SEMLS Members Making Their Mark on the Web

A couple of cool things have come up during the past week involving SEMLS members and their travels on the Web.

I posted this on the SEMLS home page, but I wanted to mention it here as well. The Dartmouth Public Library's Voter's Guide was recognized by LJ Insider last week. LJ Associate Editor Raya Kuzyk says, "(Dartmouth) produced one of the finer pages I've seen in my ongoing survey of public libraries' election-education initiatives: easily accessible, simply organized and straightforwardly designed, seriously informative, and with a winning catch phrase: "Smart Voting Begins at the Library."

Dartmouth has been working on a library Web site redesign for a few months, and, like anyone doing a major redesign, is struggling to balance its time between keeping the current site fresh while also creating a new one. It looks like they've done a great job on providing a valuable service to their residents while going through this transition. Kudos to Sharani Robins for her work on the site.

My next story doesn't involve a library Web site, but is about a burgeoning blogger in the region. Daisy Delano from the Taunton Public Library created her The Games Afoot blog as part of the recent SEMLS Learning 2.0 class. She learned last week how powerful blogging could be. After a frustrating experience trying to sign up for a Facebook account as part of the class, she ranted about it in this blog post. The problem was that she wasn't receiving confirmation e-mails after trying multiple accounts, including her Comcast account. Well, somebody from Comcast stumbled across her blog post, ultimately contacted Facebook to discover the cause of the problem, and fixed a problem that was preventing confirmation e-mailsl from getting to Comcast accounts. You can read her account of it here.

Imagine how many potential Facebook users with Comcast accounts were getting frustrated by this problem. And now, because a librarian from our region ranted about it on her blog, Comcast users can now start signing up for Facebook accounts again without any trouble.

Daisy - I hope you keep your blog up after the class is done because I am definitely subscribing to your feed!

Stephen's Lighthouse: Ten things that will change your future

As we start the New Year, here are ten things to take the time to explore as you're trying to keep up with what's new in technology. Found through Stephen Abram's blog, Stephen Lighthouse, here are Ten things that will change your future.

The iPod of eBooks?

That was the question posed in Macworld: this article about Amazon's new Kindle e-Book reader. We're still waiting for a reader that will actually become something. Will this be it?

Learn tricks for making video at Flickschool

Flick School is a site I learned about at the MassCUE Conference today that offers some great tips for making video.

Feeling inspired after MassCue Conference

I just returned from the first day of the third conference I've attended in Sturbridge within the span of a month. Today's conference was for MassCue (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators.) I've heard from several school librarians that this is a great conference, and I finally got a chance to experience it myself this year. Although I dreaded returning to the conference hotel, where wireless access has been horrendous for each of the three conferences I've attended and has even gone down for the presentations, I was soon very much engaged in the program after sitting in on a session on Global Learning from Alan November, a national consultant in educational technology - http://www.novemberlearning.com/.

I hadn't been planning to blog the conference at all (I'm a little burnt out on conference blogging after NELA), but, after hearing November speak, I had to log in and share a couple of the things he said. I didn't learn about any new technologies - it was the standard Web 2.0 stuff - but I got really excited about his ideas for using them in the classroom and for essentially recreating the learning experience.

He advocated for starting to use Skype (free Internet phone service) with kids at pre-school to grade 1. Since children at this age are too young to read and write on the Web, this is an obvious technology with which to get them started.

Students should start podcasting from grade 1, he said. Middle school students in Falmouth are using podcasts to interact with global warming experts based in Woods Hole. Not only is it a great experience for them to interact with these scientists, but the results of this learning are available in iTunes where the whole world can hear them.

"We've got to teach children the courage of having a global voice," he said.

Learning to manage information by using RSS feeds should be required in schools. He noted that this is routine for students in Singapore, while students in the US are learning to follow bookmarks.

He pointed to a Wikipedia article on Pitot House in New Orleans, which was originally written by a third grade class, is now the third hit in the search results list when Pitot House is Googled, and has since been expanded upon by people from all over the world. "We've got to start teaching in early elementary that their responsibility is adding value to the world," he said. The Pitot House article is just one example of how young children are able to contribute to the world.

He also talked about the phenomena of social bookmarking and tagging by showing us del.icio.us If you go on to del.icio.us and look up the tag apcalc06, you'll see an example of how an AP Calculus class is using del.icio.us. Students who come across a calculus site of interest to them can add it to their del.icio.us bookmarks with this tag so that others from the class can benefit from their discovery. Granted, this is done by the few students who are really interested in calculus, but it is an example where "the knowledge of the few contributes to the many."

And how did November describe tagging? "Dewey's over! The whole world is tagging." Of course, it's really LCSH that's over (and it's not really over but should be hidden from public view where only the expert searchers can find it), but since the room was full of non-librarians, I guess Dewey works.

November's talk was inspiring, and I would love to invite him to the region to do a presentation for our school librarians. He does have a podcast available at itpc://feeds.novemberlearning.com/blc06. He also coordinates a Building Learning Communities Conference in the summer that looks quite interesting.

Books recommended by November:

A whole new mind : moving from the information age to the conceptual age, Daniel Pink.

The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman.

Flow : the psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

By the way, if podcasting, RSS, social bookmarking, tagging or any of the other technologies in this post are unfamiliar to you, I am offering an online course for SEMLS members this winter called Learning 2.o that will cover all of these Web 2.o applications. Unfortunately, we will not cover Skype, but I can talk to you about it if you're interested in getting more information.

I'm off to my second day of MassCue tomorrow and hope to see more speakers that are just as engaging.

Broadcast Your Cause: A YouTube Channel for Your Nonprofit | TechSoup Blog

This program is for registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, but I wonder if libraries could take advantage of this as well. YouTube has a program that allows non-profits to create their own channel free of charge to get their message out. There's also a feature that allows viewers to donate to the organization.

Broadcast Your Cause: A YouTube Channel for Your Nonprofit | TechSoup Blog

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World [OCLC - Membership reports]

OCLC has issued this report on the use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web.

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World [OCLC - Membership reports]