10/25/2007

Goodbye

It is months since anyone commented on a post in this blog. This is most disheartening and I have decided to stop spending any time on it. My colleagues will just have to put up with emails of interesting items that I find from time to time.

I have been blogging for over a year and at first it was stimulating and rewarding. Now I wonder why I bother - hence the decision to say Goodbye to any regular readers who may be out there. Please email me if you think there is any point in continuing.

10/10/2007

Librarians in the 21st Century

I attended another session in the intermediate course on Virtual Librarianship in Second Life yesterday. It was not as stimulating as the previous three sessions, probably because it related to working with teens and I have have been turned off that age group by my experiences as a high school teacher. However, one thing that did come out of it was a reference to an article about Librarians in the 21st Century.in which the writer, Joyce Kasman Valenza, claims that ... librarians cannot expect to assume a leadership role in information technology and instruction, and we cannot claim any credibility with students, faculty, or administrators, if we do not recognize and thoughtfully exploit the paradigm shift of the past two years.
This is particularly relevant in light of my current efforts to run 23 Things at my library and my struggle to achieve acceptance of the role that Second Life or any other virtual world may play in the learning/teaching environment. I am empowered by the comment:
You do not take “no” for an answer when a network administrator or technology director refuses to support a pedagogically sound activity. You seek a way to get to “yes” if learners will benefit.
In yesterdays SL session I mentioned that I was trying to introduce my colleagues to new technology in spite of my director's reservations - and virtually behind her back, and received a resounding cheer from my classmates.
I wonder if the 23 Things participants realise just how much effort goes into running this exercise and how disappointing it is for me when they "cannot find the time" to complete each "Thing" as it is posted.

10/08/2007

Latin anyone?

I didn't study Latin at school because my father didn't want me to suffer the way he had when studying the subject. However, my love of words and their origins has often made me regret that omission. One of my favourite daily emails is 'A word a day' by Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) and in AWADmail Issue 275 he points us to an article about a Latin version of Wikipedia, Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Latin Isn't Dead On 'Vicipaedia'. This is a wonderful use of modern technology to discuss items of current interest in an ancient tongue.
"Vicipaedia has 15,000 articles. Catullus, Horace and the Roman Senate all are there; so are musica rockica, Georgius Bush and cadavera animata, a k a zombies. You can read in Latin about hangman (homo suspensus), paper airplanes (aeroplanum chartaceum) and magic 8-balls (pila magica 8), as well as about famous Italians like Leonardo da Vinci and the Super Mario brothers."

10/05/2007

Engineering Librarians Lunch

It is some time since I last attended an Engineering Librarians Group meeting so when Susanna sent me an invitation recently I jumped at the chance. I was able to combine work and pleasure as not only did I meet up with old friends but also Tamara from Nature Publishing Group was there to tell us about her company's new and enhanced online products - as well as paper based.

Coincidentally, on my return to my office I was working on a wiki for 23 Things @ Central when I came across this post:
Though del.icio.us is great, and I use it all the time, if the student happens to be science-oriented,(Connotea is a fantastic tool that was created by the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, etc.) specifically as a social bookmarking tool for scientists. And, unlike del.icio.us, it is set up to automatically retrieve bibliographic information from several recognized sites (PubMed, etc.).

Thanks for lunch Tamara. And without your presence I would probably never have become aware of this tool.