Linking & Thinking: A Week of Brain Fodder (3/18/2012)

A weekly collection of annotated links to blog posts, articles and websites about information, school and teaching.

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• PLA - The E-Book Experiment | Public Libraries Online

  This is by a librarian in the Douglas County, CO system that went DIY with their ebook delivery, and is now a model for other systems wanting to bypass the restrictive and expensive main ebook vendors (OverDrive is the biggest). The article explains why the current model doesn't let libraries serve patrons well, and how they believe their system will work better.
  
  Of note, though, is that they've not yet signed contracts with any of the major mainstream publishers -- the ones publishing books on best-seller lists and that patrons want to read.

  
  

• AU librarians tell students: ‘Don’t let your papers be duds!’

  The librarians' "candy campaign.”
  
  "Last spring, librarians bought 500 fun-sized Nestle Crunch bars and attached a note to each that said “Don’t wait till Crunch time!” with a reminder to get started on research and contact information for reference help."
  
  I wonder if a targeted campaign within the classes doing long-term research projects would be useful (I know it would be fun!!)

  
  

• Large California Consortium Joins Movement Toward Library Ebook Ownership — The Digital Shift

  Another library group goes DIY in providing eBooks to patrons. Adobe Content Server costs about $10K, plus hardware. This consortium started with $30,000 and will purchase ebook files directly from publishers as well as an Adobe Content Server to manage the digital files. We could so do this in Georgia with time and leadership.

  
  

• Jodi Picoult Turns Tough Topics Into Best-Sellers : NPR

  Text and audio interview on NPR's Morning Edition. The Paideia Library has almost all of Jodi Picoult's novels, and they often end up on the summer reading list. Many of her characters are teenagers wrestling with big issues, and they are popular with our readers.

  
  

Posted from Diigo.

"Somehow Reading Related"

I have always been drawn to silk-screened posters from the first half of the 20th century. They're simple & bold, and often were the origins of catchy phrases that have become part of our cultural vocabulary ("Uncle Sam Wants YOU!"). Last month, the release of the Red Tails feature film and discovering this great 1943 poster


inspired a Black History Month display of library books on African Americans in the military. The poster is now on my office door - the airman is terribly dashing, isn't he?

I've been doing some research on copyright and Fair Use this week, and it's worth noting that a wonderful thing about government published materials is that they are immediately and always in the public domain. After all, we the taxpayers are the publishers. Cool, huh?

There's been a WWII "School Garden Army" poster at the circulation desk, but just been swapped out for this WPA poster (definitely "reading related").



It turns out there are more WPA-created literacy posters at the Library of Congress' American Memory website. Display inspiration for the coming months!





On my iPad for March reading are several free ebooks -- I'm halfway through the first Tom Swift novel (from Project Gutenberg; it's Tom Swift and His Motorcycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the Road -- did you know that the Taser stun gun name is an acronym of "Thomas A. Swift's electric rifle?") and Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. (on the Kindle Reader app, from Amazon.com). Also from Project Gutenberg and on my iPad are Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (the original), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I'm thinking hard about the ebook situation for Paideia, and definitely taking a fresh look at the "vintage" reading available in the public domain. Stay tuned for more on that topic soon.

What's on your "always meant to read" list for March?

Linking & Thinking: A Week of Brain Fodder (3/11/2012)

A weekly collection of annotated links to blog posts, articles and websites about information, school and teaching.

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• 3M Cloud Library Integrates with Polaris ILS — The Digital Shift

  Hearing about the 3M Cloud Library a few months ago was one of the first alternates to OverDrive I came across. This article points to new and positive developments that make it seem wise to stay out of the ebook fray for a while yet. The article says that the 'cloud library" of ebooks is integrated into one company's library catalog system, so patrons can find and download ebooks in the same database as the library's physical materials. One-stop shopping! Something to keep an eye on.

• Patricia O’Brien (as Kate Alcott) Sells ‘The Dressmaker’ - NYTimes.com

  An interesting commentary on the exclusively commercial nature of the book industry, selecting books to publish not on inherent quality or sellability of the individual book, but on past sales of the author.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read | Open Culture

  Now this list could keep a rising senior busy for a lot longer than a summer.
  
  NDT is an astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science.

• Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business? | Librarian by Day

  Wow -- exactly where I am with the whole business. I would LOVE to offer ebooks to our school community, but am stuck by the turbulence in the industry. The way I'd do it is currently illegal (violation of copyright law) and publishers are the biggest roadblock. They are so afraid that library ebook loans will hurt sales, that they can't see the thousands of copies that would be sold to libraries. I did not know that the "right of first sale" (if you buy a book, you get to decided what happens to it, whether you re-sell it, turn it into art, or burn it, because that copy belongs to you).
  
  So for now, this is my solution: "get [or stay] out at least until there is a better system." Aargh.

• With Axis 360, Baker & Taylor Establishes a Foothold in the Ebook Distribution Market — The Digital Shift

  In a couple of weeks, the Paideia librarians will be attending a professional meeting to go over ebook provider options. If you've ever borrowed and downloaded an ebook from the public library, then you've probably experienced OverDrive. I love how it works and the selection, but 1) it's really expensive, and 2) not only do only LEASE the materials (instead of an outright purchase), you only lease it from OverDrive, so if a better option comes along and switch vendors, you lose all access to the ebook collection you've developed and paid for. Not going there, not yet, for sure. Axis 360 may be something to look into.

• The End of Nonfiction (a different approach to organizing print material in the library)

  Our library 'downsized' the reference book section 6 or 7 years ago, which helped with physical reorganization and greater likelihood of students finding the materials. It doesn't address the demand for getting the information through the Internet rather than in print, though. We wrestle daily with when/how to enter fully into providing information for our students through ebooks.

• Lesson Plan | What Is Modern Slavery? Investigating Human Trafficking - NYTimes.com

  Another great lesson plan. This one is related to the Race, Class & Gender curriculum that several of the JH homebases study, and also to the work of our Amnesty International club.

  
  

• 55 Free Philosophy Courses | Open Culture

  Open Culture is a tremendous collection of links to all kinds of free education on the Web. They've just updated the philosophy collection. If you want to "hack" an education of any kind, get familiar with Open Culture.

  
  

Brraaiiins . . . .

We've got plenty of good brains around here (and prefer to keep them intact inside our skulls), which is why it's much better to observe zombies from a distance (and in fiction) than to interact up close. Last spring I wrote about the CDC's emergency packets on zombie invasion preparedness, and added a reading list for the zombocalypse.


Little known, though, is that in the alternate version of 19th century Seattle, in Cherie Priest's steampunk Clockwork Century series, a mad and greedy inventor named Leviticus Blue used a powerful machine to bore underneath the city to rob a bank. He died in the event, so we never find out whether he knew that the digging hit a vent of noxious gas, releasing it through the city and destroying the population. This gas, you see, turns anyone who breathes it into a rotting, mindless thing solely focused on hunting and eating the living. Consume enough of a mind-numbing drug called sap, made from the gas, and you'll become more than just numb. Called "rotters" in Seattle (Boneshaker), "wheezers" in Virginia (Dreadnought), and "zombis" in Marie Levau's New Orleans (Ganymede), these doomed walking dead may just become a harder force to beat than either the Confederate or the Union armies.

Perhaps inspired by the coming invasion, a group of Emory students, including Paideia alum Emma Calabrese '97, entered a short film in the Campus Movie Fest student film competition last year. Look at This F***ing Zombie! (I might cuss too, if faced with a real-live walking-dead zombie) was a campus finalist, and has the second highest views of all the Emory entries. Emma is the supportive roommate, and heroine, in this funny star-crossed romance between a brainy coed and a life-challenged student in her philosophy class. Check it out below. Congrats, Emma!

Linking & Thinking: A Week of Brain Fodder, 3/4/2012

A weekly collection of annotated links to blog posts, articles and websites about information, school and teaching.
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• Lesson Plan | Easy Access: Creating Annotated Versions of News Articles - NYTimes.com

  I just love lesson plans from the New York Times Learning Network blog. They're smart, adaptable, and use sophisticated materials (from the NYTimes, of course). This one has students read a news article, then mark it up with definitions, background links and related material to increase understanding of the article and its issues.

Linking & Thinking: A Week of Brain Fodder 02/28/2012

A weekly collection of annotated links to blog posts, articles and websites about information, school and teaching.
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• Visual Turn • Why student success is such a radical idea

  I watched Sebastian Thrun's talk on the difference between teaching to "weed out" students, and teaching so that all students are successful in learning the information. It is an important distinction, and a hard approach to fit into the way schools work now. Why? Some students take longer than others to be successful, and when students are at many different places on the way to the same goal (individualized learning), it takes more individual teacher attention than marching everyone along at the same pace.
  
  Quote: "MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn."

  
  

• The Power of Feedback | blog of proximal development

  A followup to the Assessment post linked below. This quote could be written about the Writing Mentors approach to working with students:
  
  As teachers, we must help our students answer three questions:
  
  Where am I going?
  How am I doing?
  What actions do I need to take next?
  
  In other words, effective feedback focuses on goals, progress, and next steps. It’s important to keep in mind that our role here is to guide, not to answer these questions for our students. Feedback that helps them answer these three questions will provide exactly the kind of guidance that’s needed.

  
  

• Assessment for Learning | blog of proximal development

  This blog post discusses the difference between assessment OF learning and assessment FOR learning, the idea being that comments on student work should give the student clues on exactly what was done well and exactly what needs work and how to do it.
  
  These ideas are similar to the approach we want to be at the center of the peer Writing Mentors program. Rather than judge, evaluate and suggest changes to student writing, the writing mentors should have a conversation with the writer about intent, clarity and communication, and let student writers find their own answers.

  
  

• Advice for Parents of 1:1 Programs | The Thinking Stick

  Jeff wrote a thoughtful and thorough reply to the question I left on the 1:1 laptop post. It's been helpful in establishing more ground rules in our household, and can help all parents who struggle with their kids' attachments to their devices.

  
  

Posted from Diigo.

A Smashing Success!!, or,the Junior High Reading Club is Launched

It happened a few weeks ago, but the first meeting of Paideia's new Junior High Reading Club was such a success that I had to write a bit about it. Some twenty-five students from across the junior high gathered in Greg's classroom after school on February 2. There were so many good ideas and responses to the characters and action in the book, especially the question of the role of technology in this steampunk Seattle of Boneshaker. Is it good or is it bad, or just in how it's used? Students discussed their ideas among themselves, and around 4 pm (after a few false starts and connection snafus -- yay for Plans B!) we logged on for an amazing 45-minute video chat with Boneshaker author Cherie Priest.

I wish I'd been more adept with Google video chat, so I could have asked to record the visit. Cherie Priest was a super author to start the reading club with -- she's friendly, fun, was very genuine in answering students' questions. Among the questions asked was about the accuracy of having strong female characters set in a conservative social culture (US Civil War era, sort of). Cherie noted that characters on the fringes, like pioneer women (Lucy O'Gunning), the daughter of a criminal (Briar Wilkes), a battlefield nurse (Mercy Lynch in Dreadnought) or a mixed-race brothel madam (Josephine in Ganymede), aren't as bound by society notions of women's roles, and are much more fun to work with too.

How does Cherie name her characters? From gravestones, friends & relatives, and even after real people on the news. Somewhere in Washington State there's a public works manager named Jedidiah Swakhammer, whose name was changed only slightly to become Boneshaker's Jeremiah Swakhammer.

For further steampunk reading, Cherie recommended the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld, and the Parasol Protectorate novels by Gail Carriger (a personal favorite of mine. They're spunky romantic fun with werewolves, vampires and other unnatural creatures of Victorian London society).

When asked "why Seattle?" Cherie replied that she always like to write about places where she lived. Knowing that she lived for several years in Chattanooga, TN, and is moving back there soon, we wondered if she would set her next books there. What we didn't know is that she already has! Cherie's first three novels were Eden Moore ghost stories, set in Chattanooga and surroundings. They were critically successful, but didn't sell well so Boneshaker was her "what the heck" response to finishing our her contract with a publisher.

Surprise! With the best-selling success of Boneshaker and her other Clockwork Century books, the Eden Moore trilogy (Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers) has been re-released and we have them now in the Paideia Library. In addition to being fascinated and creeped out by Eden's ability to see and interact with ghosts, it's been great to recognize well-known area landmarks like the UFO house on the side of Signal Mountain, the Chickamauga Battlefield, and the rooftop section of the Pickle Barrel restaurant in downtown Chattanooga.

Have you ever discovered great reads after finding an author's current best-seller and going back to the author's older books?

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The Reading Club's next selection is the brand-new novel by the popular 'nerdfighting" author John Green, The Fault in Our Stars. Alas, we won't have a video visit with this author, but he's got plenty of video presences for us to explore. Stay tuned for the date and time of the next club meeting.