→ Teens “need” their cell phones
Text messaging is the killer app for teens. Once again I will mention: How are libraries responding to this?
→ The 20 Best Hacker Movies warning: about.com lame voice ad
→ Today’s Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm
O’Reilly on the oft present “What’s Web 3.0?” question. He doesn’t really like the term.
→ The Curious Origins of 9 Delicious Phrases
I bet I’m not the only librarian into etymology. I also bet I’m not the only librarian that would like to see some citations for these explanations.
1. The Cold Shoulder
Believe it or not, there was a time when giving someone the cold shoulder didn’t just mean publicly snubbing them, it actually meant handing them a cold shoulder, as in a cold shoulder of beef. During the Middle Ages, the easiest way to hint to guests that they’d overstayed their welcome was to serve them a heaping mound of cold cow parts. A few platters of nothing but shoulder were supposed to drive away even the most persistent of guests.
The Thomas Ford Memorial Library’s YA department is hosting a haunted house. Nice idea!
Let’s just hope they don’t get in trouble for promoting witchcraft or somesuch.
I wrote an article for the September edition of Multimedia & Internet@Schools Magazine and I think it is a solid introduction to how Media Specialists can use weblogs, flickr, wikis, and instant messaging. There’s also a bit about dealing with resistance from administration.
Here’s the intro to the article which is available online:
While our students might be able to click through Web sites with ease and change the layouts of their MySpace profiles in the blink of an eye, there are still many things we can teach them about the read/write Web. There are also many ways we can teach our students using the read/write Web. Underlying these opportunities is the possibility to use the read/write Web to discuss the issues of authorship, authenticity, and the production of information—all topics for rich discussions of information literacy. This article provides a review of some of the best online tools you can use to excite teachers and to prepare students to be active agents in today’s participatory culture.
Yesterday I gave a Education Institute webinar titled Facebook and MySpace: Pros and Cons for Libraries. Here’s a big honkin’ (10MB) pdf of my slides.
http://www.walkingpaper.org/ei.pdf
One of the questions that came up during the Q&A session was about curricular uses of MySpace (particularly in a high school setting) in which students can remain anonymous.
The basic idea is to have students use MySpace as a tool to get their content on the web. In doing so, they can create profiles for many other things besides themselves. Here are some ideas:
Do teachers ask students to do similar projects on paper? You bet. Might students forget the fact that their doing *school work* when completing projects framed in a social networking setting? I think there’s a pretty good chance. Some students might not care if their teacher thinks they’re slacking, but when their online reputations are at stake they might step it up. I’m sure they’d like to link to the funny and useful profile of the quadratic equation that they created.
From YouTube user jsdt4, a must see video. He writes:
Since most of today’s students can appropriately be labeled as “Digital Learners”, why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices?
This presentation was created in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching.
