Friday, April 25, 2008

Virtual School Society Conference


OK David Warlick is live blogging a conference in BC and it's where I would love to be right now. He posted an really interesting discussion yesterday about implementing social networks and the features of them. The presenter talks about the features of social networks using an interesting diagram.
Social Networks are all about:
Identity,
Presence,
Relationships,
Conversations,
Groups,
Reputation The diagram shows how 3 different networks play on these relationships.
Imagine how powerful these tools could be for learning if school districts could get past the fear and unblock them. We need to educate the educators so that we can use such tools wisely in learning environments.



Smith, Gene. “Social Software Building Blocks.” [Weblog nForm] 4 Apr 2007. nForm User
Experience. 23 Apr 2008 http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block.

Monday, April 21, 2008

URL for Brittania Registration

Register for Brittania for free....would help to have this link!

Brittania for Bloggers!

I have been reading Joyce's Valenza's latest posting and find this article indicating that Encyclopedia Brittanica will provide access to their product free of charge to Bloggers. Of course, I am skeptical as is Joyce and will register to find out how this works....in the meantime, if you are interested, check it out! Brittania for Bloggers.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

ANIMOTO

OK here is such a cool little tool that students and teachers can access online with very little knowledge of IT Animoto is a web based video/slideshow creation tool that can be used for many purposes. Check it out, give it a shot and tell me what you think. This was posted on Ewan McGregor's Edublog and it is a wonderful thing. Thanks Mr. McGregor!

Friday, April 18, 2008

Google Mojo

OK folks....here is something to share at the next staff meeting....librarianship blues if I ever heard it!

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Time Mag Top 25 Blogs

Here is Time Magazines link to top 25 blogs. Although I have heard of some of these blogs, I don't subscribe to them and at the moment I am resisting adding them to my rss. I am online far too much and need to limit my aggregator to specific focii, such as IT and libraries. lol Not too broad an area!

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Blue Skunk & Copyright

I have gotten hooked on Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog. This week he has been discussing copyright and fair use of material. This is always a hot topic in librarianship but this one hit home because we were discussing our New Vision Document for school libraries at a recent meeting. In this document the vision refers TL's to character education connections when teaching copyright. Johnson makes the same reference saying that we need to teach copyright from the perspective of the producer and call on student empathy to understand the rationale behind copyright law. Don't you love it when everything seems connected??

Digital Archive Mashups

David Warlick posted this wonderful link to the national archive of the united states where they have digitized primary source documents for users to use for research and to create new views of this information. Items are tagged using blog like folksonomy and it has a Flikr like feel to it. Imagine how much fun this could be to have students select images from this resource, create movies, slide shows, posters....all built into this wonderful site! Canadian digital archives please take note!!! Check it out