The Ungarbled Word

Not that I am old but Andrew and I are discussing his library...

So let me give you a brief history of my life as a librarian. The moment that fate stepped in was when I had applied to grad school for an MSLS and the club I was working for wanted me to go to Bartending School. The grad schools came in first, California State stepped up, but the University of Tennessee (Yup, I Volunteer for a lot of things, excuse the pun) offered money; not much and I had to work for it, but the rest is history. It is worth pointing out that I have a high circulation desk that I prefer to stand at, and do “last call for check out” and I do bouncer duty at the gates. Did you know that nipple rings can set those things off?

I am old enough to have worked with a woman who told me she saw a demonstration of the overhead projector and was told that it would make libraries obsolete.  My three favorite shirts from grad school at the University of Tennessee were; one with a clinched fist above the word Strike, another that read “We are lawful wives of the 3×5s”  and finally a tasteful red one with “Mao was a librarian.”   I call myself a librarian because I was trained as an academic librarian not an academic media specialist and because people know where you work when you tell them you are a librarian.  Of course, they still don’t know what we do.  I was in a jury panel that was going to try a case concerning a young man who shot a nail into the head of another guy. I didn’t make the final cut, but the judge did say that “the librarian” is excused.  The other variously titled people from libraries he just said “thank you.you are excused”.  Of course, it might have had something to do with the defendant waving at me and calling out, “Hey, Miz Lay.” 

Later, I got an Instructional Technology degree from the University of Georgia and learned that computers were going to make libraries obsolete….  Having started with filing cards and now running two classroom computer labs, one on site professional lab, and eighteen work stations on the floor; not to mention the OPAC and circulation system, I think it is safe to say that the overheads are gone but if libraries are obsolete I sure am working hard in one. Once again somebody has to know and show people what to do with the information…

More later…

Debatable topic #3: Copyright Commando or Ultimate Informant?

This is our third “debatable” topic of interest…

“Should the SLMS only teach about copyright issues through staff development or take a more aggressive role in informing faculty and students of the law?”

Copyright infringement happens all the time in our schools. Oftentimes, it occurs because the teacher is not even aware that they are breaking copyright law. I can recall many instances when I stumbled upon someone infringing on copyright guidelines: making illegal copies of sheet music, recording full length songs onto video, using the opaque to copy Big Bird for the bulletin board, photocopying full texts so every student in the class would have a copy, and the list goes on. Exactly how proactive and assertive should the SLMS be in dealing with copyright issues such as this? While it is obvious that the teacher who is committing an infringement should be told they are doing so, should the SLMS routinely check to see if such situations are occurring?

One school of thought is that the SLMS should go beyond simply informing students, teachers and administrators about copyright law by taking measures that expand their basic knowledge in this area. For instance, Doug Johnson suggests the SLMS can become a “copyright counselor” by guiding students and teachers to make informed decisions regarding copyright and fair use. The more assertive you are in informing students and faculty of copyright laws, the more likely they are to understand that this is theft and support punishment of offenders. The better informed faculty and students are, the more likely there will be no embarrassing infringements for the school and school system. When the role of copyright officer is taken more seriously and aggressively by the SLMS, the more protected the users of information will be.

The opposite viewpoint is that the SLMS should only present a good, basic overview of most copyright infringements through an in-service at the beginning of the school year. Teachers can inform students in their classes about proper use of resources and explain what is, and what is not, allowed regarding copyright. Rather than spending precious time and energy distributing detailed information beyond a basic staff development session, the SLMS should budget for legal purchase of needed materials, help teachers obtain legal copyright permissions, and model ethical and moral behavior regarding copyright law. Informing teachers and students at the point of infringement is sufficient; there is no need to offend teachers by presenting more details than necessary when dealing with sensitive copyright issues.

The next question becomes: when a teacher is observed breaking copyright guidelines, should you turn them in to the administration or look the other way? I think the goal here is to lead the faculty and students to a point where they automatically seek out the proper way of dealing with copyright “situations” when there is a question. If the SLMS can get users to first recognize when there might be an issue of copyright clearance, present this question to him/her as copyright officer in the school, and then respond based on the allowable actions, just maybe the more appropriate title could be COPYRIGHT GURU!

(I strongly recommend the Carol Mann Simpson book Copyright for schools.)

Johnson, D. (2007, June 13). Lessons school librarians teach others. Retrieved July 23, 2008, from http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/lessons-school-librarians-teach-others.html.

Russell, C. (2004). Complete copyright: An Everyday guide for librarians. Chicago: ALA.

Simpson, C.M. (2005). Copyright for schools: A Practical guide. 4th ed. Worthington, Ohio: Linworth.

Dr. Phyllis R. Snipes
University of West Georgia

08-08-08 Prep

The  Beijing Olympics begin in 26 days!  The official site has education resources concerning records, Hall of Fame, the Olympic Movement and more. Check del.icio.us for more links.

We begin school the Monday before the start of the Olympics and I am planning a book display to entice our students to read about the commitment, challenge, and history behind the Olympic Games.  I will also pull books concerning China (especially apropos for the 7th graders who study China this year) for check out during orientations.  In the fiction area, I will pull books by Chinese-American authors like Laurence Yep, Lisa Yee, Adeline Yen Mah, and Lensey Namioka.

How will you incorporate the Olympics in your school’s media center?

Kris Woods, Media Specialist, M.A. Teasley Middle School, Canton, GA

Pageflakes As a Personal Learning Network Portal: Learning and Research 2.0

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

Mashup with Mixwit!

Are you looking for a cool multimedia Web 2.0 tool to show your teachers this fall?  Check out Mixwit, a fun “media playground” that allows you to artwork, photos, and music in a format that can be easily shared!  Read about how this teacher, Konrad Glogowski , used this tool as part of a novel study (hit the play button above to play his mix); you can also visit and see student examples by going to the link beneath this screenshot.

blog of proximal development

You can register your own account for free!  Click on the link below to visit Mixwit and start mixing up your own creative projects today!

 

Mixwit – Create and Share Digital Mixtapes

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com

A New Way to Read

As a recent present to myself, I bought a Kindle.

Kindle is Amazon’s digital book reader thingy, in case you haven’t heard.

Long a fan of handheld devices, I had resisted buying any kind of e-book reader. The printed book is an elegant technology. I hesitate to adopt a new gadget when the old version could hardly be improved on.

There will always be books in my home and office. However, this device seems better than previous generations of readers. Here are some basic reasons for shifting some of my library from print to electrons:

• Growing concern for diminishing numbers of trees (especially here in the south, where our pines so often become toilet paper)
• A need to declutter and simplify
• Frustration over never being able to check out a best-seller at the library, due to popular demand (a good thing)
• Distaste over having to carry so much stuff with me everywhere, including a laptop

These were personal reasons. The cool reasons that really sold this device to me were:

• No computer syncing required
• No cost for wireless access (it works over one of the cell phone networks, and you need not own that particular cell plan)
• Ability to access the web – to a very limited and slow degree, but still…
• For a dime, you can email a document to Amazon, where it will be converted to Kindle format and magically appear in your table of contents
• Plays audiobooks (for which you do need the provided USB cable to hook up with a service like Audible)
• Plays mp3s
• Can use some web tools designed for mobile devices, like the Google mobile apps, including calendar, email, and maps, so it’s possible to do email if you can type with your thumbs.
• While reading, it’s easy to annotate specific lines of text, just as you would pencil something in a book.
• Can download substantial samples of most titles before deciding to purchase.

So far, I am quite pleased with my present. Teaching class, I used it as a backup for my online class materials. I’m now reading my 2^nd novel. “Turning pages” is simple; the device is lightweight (about the size of a paperback). The “print” is highly legible, even for those of us who are (ahem) needing more light these days. (You can also increase/decrease the font size.) Books cost about $10, and are instantly available.

For me, the Kindle fills a niche. For good or bad, I can instantly (for a fee) access a title that would involve at least a car trip or several days of waiting for delivery. Also, $30 seems a lot to pay for a best-seller entertainment novel that I will only read once. I will still visit the public and academic library for older titles, highly visual titles, etc.

I could gush more but will stop here. I’m not sure if this first edition of the Kindle is something that would hold up in a school setting – but I think it’s worth a look.

Mary Ann Fitzgerald

University of Georgia

Feed, Tag, Research: Remixing for School Library 2.5 (Library Remix 2.5@NECC 2008)

 

necclibrarians08 » home

If you have not heard the buzz about this NECC session, then head over to http://necclibrarians08.wikispaces.com/ to get the scoop!  Here you will find the recorded Ustream video of the session, plus terrific resources from all the presenters on the panel.  What was this session all about?  Here is the official description in a nutshell:

School librarians are leading learning and instructional change. Discover how we are re-visioning reading, research, and “library” for 21st-century students on the Read/Write Web.

As if this link isn’t enough, feel free to check out my favorite buzz and discussion on this important NECC 2008 panel discussion by visiting http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/LibraryRemix2.5 .

 

 

 

more about “Team Force Teacher Feed: Ustream.TV S…“, posted with vodpod

Posted by Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School

Save the Date: Decatur Book Festival, August 29-31!

 

The 2008 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical | Home

 Many thanks to Dr. JoBeth Allen from the University of Georgia Department of Language and Literacy for the heads up on this WONDERFUL event!  I plan to be there…Billy Collins will be giving the keynote address!  Here is the latest info straight from the festival organizers via email:

It’s hard to believe, but here we are preparing to launch the THIRD annual Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical. The festival has not merely survived its first few years. We’ve built on partnerships with artistic, educational, business, and governmental organizations not only from all over metropolitan Atlanta but from all over the nation. Hosted in the literary haven of Decatur, this festival has quickly joined the ranks of the largest and most talked about book festivals nationwide.
 
 Perhaps we could just keep doing what we’ve been doing and call that good enough, but where’s the fun in that? We’ve added plenty of new and unique programs to this year’s festival:
 
 We’ve had a Children’s Parade since the first year, but this is the first time we’ll be launching a new book at the parade. Not just any book: It’s the first new “Madeline” story in 50 years–”Madeline and the Cats of Rome”–written by John Bemelmans Marciano, the grandson of Ludwig Bemelmans. We encourage everyone to join Marciano in the parade, maybe wear a big yellow hat, sing your favorite French (or, for that matter, Italian) song, or just make some noise.
 
 Though we’ve had programs directed at teenagers from the beginning, 2008 marks the first year we will set aside a space exclusively for teenagers, called Escape. Escape will host best-selling authors for interactive discussions, an open mic and a literary salon. For those under 18, there will also be a quiz show called How Well Do You Know Harry? judged by Cheryl Klein, continuity editor for the last four Harry Potter books.
 
 In a historic partnership, Poets & Writers and Agnes Scott College are working with us to present the best DBF Writers Conferenceyet, with top national editors, agents, critics, publicists, authors, and screenwriters sharing their collective wisdom in a conference tightly integrated with the rest of the book festival. In addition, beginning this year, DBF will host the prestigious Southern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA) awards ceremony. Many of the nominees will give readings at the festival.
 
 In 2006, we hosted the launch event for the first Atlanta Reads. This year, we’ll launch Atlanta Reads as well as the Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts. Atlanta’s Big Read will encourage the entire community to read and talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
 
 Still not enough to fill your Labor Day weekend? Check out even more of the new programs that make this year’s festival truly unique:

 Brooks & Co. Dancewill perform a dance inspired by Shirley Jackson’s classic short story, “The Lottery,” set to the music of Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” and drawing on Ninjinsky’s seminal choreography to Stravinsky’s work.
 
 In a program called “Words from Iraq,” adult and young actors from PushPush Theater will present multiple perspectives on Iraq through readings of letters children have written to their parents in the military, blogs written by soldiers in Iraq, and a blog by a young Iraqi woman.
 
 In the spirit of the Java Monkey Local Authors Stage, we’re adding a stage for emerging authors just beginning to get their work out into the world, called the Emerging and Exhibiting Authors Stage.
 
 Author and former Olympian runner Jeff Galloway will lead a fun run Saturday morning of the festival, followed by a running clinic.
 
 Lee Smith, Marshall Chapman, Jill McCorkle, and Matraca Berg will all be onstage together to give a taste of their traveling musical–The Good ol’ Girls–about their friendship and the mutual influences of their books and music on one another.
  
 And that’s just the new stuff!
 

You know you can also count on us to bring you the nation’s top authors in our strongest, most diverse line-up yet. You know we’ve got you covered for good food and some of the best singer-songwriters in America. You know we’ll show the whole family a good time. So, come join us this Labor Day weekend for the best AJC Decatur Book Festival yet!    
   
   

 Be sure to check out our 2008 DBF web site,www.decaturbookfestival.com <http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0010o9b8-G1lEKeg0HJ9PdUjGRNyOgyeblVgbcTsEt5PKylDahxzgliuFLJWKLt-zYIoc45cFGTjIsQlOObVGPCdF6Q_S1hyNoiVHSyZMw4GDtx6o-NqZyAj84pBZOFARsm> .

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School