befuddling it, by the way.) The movie has been on my mind lately in relation to an ongoing [...]

In honor of…

November 11th, 2009 · No Comments · Web 2.0

Since today is Veteran’s Day, I wanted to share our improved edition of the Vietnam Wall project which our English 3AP students have created over the last four years. Students research the lives of individual soldiers who fell in Vietnam, including interviews with family members, and then create video projects recounting the soldier’s life. [...]

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Cart and buggy or…?

November 9th, 2009 · 2 Comments · libraries, Web 2.0

There’s been a lot of talk lately around the blogosphere about the future of libraries from both within the library profession and outside of it. I think it’s been a great constructive dialogue about a complicated topic. You can follow some of the discussion here: The Uncertainty of Professional Persistence Touching Some Nerves Dangerously Irrelevant [...]