Not able to attend ALA but still want to find out what's going on in cutting edge technology and social software!? Well check out the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase...
From their page:
The Social Software Showcase is an online unconference occurring around and during the time of ALA Annual 2007. On this wiki, you will find eleven wonderful presentations on cutting edge technology and social software by librarians and leaders in the field. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to discuss the presentations here in this space.
We will also be having a face to face roundtable discussion with some of our presenters at ALA Annual in Washington D.C. on Saturday, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. If you are in D.C. please come and join us.
This wiki will be a work in progress as we iron out a few things, including the embedding of the presentations. But we'll be ready and running before ALA! [end]
This is a revolutionary way of presenting information! Please do check it out.
The presenters include the VERY excellent:
Michael Casey - Library Crunch
Michael Porter, aka Library Man! - Libraryman blog
Jessamyn West - Librarian.net blog
Karen Schneider - Free Range Librarian , her post on this
AND MORE!
You can read another excellent post on this for some more information on the Information Wants to Be Free blog here.
The Bigwig Social Software Showcase is here!
Check it out! :-)
Happy Weekend!
Labels: ala, amy kearns, social software, technology, unconference, wiki
¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 7:57 AM 0 comments
This is what I do everyday. I even get up early to do it before work.
What's yours?
I get up. I get my coffee and breakfast. I turn on News12NJ, I put on the computer.
First, I sign into Trillian and Google Talk.
Then I sign into my work email and read those.
Then I read my personal emails by going through Trillian and Google Talk.
NOW I next sign into facebook and check that out. (This is new and is taking up a new, additional amount of time.)
Next I go to hungersite.com and click on all those. This is such a habit for me. Then I go to iwon.com and click for my 100 points - I have been doing this for a long time and I have never won anything and I don't know why I keep doing it - but it is my ROUTINE!
I always go to my bank accounts online just to make sure everything I expect to be there is there. ;-)
Then I click on my bloglines notifier and look at all the updated feeds - some I read, some I mark for later. A few I have to go directly to their blog from there for one reason or another.
Then I check around on all my blogs, etc., or places where I have commented, etc. and look for comments, posts, etc...
Usually I also go to flickr also just to check out any other new things that I may have missed - even though I have several people's flickr streams in my bloglines - which is fantastic!
I used to also then check northjersey.com and nj.com and stuff for local and NJ news that I might need to know before arriving at work, i.e., if anything major has happened in Clifton, Paterson, East Orange. Then I sometimes check Glen Rock and Ridgewood just out of curiosity, but lately I haven't been doing that. I don't get a morning paper and even when I was, I never had a chance to read it.
This whole process is now taking around up to an hour!!!
Too much!? I kind of like this routine. It sort of "sets me up for the day." I don't feel "right" if I don't do it. However, I could anticipate adding more and more things until this routine was just unmanageable - or until I was getting up at 4 a.m. in order to complete it before work! I guess perhaps some things might drop away as I add other things. Not sure.....
Again, this is one of those "balance" issues in life.
What are the important things you must check in the morning before you get on with your "real life"?
Labels: amy kearns, balance, routine, technology
¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 9:08 AM 3 comments
Luckily, this post by The Shifted Librarian (Jenny Levine) really saved me today. I recommend highly that you read it.... Thank you, Jenny.
Thanks to my fellow blogger here, Mary, I have been sucked into the world of facebook. I also highly recommend you check it out. I created a New Jersey Librarians group there and if you are a librarian here in the great state of Jersey, please join us. Just keep in mind what the Shifted Librarian says.
I may be floundering a bit at the moment in this vast sea, but I'm not ready to get out yet.
Labels: 2.0, amy kearns, facebook, keeping up, librarians, new jersey librarians, technology
¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 11:34 PM 2 comments
Greetings,
Several librarians (Margaret Mellinger, Hannah Rempel, Kate Gronemyer, and
Jane Nichols), one librarian to-be (Michael Baird) and myself have been
maintaining a blog dedicated to reviewing information tools on the Net. A
little shameless self-promotion never hurts, and I wanted to spread the
word. :)
We hope our website is useful for librarians and other information-lovers.
Please check it out at http://infodoodads.com/
Have a great day!
Laurie
.......................................................
Laurie M. Bridges Business & Economics Librarian Oregon State
University
What's especially nice about this to me is that I have recently been thinking about and talking to some people about just what it is that the current crop of library students are learning.
I graduated from library school in 2003 and it's been awhile (especially when you think of how quickly things change and advance in technology and the world) since I've been in school! I think about how we are all working hard to "catch-up" and help others "catch-up" to all the new technologies and ideas about customer service and so on... if we are currently producing new librarians who will find themselves in this same position then we are fighting a losing battle!
One might think that the "new" librarians are "young" librarians and would automatically be "hip" to the new social technologies, i.e. facebook, instant messaging, flickr, etc., but this is not necessarily true, and it is also not necessarily true that any/all "young people" know about this stuff and/or understand or believe in it in relation to the library world.
Case in point: I mentioned this to my library garden pals and one replied with anecdotal evidence that I was afraid of:
I did a talk for (a class) as recently as October 2006. By show of hands,
maybe 2 out of 30 in the class had any idea what RSS is, or read any
library blogs.
I found this upsetting . . . (because) RSS IS
an information literacy technology. Perhaps it is THE single best
technology for allowing us to manage the flow, display, sharing, and consumption
of information. As promoters of information literacy, librarians should be
ALL OVER THIS.
Oh great. What is going on here!? What are the library students being taught about. If we are spending time and effort catching-up current librarians, I think this will have to include some of the library professors as well. Apparently.
However, this blog is a ray of hope to me since there is a student on there and he obviously knows about these things and is blogging about them with some colleagues. I guess you could say that he perhaps knew/knows about those things already and didn't learn them in library school.
You also might say that maybe the students USE RSS and don't know it - like many "lay" people do - If you ask a bunch of people if they use RSS they say no - but if you ask them do you use My Yahoo! and they say yes, then they are using RSS and they just don't know it.
Of course the second point about reading library blogs there is just no excuse about!
So check out this blog to help yourself "keep up" and let's think about doing something NOW about the next generation of librarians being "created" so we won't be fighting against a growing tide of people who just "don't get it."
Note: I just found out that Leslie Burger, current ALA president (and Director of the Princeton Public Library, NJ) is interested in this and is working (I think) on a way to look into this and address it. Yay! :-)
Also: If you want to look at a great and simple way of learning about RSS, check this out.
Labels: amy kearns, blogs, librarians, students, technology
¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 11:20 AM 3 comments
The other night I watched 60 Minutes which isn't something I regularly do but I'm glad I did because last night they did a story called What If Every Child Had A Laptop?
Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT, had a dream that every child on the planet had a laptop. He thought that this would enable kids even from impoverished countries to become educated and a part of the rest of the modern world.
He figured if he could help invent an inexpensive laptop he could achieve this dream. He founded a non-profit organization called One Laptop Per Child and he has managed to create a lightweight, very sturdy, inexpensive laptop that he expects will soon cost about $100.00.
The show was pretty amazing - the kids in some places he went to didn't even have electricity or running water but when they got the laptops they only needed about 10 minutes to figure out how to use them! They taught each other and they brought the laptops home and taught their families. Sometimes the light from the laptop was the only source of light in the home! Some places he would like to give the kids laptops don't even have a school. The laptops would be their school.
It might seem like a luxury but would it really be in places such as Cambodia, Brazil, countries in Africa?
Interestingly, the attendance at schools where the laptops were given out also went up - kids were coming to school because they had heard from other kids that school was a good place to be and a place where they got the laptops. These kids started crossing the digital divide.
The computers have built-in cameras, drawing programs and programs to make music. They have wi-fi two to three times better than the wi-fi in this Dell laptop I'm using right now, according to Negroponte, and are currently in a testing program in Brazil. The computers are waterproof and do not have openings on the sides where sand or dirt could get in.
These laptops have other features I would love - the battery lasts 10-12 hours and can be recharged with the use of a hand-crank if no electricity is available. Who wouldn't love that!?
Interestingly, this laptop which started out as a dream and is Negroponte's completely humanitarian effort, has attracted some competition. Geekcorps - an organization that brings technology to poorer countries, much like the Peace Corps operates, thinks the One Laptop Per Child idea is great but director Wayan Vota isn't sure that the kids can really just teach themselves. And there is another laptop up against Negroponte's. The Classmate by Intel -
Negroponte says that worldwide there are over a billion children who would need laptops, so no wonder other companies want in on this idea. Negroponte says this competition is "shameless," but Intel says it is just the way the business - the world - works. Intel believes that a project like this will require everyone working together and that there are lots of opportunities to work together.
To get his laptops into full production he will need at least 3 million orders. He feels confident he will get that despite the competition from Intel and others who will want to get their products into the hands of a billion plus kids.
If his ultimate goal is really a purely humanitarian one of really getting a laptop into the hands of every child maybe the competition will be good - maybe it will result in an even cheaper, and better, model that really can be distributed worldwide.
Whatever happens with the One Laptop Per Child program, one of my favorite parts of this whole idea is that when One Laptop Per Child comes to the US (there are talks going on already) and if the laptops become available commercially, parents will have to buy two if they want one. One for your child and one for another child. I think that's a great idea and hey you'll still only be spending about $200.00!
I think this program would be great in urban areas in the United States such as the one I am working in now, Paterson, New Jersey. Many of the kids in these schools do not have access to computers everyday, they don't even all have real cafeterias, gyms or science labs in most of the schools! I recently toured some of the schools in Paterson during a seminar for Leadership Paterson, a program I am enrolled in. That was fascinating and I will post on that at another time on my blog, Urban Librarian.
Labels: 60 Minutes, amy kearns, computers, laptops, One Laptop Per Child, technology
¶ posted by Amy J. Kearns, MLIS @ 10:50 PM 0 comments
