Digital Audio Book Services through Libraries

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

We’ve been doing a bit of a ’roundup of possibilities’ in our school libraries, and some of our Teacher Librarians and Technology Co-ordinators have become keen to expand this aspect of their digital services within their schools. For those who are on the same path, I thought I would highlight one of the excellent series of Technology Reports from ALA TechSource.

Author Tom Peters explains that his issue of Library Technology Reports (Jan/Feb 2007), Digital Audio Book Services through Libraries “examines in some depth digital audiobook services that can be purchased or leased. It also looks briefly at a few free online digital audiobook sources.”

I have purchased some of these Library Technology Reports – which for us in Australia are very expensive – and they are absolutely excellent 🙂

However, the good folk at ALA kindly make digital copies available for viewing and download.

View (and then save) your pdf copy here.

What a tweet!

Posted on June 12, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

After some testing and ‘dialogue’ shared at Twitter, Daniel Kuropatwa says:

The winner is: Sendspace for simplest interface for non-techies to send large files to family and friends.

Sendspace gives you:

Unlimited Uploads
Unlimited Downloads per file
Safe, Private, File Sharing
Completely Free To Use
Send a file to anyone, anywhere in the world, up to 300MB!

Bibliography blues?

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

BibMe is a fully automatic and free bibliography maker. You can create, and save your bibliographies until you are ready to download. Looks good – really easy to use! Does APA, MLA and Chicago formatting for a full range of media.

From KairosNews:

This is the most exciting citation generator I’ve played with in a while. I’ve been using sites like Easybib.com for years, but BibMe, which was developed this spring by Information Systems students at Carnegie Mellon University seems simpler to use and more extensive in its scope than most other tools around. Just go play with it. It seems pretty fantastic.

I agree!

[Thanks to Chris Harris from the School Library Journal blog, this is now cross-posted at iLibrarian.

Learning is sexy…

Posted on June 9, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

….. or so Librarian Chick insists. You might like to drop over to the Librarian Chick wiki – where you will find a big compilation of all kinds of resources.

I am particularly interested in the Books and Audio Books section, because many of our school libraries are looking for good ways of integrating digital and audio book resources.

Gaming for learning – and the young

Posted on June 9, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Anshul Samar is a 13-year old founder and CEO of Elementeo, a company operating in the field of education.

Enter the chemical battlefield with Elementeo, a game of chemistry. Two strong wills fighting against each other in a midst of an epic chemical battle, constantly trying to reduce their opponent’s IQ to ZERO. Armed with their arsenal of elements, compounds, and nuclear reactions, these chemists strive to create, combat, and conquer the world!

Teemu Arina says

Isn’t that exiting. One more young CEO who thinks the educational system is not doing an adequate job and decides to fix things himself. Reminds of myself when I was 16 but Anshul beats me by 3 years.

I recommend a read of Tarina, Teemu’s blog. He is partner and CEO at Dicole Oy, a company focusing on understanding the role of social technologies in knowledge work and networked learning in organizations.

Who are you teaching today that is really a CEO in school uniform?

Isn’t 42 the answer to everything?

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is a theoretical solution in Douglas Adams‘ book series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The “Answer” is simply “42“. In the story, the Answer is produced using the hypercomputer Deep Thought.

OK, so I have to own up that this crazy book has always been on my bookshelf of favourites. Nuts!

Naturally I had to test out mind42.com! Not sure if the developers know about Douglas Adams, as they say the name stands FOR TWO, which is the minimum required number of people to do something together.

Is mind42.com the ultimate mindmapping solution to manage all your ideas? Well, it just might be. You can collaborate, or manage revisions. Link images or URLs. Make notes or create a ‘to-do-list’. Amazingly, it sports a Wikipedia API – so you can search wikipedia, and attach an article. Would like it to have more flexibility with shapes and lines – but overall pretty interesting.

Picasa to Flickr – cool!

Posted on June 2, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Download Picasa2flickr from SourceForge, and you will be allowed to (you guessed it!) upload your photos straight from picasa to flickr!

This is a very handy enhancement for busy teachers. Since picasa is so easy to use (and can do so many simple image editing things ‘on the fly’), being able to hit the button and upload to flickr is a nice enhancement!

ICT – responsible use forum

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

I’m attending an ICT forum on “responsible use” tomorrow, with information from Minter Ellison, National Copyright Unit, and more. I hope to learn something ‘new’.

Fair use, and responsible use online are significant issues, that need solutions for management in schools in developing a culture of ‘fair use’. I am surprised that there seems to be nothing listed on the agenda in relation to Creative Commons – will they mention or cover these newer directions?

Back in August, Andy Carvin wrote about Encouraging student creativity with Creative Commons.

In today’s world, copyright has become a lot more complicated. Ever since the advent of digital recording and the ability to upload large files to the Internet, everyone with Internet access could theoretically become distributors of other people’s content, even without their permission.

Hmm, how does this video below fit with this?

The post on YouTube provides the source of this video from Stanford Law School. Nice. Is it OK for me to capture it this way for the purpose of education? Since their purpose is to promote ‘fair use’, and our purpose in schools is to teach about “fair use” – I imagine that distribution of this video, with acknowledgment, is going to be fine. But I don’t know – and I didn’t ask. Would you? In this case the ‘horse has bolted’, as I found this link via popurls!

How close do we stick with these ideals? The sharing on social sites, such as Flickr, encourages us to ‘do the right thing’ and reference our use of photos, even when willingly shared. However, it is our job to be encouraging students to be familiar with the purpose of Creative Commons licensing, and how this is used in environments beyond the standard copyright laws in our own countries or under international law.

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Technorati Tags: copyright, creative commons, flickr, YouTube

Mobile technology…2020

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

To tempt you to investigate the Horizon Project, I am going to share this great video by Atif from the International School Dhaka, in Bangladesh. He’s done a great job creating this video to highlight the possible changes and uses of mobile technology in education in the future.