Sure it's a toy . . .

But for $300 bucks, is it at least as good as a tv? With built in speakers and dvd player and using cheap lightbulbs? And way more portable?

A DVD Projector Turns Multimedia Into Child’s Play - New York Times

This brings up a common problem I have when wanting to innovate in schools (when spending taxpayers money on techy things) - if only I could get my hands on one, borrow one and play with it. Then I'd know one way or another. There's only so much research you can do. Questions always remain, and you never really know, is this thing going to work?, until you get it out of the box. It's one thing to return something to Beasty Buys as an individual consumer, receipt in hand. It's another when dealing with the world of POs.

Ugg - DOPA isn't dead (yet)

CDT | Headlines.

The House passed it. Friggin' morons.

Thoughtful commentary from Jessamyn.

google does accessibility

from the google blog:

Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

I just finished my Rutger's online MLIS Multimedia Design class in May, and granted, there was a lot of great stuff crammed into a really short time, but accessibility was not at all addressed. In fact, we asked our professor, early and often, about questions of accessibility. We wanted to learn it. But our professor, being pretty experiences in teaching the course, knew we didn't have the time. Having taken the course, I can respect that.

My problem remains, though. I have taken two technology-centric courses, both dealing mostly with webby stuff, and haven't learned anything about accessibility in either. No readings, no assignments, nothing. Meredith talks about many people getting through library school without any techy training, and I'm certainly grateful for what I've learned and know that I will continue to learn and will eventually teach myself what I need to know about accessibility. Eventually. When I'm not in school and have the time. In the meantime, I'm creating web content that isn't accessible, and that bothers me.

Shouldn't we be more in tune to this stuff than anyone?

How Students Think (and with good reason)

a quick quote from John Updike's Terrorist [I'm 195 pages in - it is expectedly heavy, but very very good. If you'd rather own than borrow from your library, try Powell's]:

"My students do not believe they will ever need business math (substitute any and all subjects here - SZP) in their heads. They imagine the computer will do everything for them. They think the human mind is on eternal holiday, and from now on has nothing else to do but absorb entertainment." (p. 113)

YALSA - Out of the Closet and Into the Library

YALSA - Out of the Closet and Into the Library

a super excellent conference post from a yalsa panel discussion on services for glbtq teens. excellent links and my own personal take-away: putting glbtq themed reading lists (I've already made one for our library here) inside glbtq themed books. ie, "like this book? here's some more like it . . . " in an accessible but anonymous place.

dvd discussion group

Pop Goes the Library covers a new initiative from the Stafford Branch of the Ocean County Library (where "Every Ocean County resident uses and champions the library." If true, Ocean County is library utopia) where people watch the dvds on their own time, like a book club, and then come in for discussion. They started it up for Gay Pride Month with several of the recent big gbltq films.

Very exciting. I haven't yet wrapped my mind around adapting such a concept for a high school library - for one thing, movies couldn't be rated R, and it seems so many discussion-worthy movies are, for another, there's the dvds - but I'm wondering if public libraries could really make a concerted effort with older teens in this regard. I'm wondering if R ratings matter so much in that realm. Certainly 20-somethings would be aaaaaalllll over this.

nsa and myspace

or, guess what kids? posting stuff online makes it totally public - to *everybody*

Yet another situation arises that is not only sketchy and angering from a 'why is my government so sucky?' perspective, but also inspires me to ask for the bazillionth time why the teaching of online safety and common sense (yes, we need to teach common sense to teenages) isn't du rigor in public eductation. Instead, we are busy trying to understand the basics of what is happening, finger-wagging, and fear-mongering. We teach stranger danger to second graders. We know how to do this. We just aren't.

Here's a clip from the New Scientist article via Lifehacker:

Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

creative commons and music

via lifehacker, a baby digg-like site that focuses exclusively on creative commons licensed music. Which means students could use these pieces in powerpoints and videos, and in some cases hack them up with garageband or audacity and use them some more. All of which is very very cool. Gotta love musicians (and all artists/creators) who release their stuff under more flexible copyright than the default.

NHEMA talks 2006

gave two talks at the NHEMA conference this past week. I think they went well, other people tell me they went very well.

The first started out to be an overview of the concept of library/web2.0. I wanted to put '2.0' in the title, but the conference organizers had no idea what that concept was, and said the attendees wouldn't, either. So the talk evolved into a brief overview of social software that will be impacting education soon, if it hasn't already, and a more in depth introduction to rss feeds and aggregators as a way to explore 2.oish concepts in more detail than we had time for. My boss attended the talk, and she seems to be still reeling. All the attendees said they learned a lot, but they looked kind of stunned. My boss said I pushed them, and that was good. Not sure, though. At least they are now familiar with a couple concepts they weren't. But it still weirds me out that things I take for granted are totally new to them, especially in light of the fact that there is so much out there, so many people, who are way more cutting edge are way more knowledgable than I. I was sort of hoping by the end of this talk to get some people excited about maybe making a NHEMA blog. Maybe next year.

The other talk was on digital audiobooks, focusing on our own very successful program, but giving a lot of background information, links to research, and lots and lots of nuts&bolts. It was the kind of talk where I got to say two sentences, then there was a question. Good for audience interactivity, bad for trying to keep up with my own slides. Good for keeping me on my feet.

Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey

Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey
Originally uploaded by plentyo'moxie.

I ordered this book because I thought our manga/anime crowd might get into it - they've checked out other non-fiction books about Japan and Japanese culture and can't seem to get enough. They haven't gotten into this book at all - I don't know if they haven't found it, if it's just plain unappealing, or what. So I finally took it home myself, and it turns out to be a great book for educators to start to understand teens' obsessions with all things modern Japan. There's a lot of good detail oriented stuff about manga, with history and culture woven into it all. The writing isn't particularly engaging, but it isn't off-putting either. And the length of the book is short enough. Educators and librarians looking for more background info on manga and anime will be pleased with the content of this book.

iTunes isn't as mean as it pretends to be

A little bit of talk over on Lifehacker seyz that if something happens and you lose all your purchased music, iTunes may let you redownload it. Mebbe. Never hurts to back it up anyway.

Bloggerific v. DOPA

I had a bloggerific day the other day. A reading class (seriously, it is a class where they just read and read and read - mostly whatever they want. On Thursdays the teacher brings them in to read magazines and newspapers, sometimes they need something non-fiction, and there are all sorts of options for assessment - I love this class) stopped by to read and use the computers to blog about what they were reading. I had already introduced this class to the blog, so that was out of the way and many happily, easily blogged. For others, there was a lot of tech support. You need an email address to be invited to be a contributor of our blog - more than a couple kids didn't have email addresses (?! - we are a mostly wealthy, white district - mostly very connected at home - this surprised me, though a few explained they just use MySpace to communicate with friends - a very teachable moment in both directions). There were kids that kept clicking on the 'create a blog' button v. the 'create a post button.' And so on.

Overall, though, the kids wrote about their books, checked previous posts for comments, read other people's posts, and then went back to reading. It was awesome to read their posts, to see them read the other posts and then be interested in the book the other student-blogger recommended (peer reader advisory!), and to generally interact with the blog in terms of the content, not the delivery.

And then I got home and read about DOPA. Something that blindly would put a kabosh on all this good learning - tech learning, peer learning/teaching, personalized, independently paced, individualized learning, learning relevant to the real(virtual) world- all of which are apparently the big education buzz words and things we are supposed to be emphasizing and doing more of.

Punch in the gut.

Except it isn't any sort of done-deal yet, in fact it is barely off the ground. Action, people, action.

random reflection brought on by malfunctioning technology

Wednesday the wireless went wacky in the apartment. B came home to try to help, but I was prepping food and the house to have people over for dinner, so we never did get it working that day. We did figure out that it was some sort of communication error between lappy and the Airport Express, because everything else worked, including hardwiring the laptop to an ethernet. This was more than awkward, so I decided I could just use B's big bad g5 with dual monitors for the light stuff I'd be doing that day - checking email, aggregator, class discussions - not doing any actual homework.

Getting closer to the point: I have a hella lotta passwords and user ids. I actually had no idea just how many of these things I have going on, because I let the computer remember most of them. I don't let the computer remember anything about my online banking, but that's about it. In the daily course of checking email, aggregator, and grad school class space, there's a lot of *other* stuff I end up doing - blogging, commenting on a lot of blogs, looking at pictures, adding to wikis, writing more emails, looking at a lot of links, looking up books at the library and so on. And a lot of these things require the user ids and passwords I created and save on lappy.

I have probably about 3 core variations on the user id, which also means I'm spawning multiple identities across the net. There's my real name, there's my libraryish screen name, there's my foodie screen name. Then there's the issue of if my screen name isn't available and I need to choose a variation. Sometimes my standard variation of that particular screen name isn't available, so then I have to make up a new variation. So I might have up to 10 different actual user ids.

And then there's passwords. Let's just say my passwords are probably only secure from me. I can't remember which one I've used where, and more often than I like have to go through the process of resetting said password.

I suppose why I found this so interesting (really frustrating as well as I kept getting stopped in my tracks) is that I generally avoid creating accounts whenever possible. I use bugmenot.com in my rabid avoidance of creating accounts for news organizations. But I think its a very telling sign of the interactivity, the 2.0-i-ness, of the web, that someone who generally won't comment on a blog or read an article if I have to create an account has ended up with this long list.

In no particular order, some of the many places I visit and have to login for:

• bank
• home email
• work email
• grad school email
• project email
• flickr
• blogger
• grad school class space
• grad school library
• grad school grades
• grad school money stuff
• yahoo groups
• typepad
• public library opac
• library elf
• blog aggregator
• amazon (which i don't purchase from anymore because they donate a lot of money to the republican party)
• powells
• zingermanns
• delicious
• eat local wiki
• wikipedia
• meredith's library wiki
• paypal
• livejournal
• grad school ftp web stuff
  

Yet another reason to love Canadians

As if we needed any more . . .

Canadian Music Creators Speak Out Against File Sharing Lawsuits

To quote extensively (hell, I'd love to paste the whole thing here, make sure you check it out - there's only a couple paragraphs more):

Major international music artists based in Canada have banded together to form a group aimed, among other things, at protesting the recording industry's practice of targeting fans with lawsuits.

With Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan as members, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition stated in a White Paper Wednesday:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical: Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of US$500 to $20,000 per song.
2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive: Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels' control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.
3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists: The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent."

here's another version of the same story, this one with comments/discussion.

Patrons are people, too

Aaron of Walking Paper points out that patrons might like to interact with their library website in cool ways just like they interact with other social software sites - creating content and making it amusing for themselves and others - and in terms of privacy, adults can make their own decisions about such things if given half a chance.

circulating art

What I like so much about this initiative from the Portland (Maine) public library is not just that they are recycling things into art, but that then they go ahead and circulate the art. And that they accept that things like stolen, lost, and damaged items happen, and treat those situations like any other circulating item. Art is meant to be appreciated, but not treated as too precious to be appreciated by people in their own homes. I *heart* circulating art. Story, from the New York Times, here.

Powells and New Orleans Libraries

Here's an easy way to directly help New Orleans libraries through Powells. One book cost $8.95, you can recommend a book if you want. Powells and the Katrina Project make sure the libraries get what they need. More info on the Katrina Project, including some intense pictures of what floods do to libraries, here.

more on schools and wikipedia editing

Apparently, our school isn't the only one being blocked on the basis of IP address from editing Wikipedia, and mine aren't the only students taling back and asking that the Wikipedia blockers give schools special dispensation. In this case, Andy Carvin asks the question, what are schools doing to make sure students are editing responsibly? ummmm . . . . nothing. But different in our case, our students do add constructive, though mostly very minor, edits. Probably not enough to balance out the vandalism. But enough to know there are some really cool kids who get it.

my kids rock the wiki house

A student came up to me a few weeks ago, all worked up because our ip had been blocked on wikipedia - he couldn't edit a page he was using for a class. He'd learned something for his project he didn't see on wikipedia and wanted to add it.

So he went into the user talk and made his points - and came back to me 20 minutes later with a few pieces of paper printed out from 'our' user talk page - he got his point across, and the wiki community came up with a compromise. Real world learning on all kinds of levels.

Check this out:

Excuse me, this is a school library IP. Can you really punish the entire school for the vandalising actions of just a few. Seems like an injustice to me, though I do not know the wikipedia's policies on this matter. Thank you. ~Jesse S. of Winnacunnet High School Hampton NH

And the response, a few minutes later:

Okay, the block should have expired now. I did not realize that this was a school IP, if I had, the block would have been shorter to limit the collateral damage. In general, we use blocks to prevent vandalism, sometimes that is the only way to stop it. It is regrettable that it affects innocents, if you have a registered account and your IP winds up being blocked for a long period of time, you will be able to e-mail the blocking administrator, explain the situation and hopefully you will be unblocked soon. Sorry for the trouble. Sjakkalle 15:44, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

The whole conversation.

we so cool . . . update

so far, so good. there were some trouble-shooting phone calls with my-friend-our-first-volunteer-reader over the weekend - I had given some piss-poor technical directions on one part, which reminded me why testing is such a good idea. Got the file, had to spend some serious time doing various things with it - serious time only because things like uploading .wav files and renaming id3 tags was new to me. It's in the LibriVox forums right now, an editor has claimed it, and soon it will be ready for prime time.

The project manager called the reading "charming." Which made me grin like an idiot. I love it when things work.