Admiration of an Author

Ever since I read Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak several years ago, I have been a huge fan of hers. I've now read three more of her books, and I admire her even more. Now that I've found this video--where I learned that she is also a big supporter of having qualified librarians in school libraries--I think I just might have an infatuation forming :) j/k

Learning with Laurie

Tweet Timelines

I must admit that for a very, very long time I was one of those people who thought that there was no point to Twitter. I wondered why anyone would care what anyone else was doing on a minute-by-minute basis, and I thought anyone who would Tweet had to be quite self-involved to think anyone else would care what they said.

Then a couple of weeks ago I got my first taste of how Twitter could be useful. When there was an earthquake down in Roosevelt, no one that I was with could seem to figure out exactly what happened. People had cell phones and laptops and were hurriedly typing away and googling "Utah earthquake," but no one found anything...until...my husband thought about checking Twitter, and voila! There was our answer. None of the media news outlets had a chance to post anything, but people living near Roosevelt broke the news of the earthquake to Utahns via Twitter.

I still think that some of the other technologies we've learned about could be put to better use in a library than Twitter could, but I'm sure there are some possible uses for it. I guess I'm still not sold on Twitter because I had to "google it" to get some Classroom Twitter ideas. There were actually quite a few good ones. I especially liked the following ideas: Tweet about a useful source that could help students on a project; provide daily tips like a word or a book of the day; link to a book trailer or a video book talk; schedule meetings with other teachers; etc. The list goes on, but I think that's quite a good start. Sorry for dissin' ya Twitter!

Really Simple Searching (RSS)

I have heard about RSS feeds for a really long time. My husband subscribed to My Yahoo about a month ago to keep track of his feeds, and for about a week all I heard about was how awesome it was! (Obviously not, it probably just seemed like it was all he talked about because my guilt was telling me I should already know about RSS Feeds thanks to Learning 2.0!!)

I didn't know beforehand that you could even sign up for feeds of topics, but what a neat concept! Now I have a feed that keeps me posted on news results for Utah teaching positions! I also have an RSS Feed for a comparison shopping website--hopefully that doesn't turn into a bad thing!

I am also planning on following librarian.net and "Awful Library Books." There were a couple of things that really impressed me with the first blog. First of all, it was obvious that its creator is passionate about sharing stories about successful library stories in these tough economic times when the positions are so often undervalued and axed. I really like "happy ending" stories, so I thought I'd appreciate this touch. The second thing that sold me on the blog was the fact that the author is writing a book that focuses on the digital divide--which is what I was worried about in just my last post! I hope to gain some insights into how we can solve the digital divide problem in society. As for "Awful Library Books," I couldn't resist looking at a blog with a name like that!! It will be an interesting (and, I suspect, often humorous) blog to follow.

Library 2.0

I found this article to be simultaneously informative and a little frightening. All year we have talked about librarians having to market ourselves and prove to others how valuable we are in the school community. I agreed passionately in all of the discussions. But seeing the vulnerability of our positions spelled out in an "official" document really brought the discussion home to me!! It's funny how logically knowing something isn't enough sometimes--you have to see it.

However, we must trudge on! I think that could be the tagline for the whole article. The world is moving along at an alarming pace, and we absolutely have to run along to keep up (and to keep our positions!) I simply love the possibilities that having a tech-heavy "Library 2.0" program would create. I especially love all of these new technologies that I am learning because I know that incorporating them into the school system will revitalize and energize students. They want to learn about and use these things, so if we use them in our classrooms, our students will be more likely to want to learn.

There was one new idea, in particular, that jumped out at me from the article. It mentioned that it is now possible for students to submit book talks via voicemail that then convert into MP3 files that are sent to an email address! Is this Back to the Future or what? I'm definitely going to look into this possibility further. It sounds like a fun way that students would get excited about doing book talks with.

I must say that there is one aspect of having a Library 2.0 environment that causes me worry, and I don't think the article addressed it. I always worry when technology is involved in education about what will happen to the students whose families can't afford the technology. I know that this learning is crucial for our students, but I worry that incorporating even more technology into schools will create an even wider divide between the haves and the have-nots. That's just my two cents!

Technorati

Now this is more like it! I just thought of another reason I may not have liked del.icio.us as much as the other things we've played with this semester--I like things to be visually appealing, and del.icio.us was kind of "blah" compared to some of the sites we've seen.

Anyway, I could see how Technorati's blog directory could be extremely useful. The "Life" and "Entertainment" categories were most well-represented (understandably so), while "Autos" and "Science" were in some serious need of help. I found their "Top 100" list to be interesting--I found that I am way out of it because there were very few that I'd even heard of! When I tried a few searches alternating between their "Blogs" and "Posts" options, I got very different results. Who knows if this would continue to be the case if I kept searching for something, but in general I found more useful links searching "Blogs" when I searched a somewhat unique query, while "Posts" returned better results when it was a more common query.

I can see myself using Technorati in the future when I'm trying to find different media sources to use with my English students. I think it's important to show how you can get information on the same topic from a lot of different sources, and blogs are definitely a growing genre!

Disappointing Del.icio.us

I've got to be honest--this was not one of my favorite activities that I've had thus far in our Learning 2.0 assignments. I thought, from reading about it and watching the video, that I would find it incredibly useful. However, I wasn't too impressed. I'm sure that's probably because I have never really used bookmarks in my internet use. That should probably be remedied, but for now it's not much of a priority for me. Perhaps there's another reason for my disappointment with this step, however. Perhaps I was turned off by the woman who narrated the 8-minute video about del.icio.us. The video was informative, but boy was her voice boring and monotone!!?!! (The answer is yes, by the way;)

One thing I did like was learning about folksonomies and their relative ease compared to having to force yourself into understanding something like Sears Subject Headings! Ugghh!