Everytime I check Twitter, there's a new article for me to read. Everytime I read that article, it leads me to another article, and so on and so on. Suddenly, I've spent hours surfing through articles on the librarians at ALA or reviews from the NYT or links to ways to make an avatar on Yahoo!, and then I find the world of podcasts that needs to be explored, like Grammar Girl, and their corresponding websites. I also found a podcast from ProQuest explaining how to access newspapers from home via the internet. How can I create those mini-videos to embed on our website? Those types of tutorials could be sweet.
Then I find new blogs from AASL to read where, instead of talking about ALA, they are talking about NECC, and some comments bring up ideas that don't seem revolutionary to me, though the blogs approach them as such. It makes me realize that as behind in the times as I am in terms of certain technologies, I am not completely ignorant. I've kept my ears and eyes open to learning where people are going with computers, and certain softwares.
As my del.icio.us page attests to, I've found a way to personally use that site for a year now. Though I still struggle with how to integrate some of those/these technologies into the classroom. In listening to the Grammar Girl podcast I think, the English department could really benefit from these, and I wonder what other podcasts I could introduce to the faculty, how they could livestream them so it doesn't take server space, and if there's room on the school server to create podcasts of our own.
Later, I was watching my favorite video blog (vlog) of John Green (author of Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines)and his brother Hank Green called Brotherhood 2.0 and what is Hank doing but reading. The next day, John's talking about ALA. But back to Hank, in his vlog he's reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, and he questions the acceptability of adults reading young adult books. What follows in the comments is lots of cheering for YA novels as well as thick discussion of the upcoming movie for The Golden Compass. Being the surfer I've been all day, I head to the website, and try to create my own daemon. Here's what they gave me, a jackel:
I've tried to embed the image from the site, and hope it works. I figure that is a test in and of itself. I can't see the image when I use Firefox, but can when I use Safari, so please let me know what happens when you read this post.
Seems a little mean to me (the choice of jackel), and apparently it can be changed but...I know this site is created to promote the movie, but there are other books like Lemony Snicket which certainly take advantage of the world wide interweb to help promote their books. How well to libraries and librarians pay attention to this? It seems we should.
Maybe, after all this searching, my real question becomes: what's the priority? Where do libraries and librarians enter the tech world and how much is truly necessary to stay current and provide the best services to users? How do we become efficient surfers so that students can learn from us, how to move through the interweb with limited distraction. Maybe distraction is fine (it is, really), but all the surving and exploring and discovery takes time. What is the minimum a library needs to know in order to serve the most people?
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4 comments:
I agree-the web, it's a crazy hall of mirrors--it just seems like a big ball with an endless amount of holes, weaving in an out of each other. I just feel like if I spent enough days doing what you did today(I've done my share today, too)then I will find the blogs and newsites that I like, monitor those, and be content.
it's that itchy feeling of wondering: What'd I miss?
Now I'm going to find my daemon!
First, yes the image works - at least in Firefox on a MAC.
Second, as I read your post I thought to myself, isn't this the research experience we want students to have. They are engaged in the process finding connections from one place to another. So, I'm led to ask what is it that makes that interest and perhaps excitement happen so that research is more interesting than painful? Do you get what I'm asking?
On the topic of how to know what you need to know, here's my take. I use RSS feeds to keep track of the topics that I think are important or that I'm interested in. That's my world. But, then I also talk to people and hear what they are interested in. That way I learn new things.
I've been doing this for a few years and haven't felt like I'm missing something. I feel comfortable that I'll know what I need to know either via RSS text or podcasts and the people I encounter in real life.
I should move that embedded image to it's own post! I just realized that people can rate my daemon right from this blog. I've seen it turn to a mouse, a bird, a cat, and now it's back to this jackel, but who's to say how long that will last...
I found my daemon last semester in my YA lit class when we read the GC, I forget what mine was...
I just found Grammar Girl this week, and I'm obsessed. I've always been a bit particular (and a little shakey in my own skill) about grammar, and that podcast just feeds every need I have.
My concern with everything that is available on the Internet, besides the sheer quantity of it, is authority control. Do we teach students the same way to check to see if a podcast is credible in the same way we teach them to check a website. Is there a way to teach this credibility?
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