The Networked Student

A video to use with administrators, parents, and others to explain how new tools and new connections are important to create 21st century learners. It does miss the collaboration with your media specialist, but it does mention the media center. Found via Tame the Web,

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros’ Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century.Anyone is free to use this video for educational purposes. You may download, translate, or use as part of another presentation. Please share.

History Uncovered Competition

Here is an opportunity for teams of students coached by their teacher and media specialist. From the press release:

ABC-CLIO will launch its new annual research competition for secondary students at the National Council for the Social Studies 88th Annual Conference in Houston. The award-winning developer and publisher of history research databases will award more than $60,000 in cash and prizes in this unique competition for teams of secondary students working in collaboration with their social studies teachers and school library media specialists.

The topic for the inaugural competition is "Select the top 10 people, events or places that have shaped the course of history." Coached by their teacher and/or school library media specialist, student teams will identify their choices and then defend them and present their research findings to ABC-CLIO in an electronic format...

More details at the History Uncovered Web site.

My Dewey Decimal Classification

Just what every librarian needs to know! Where do I fit in?

Ann Walker Smalley's Dewey Decimal Section:

068 Organizations in other geographic areas

Ann Walker Smalley's birthday: 11/17/1951 = 1117+1951 = 3068


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

New Tools

Life Magazine Photo Archive
2 million photos from Life Photo library from 1750s on. The goal is to add 10 million of Life's photos. Search from the start page or you can include source:life with any Google Image search query. Great for History Day, among other things.

EtherPad
"The perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page." Doesn't Google Docs already do this? Their answer:

No. Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.

Gmail Themes
Not exactly a productivity enhancer, but Gmail has added the ability to customize the look of your Gmail account.

Google SearchWiki
Tailor your Google search results. Learn more.



And a tool no more--Lively
Google announced that it will discontinue Lively, a Second Life-type 3-D virtual world creator in December.

And You Thought Wikipedia Was Bad

This post on ReadWriteWeb describes a casual conversation about a nine year old boy who accesses the Web through YouTube. The kid's dad says that when the kid wants information, he goes to YouTube and types in a search term. The kid then watches the videos. No Google, no other Web sites, no further searching, no other information source at all.

The author of the post does his own experiment using various terms to test YouTube as search engine. Read the post to see his conclusions.

Now admittedly, what the original kid was looking for was not "research"--he was looking for Pokemon characters or Donkey from Shrek. But what does this mean for us as teachers and librarians trying to teach research and information literacy skills? Will we face a a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube? Only YouTube?

We do keep hearing that people no longer read, kids use their electronic tools for all things from communication to games, etc. People are seeking information, but through less traditional ways than print. Doug Johnson of Blue Skunk Blog has an interesting post on Libraries for a Post-Literate Society. Doug is Media Director at Mankato Schools.

Note that I love YouTube--I have spent a lot of time watching stuff like this or this. During the campaign, I looked for the speeches, debate clips--and SNL sketches. And it looks like soon we will be able to watch full-length Hollywood movies on YouTube. I have to say, though, YouTube as search engine does not thrill me. What do you think?

Glue

Yahoo! Glue is an "all in one" search tool. Yahoo! Glue search results include web search, images, news, blog search, Wikipedia and YouTube videos. The cool part? All these links are on one page. Here are the results for a search on Barak Obama.

Depending on the search terms, you get different results (or no results if you search school libraries). Most have the Wikipedia article at the top, then maybe blog posts, images, videos, articles, news links, and more.

Try it out--it is fun.

Digital Youth

Just wanted to point you toward this post on Stephen's Lighthouse blog (he is a big thinker in the library world) that is a good summary of Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project funded by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Take a look at Stephen's summary and delve deeper in the entire executive summary (58 page PDF) for more insights and answers. The two questions the study asked are of great interest to all educators.

The study was motivated by two primary research questions: How are new media being integrated into youth practices and agendas? How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?

The answers to these questions are critical to developing educational and other social institutions--including libraries--that can meet the needs of this and future generations.

The Week of the Search Engine

I seem to have encountered several new search engines this week. The latest is DeepDyve. DeepDyve says it searches the deep Web that other search engines don't reach. It seems to search selected industry databases including open access databases such as Medline and other government medical sources, open access medical journals, and patent databases. It includes SAGE Publications and some other subscription journals. 

These are freely available databases (although may require payment for fulltext), but as we mentioned at our meetings this month, the typical search engines don't search these specialized deep databases. You won't find Medline results in a Google search. You could search each of the sites DeepDyve mentions on its Expert Sources page but it would mean searching each site/publication individually, so this is a productivity/efficiency tool at least. Currently the focus is on patents, life sciences, and physical sciences. And Wikipedia. More industries to come.

You have to sign up and sign in to use the free version of DeepDyve. Premium version--which offers more complicated display and filtering of results, along with some organizing tools--is $45 per month per user. 

Seriously, I've Been Trying To Tell You!

Here's a tool that I can recommend for its extreme accuracy. The Blog Readability Test measures the level of education required to understand your blog. Just enter your blog URL and get the results. And how do I know it is accurate? It rated my blog as:

New Tool

Refsek* is a search engine designed to make academic information available to students and researchers. My first search got no results (Truman Capote), but you have the option of searching again using Google, Yahoo, Ask, or Live. Other searches had better results. The site seems to retrieve "academic" information from .org, .edu, and .gov sites. Could be useful for new searchers unfamiliar with verifying their information. The directory (click on link in upper right) has links to reference sources and a list of teacher resource sites. 

Here is a tool to really keep an eye on. Reference Extract is a new search engine under development by OCLC (the multinational library organization that brings us NetLibrary, WorldCat and OpenCat, among many more library-focused tools and services). This search engine will be built for

maximum credibility by relying on the expertised and credibility judgements of librarians from around the globe. Users will enter a search term and get results weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State of Maryland, and over 1,400 libraries worldwide.

The Planning Reference Extract blog has more information. The blog also seeks librarian input into the development process. 

Blocked

Edutopia has many sources for teachers and media specialists that are integrating technology in their teaching. Here is an article on working around filters with good points on advocating for access and teaching "digital citizenship." One recommendation,

When Honeycutt introduces Web 2.0 tools to schools, he often starts with a virtual sandbox in which teachers can play with new applications before granting access to students. "We need to create places where teachers can take chances," Honeycutt says. “Every district needs to anoint some teachers to play with Web 2.0 tools in a safe, hypothetical environment. I call it taming the tool. Teachers need time to consider, 'Under what conditions would we allow this tool into the classroom?'

Hey, that's you MILI participants!

Blog Tools

Here is a handy chart that compares features of various tools that offer blog search. These tools let you search for information in blog posts, which can be useful if you are looking for opinion or recommendations.

And may I say, Ann Smarty is a better name than Ann Smalley.