Library 2.0 and Books of the World

Posted on June 12, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Due to the google-ification of the world's collection of books, we are going to find ourselves in a very different space in terms of books and reading some time in the not so distant future. No, I don't advocate getting rid of books – there is something very portable, tactile, personal and relevant about an actual copy of a book. But we do need to think beyond book too.

Changes in the book-landscape come together in a series of recent posts and messages that are related to books.

Will Richardson's post about his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (love that book!) is worth reading just to see what he is cogitating. What will he do about his next book?

Then we have Michael Stephen's message about the iPod program at St Joseph County Public Library.

" The library will begin offering downloadable audiobooks on iPods beginning Fall 2006! Bring in your own iPod or check out one of the library-owned iPods. We’ll download bestselling audiobook titles from the iTunes Music Store for use on your MP3 player, laptop, or in your car."

Last but not least from InfoBlog we have Michael Cart talking about the future of books. The 15-minute podcast looks at the New York Times Magazine article from May 14 entitled, "What Will Happen to Books?"

His unique perspective as an author and librarian brings an even-handed perspective to the controversy surrounding the "google-ification" of books and what impact this may (will) have on our current ideas of intellectual property.

Some food for thought!

Social Software and Web 2.0

Posted on June 6, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Today I had fun working with a small group of teachers, in a workshop simply called "Introduction to Blogging". This was intended to help people think about, and be confident enough to go back to school and get involved with blogging.

It's great to see teachers and teacher librarians volunteering to
come and learn these things! With this training, and with those
who have already got their blogs under way, I am seeing a wave of interest in blogging and other social software. After my presentation at the last large network meeting, I am finding others with whom I can talk about blogs, news feeds, tagging, flickr, de.lic.ious etc.

Nice to know we have begun thinking about and working with social software – and started to do new things. In this context I would highly recommend the article by Brian Alexander that appeared in Educause Review Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44. You can read this online here or download the pdf file. Though written for the Higher Education sector, the article provides a comprehensive overview of social software and Web 2.0, and asks some challenging questions about the implications of these developments for education.

"The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?"

Grab this article and check out the other issues for more treasure.

The Learner as Network

Posted on June 1, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

A post on Will Richardson's webblogg-ed brings home the critical issues central to the whole debate about 'futures' in education. The learner has always been considered central to the education enterprise, and in a constructivist sense the learner is the creator, shaper, and manager of learning experiences. Translate that into the world of ICT, and you get education being 'delivered' with different IT tools, exploring new and/or different ways to allow students to engage with ideas for the creation of new personal knowledge.

Sound good? Many schools think so, and in some cases are appointing people into a position that might be a Director of e-learning (or similar). e-learning what? how?

What then about the socially networked world of our students? Aren't they busy e-learning without any help from their teachers?

Will comments on how far we need to go:

" We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Read the full post here. My concern is that educators need to understand (if not adopt) the ways of networking that permiate the lives of students. Also,what we need in our schools or educational institutions is someone who can 'direct innovation'. This is vital to ensure that a true blend of tools, techniques, processes, and thinking strategies can happen. Who can bring a broad curriculum understanding to integration of ICT and social networks, as well as promote and develop literacy for reading and relaxation as well as communication (essential for metacognition and learning), plus embed knowledge techniques for information search, analysis and sythesis? If the position criteria are any guide – what we now need is a Director of Innovation. This is not an IT leader, or teaching & learning leader, or curriculum leader, or information services leader. This is new, and this is important!

We can no longer afford a silo mentality. We need a genuine innovator to remix a new learning framework for our students – within a school that is remixed in shape and style to accommodate "the learner as network".

Social Internet = Web 2.0

Posted on May 29, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

At an inservice some weeks ago, a group of us shared ideas about changes in the digital envirnoment of our students that is impacting on their lives – and which must be understood by educators if we are to adapt our teaching to include more collaborative tools.

Our introduction to Web 2.0 was designed to alert our teachers to a different web world – well beyond the comfortable world of websites and smart searching of the internet. We provided this summary sheet of these ideas to encourage them to do a bit of looking. I admit, we could have created a Lense in Squidoo – maybe next time!

Web 2.0 is an 'hot topic' in the blogosphere – but is not yet a hot topic in your average school. Just today I came across yet another forum being promoted amongst our schools –Learning in an Online World.

Quite correctly the promo considers many changes that have occurred since 2000, and states that "Major challenges still exist. Continued collaboration and sharing and best practice is crucial to achieve our shared vision of all schools confidently using ICT in their everyday practices to improve learning and teaching."

This forum will certainly showcase some interesting things – because so many teachers and schools still have a lot to learn about the potential of Web 1.0 technologies. However, as far as I can see there is nothing Web 2.0 about the Forum. There is no obvious reflection on the digital world of our students, nor the use of Web 2.0 technologies for social networks, and supporting teaching and learning. Of course, these concepts may emerge within presentations.

Somehow I think that much is being missed in a forum which is discussing learning in an online world. While some very important things will be covered, there is just so much more to consider than learning management systems (MyInternet), electronic whiteboards, video editing, learning objects, Kahootz, ipods, wikki versus Britannica (ho hum! I wonder how up-to-date this presentation is?). The focus is very much on tools to use, rather than ways of thinking and operating in a socially networked world.

Working the Web – using or abusing?

Posted on May 27, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

I spent a good part of today attending a professional development session for Teacher Librarians. Amongst the things discussed was ethical use of resources and the issues around plagiarism.

In this context I am wonder where developments in Web 2.0 software will take us. Joe reports on Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a website which enables you to clip images and text onto a website to store and, optionally, share. Just like how you can take magazine and newspaper clippings, Clipmarks allows you to do this on websites.

Clipmarks requires you to install a Firefox extension or an Internet Explorer toolbar. Say you are researching a specific topic and you have multiple sites open, each with a snippet of text or an image you want to take note of. With Clipmarks, you can simply open each source in a new tab in your browser, go into clip mode (first icon in toolbar), and clip multiple objects from each site. You will find all of your clippings still intact in each tab/site. Then, when saving your clippings, you will see that the Clipmark page will include all clippings grouped by source on one page. I have found this very useful, especially for when researching.

The idea behind Clipmarks isn’t just to store things – it’s to share them. del.icio.us is a bookmarking service designed for storing and sharing bookmarks. However, on del.icio.us you do not have the option to keep these bookmarks private. Clipmark is a bookmarking site with a twist.

Well yes! As Joe says "When does Clipmarks become a copyright breach? Copying copyrighted images and text (in quantities larger than an excerpt) surely isn’t fair use."

Solution Watch offers this information:

"Say you are researching a specific topic and you have multiple sites open, each with a snippet of text or an image you want to take note of. With Clipmarks, you can simply open each source in a new tab in your browser, go into clip mode (first icon in toolbar), and clip multiple objects from each site. You will find all of your clippings still intact in each tab/site. Then, when saving your clippings, you will see that the Clipmark page will include all clippings grouped by source on one page. This could be very useful, especially for when researching".

Read the full report from SolutionWatch here. Lets see what happens!

Sphere it! to read it!

Posted on May 25, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Just recently I found myself in Borders Bookstore on a hunt for information about new developments in web technologies. Yes, there were exactly 18 bays of books – all sixfoot high each of them – and absolutely none about Web 2.0 technologies and developments, other than a few books on Ajax.

Never mind – everything anyone wants to know or discuss can be found in blogs, social bookmarks, squidoo – basically anywhere you want to go, or any place you want to aggregate!

I have to say that the report from TechCrunch about "Sphere It" was a damn good find.

The blog search engine – Sphere – is less than a month old…..and it is already a great tool for searching for blogs. Try school libraries, or Library 2.0, and you will hit a few jackpots.

But the other thing it offers is "Sphere It" functionality, which is already appearing embedded in articles. Theses links are prominently placed below the headlines of articles and link directly to Sphere blog search results related to the topic.

Here's the thing: "Sphere It" is a Sphere feature that allows users to find relevant blog content from any URL. The easiest way to use it is to install the Sphere It bookmarklet into the browser. Click it while on any web page and relevant Sphere blog search results will be brought up.

Unlike Technorati’s “Technorati This” feature, which shows blog entries that link to the URL being searched, Sphere It doesn’t report links. Rather, it does a semantic analysis on the text within the page being searched and returns blog results that it finds relevant to the article.

read the whole article at TechCrunch, of more on the difference between Sphere It and Technorati This, see Sphere CEO Tony Conrad’s blog post here