Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Open Access Explained with RSA Animate




What is open access? 

Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing and explain why it is becoming more important.

There is a growing momentum across the world to understand best practices for open access. 

Just as we teach our students about Creative Commons, we also need to inform them about resources for open access journals.

Be sure to bookmark Collected Repositories  which links to resources such as OpenDOAR






This was produced in partnership with the Right to Research Coalition, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition and the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students.

To learn more see resources on Open Access Week:
On Monday October 22nd SPARC and The World Bank Co-sponsored an event entitled “Perspectives on Open Access: Practice, Progress and Pitfalls” at the World Bank. This event served as a kickstart to the sixth Open Access Week.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Thinglink

Thinglink 

enables you to easily add pop-up links, video/audio to images in order to add/highlight information to a photo, image, diagram, map etc.

Some ideas for the classroom:

History--- show a battlefield and label image with links/info or image of group of people with their identities and biographies.
Lanauges--- Take a photo of your favorite place and lable links to favorite things.
Art --- Link various parts of a piece of art highlighting symbolism, characteristics of art and artist.
Science --- lable and link a dissection specimen, an image of a cell, plant etc.
English --- An author image can be linked to their history/background etc.
 




Educause article on Content Curation

Robin Good, a curator I follow on Scoop.it, shared a technology brief from Educause which attempts to introduce and explain the emerging trend of social curation:

 "7 Things You Should Know About Social Content Curation"

From the official abstract: "An emerging class of online tools, including Pinterest, Scoop.it, EduClipper, and others, allows users to quickly and easily gather, organize, and share collections of online resources, particularly visual content. These applications make it easy to collect and post disparate bits of content, providing visual groupings at a glance that can reveal important patterns. In academic settings, they can facilitate more visual thinking and discussion among students while providing a means to share collections of online content."


ePUB: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/epub/ELI7089.epub
PDF: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7089.pdf

I currently am using Scoop.it to experiment with curating content for Election 2012.  This tool allows the user to editorialize and also provide visual content.
Tools like this seem to be just right for current events such as Hurricane Sandy and ongoing conflicts such as the Arab Spring.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Pinterest as a Curation Tool


Erika Immel suggests librarians and educators consider following U-High Library.

U-High Library has 36 boards with excellent library resources.

Swain Library is another good one to follow.

They have great book boards, resources, and boards for library research which can be re-pinned.

It's great that pictures/links can be embedded in libguides with embed code provided.

It would also be a useful tool for clubs.

Monday, October 22, 2012

30 Infographics tools and resources:

Make your sites and writings more interesting with visuals; charts, tables, mind-mapping tools and graphs. Below are 30 sites for both creating graphics and accessing databases with ready-made data graphics and mind-mapping tools. 



Mainly traditional graphs largely focused on economics and money.
http://www.data360.org/index.aspx

 Ready made and create your own.  Highly visual.
 http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/


  Create your own simple graphs.
http://www.onlinecharttool.com/graph.php


  Make fancy word clouds with images.
http://www.tagxedo.com/

 Advanced Infographs and data visualization.  More for browsing than creating; cost is no minimal.
http://visual.ly/


Just Joyce! Joyce Valenza's Keynote Presentation at ISLMA

Transliteracy:  An Unintentional Film Fest

It was certainly exciting to meet Joyce Valenza at the Illinois Library conference (ISLMA).  See all ISLMA presentation handouts! ...her presentation not only motivates me to explore more tools for students to make/create stuff but also to think about re-imagining our library facility.

Valenza effectively drives home the point that our libraries are not just for
finding stuff.  We need to evolve to a library where students come to create projects and share their work.


So, how do we direct transliterate learning?

First, Joyce spoke about digital citizenship and promoting compassion for others to prevent harassment and hurtful messages on social media.

The tricky thing is that in trying to manage kids' digital profiles we have obscured their academic profiles.

Valenza explains that must  move in a direction where kids share work with their names on and pictures embedded.  An positive 
academic digital footprint is necessary because teachers need to be involved with teaching their students "how to navigate in mediated public landscapes".  "Public is the new default".


College admissions are not only looking at kids on social networking sites, but are also looking to evaluate what types of contributions they have made online. Human resources are looking to see "who you are online".  So, we need to our students to use people search tools to look at their online profiles.  

Experiment with and expose your students these tools:



  • pipl --one of the most comprehensive people search tools on the web
  • Set up a "Me alert" for  Google on Me on the Web --to get notification of what's online under your name
  • Rebel Mouse --a tool which aggregates everything done on social media.

Important reads:

Howard Rheingold's Net Smart --must have for your library curriculum

Sherry Turkle - 


We need to teach about respect for intellectual property.  Essential read:


Noodle tools is a favorite tool
Mendeley - reference manager and academic social network --remarkable place to store your own research
Turnitin.com  has new taxonomy of new types of plagiarism

While meant to be a helpful resource finder, student use of the Research tab on Easy bib is becoming problematic because kids are taking others' bibs & ignoring library resources --they are even copying others' annotations.

Libraries should teach students about the use of Creative Commons - a shared culture. Everytime students produce media online, they should put Creative Commons licensing on their own work using the embed code!

see LibGuide of Creative Commons resources - please attribute to Valenza
FLICKR Creative Commons image page
FLICKR Blue Mountains
matrix of images--image editor there (one stop-shopping)

Wylio.com  - (Images from Flickr Creative Commons)Wylio is the fastest way to find free pictures for your blog. Millions of free, legal, pictures are available from online sources citation comes with image.


FLICKR Storm - better for younger children
Can create a tray of images for them to select


See libguide for more image resources.

Jamendo  - copyright free music - 370,000 tracks

Not all images are found in the Creative Commons area. 
Let's teach our students that it is OK to use copyright images if you follow codes of fair use. If the media is repurposed and if the use is transformative, it is OK to use that nugget of information or media to tell another story.

What's new in Search?-- new stuff to show your students:
  • new favorite instagrok! -- "what would you like to learn about"? --a new search tool designed to help users learn about a topic by facilitating the finding of context and educational content. Good brainstorming -topic selection tool.  Go Grokking to find key words.
  • Teach Google results list
(filter for date, type of result; advanced search screen --search for doc or pdf and find really big documents)
  • image search --click on camera and it will identify photos  - does not do facial recognition

  • Wolfram Alpha - computational engine --all sorts of graph generation
  • Mashpedia for current news ---helps discover the #hashtag they need to do twitter searching

Do not demonize wikipedia --use the right tool for the right task

Tutorials - Cooperative Library Instruction Project

(CLIP) --another tool videos on using info literacy stuff --tutorials on many topics and a libguide template of tutorials to use from Western Oregon University

Tips for evaluating truth in Wikipedia  from Debbie Alcock
Use featured articles as a starting point!

ANNOTATED citations are necessary and a must for high school
who wrote it? why did they write it? and how will it help me argue my case?

New primary sources
United Nations History Project --primary sources

Twiplomacy --world leaders tweeting (or official offices)
Information is not the destination --teach them how to think like detectives, reporters, scientists, citizens of the world

Read Henry Jenkins on participatory culture  - audience changes everything.  Students need to be creating for authentic audiences/purposes

We need to recognize creative thought
Have students make own infographics!



Rubrics   ---for multimedia projects on   Digitales


CREATE "maker space" in your library - 
hang over new counter tops to put high stools around reference stacks; add electrical outlets
Making stuff is the killer app!  Are you honoring your filmmakers and storytellers?


Lend out portable blue/green screens

Have conversations about books within your catalogs
see also:   YALSA TEEN book finder  - 
a free app to help teens, parents, librarians and library staff, educators, and anyone who loves YA literature access to the past three years' of YALSA's awards and lists on their smartphone.

Students need to collect information in new containers
play with Mentor Mob  --creates a learning playlist - a way to curate content


The overall goal in transliteracy is to allow students to gain the skills they need in order to navigate the world.  Can our students make brave decisions?  Can they lead?

Joyce Valenza's presentation on Curation Tools is also linked.
                            
                                  

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Curating News Content from Social Media

Here are some great tips which I  endorse because they make good use of Tweetdeck.
I cannot even imagine doing power searching without the use of Tweetdeck.

Technology editor (from Journalism.co.uk) Sarah Marshall gathered ideas and posted them all in one place: 

How to: use social media in newsgathering

tips:
1) organize chaos by using Tweetdeck
4) make use of hashtags
5) keep your key words simple

6) use Twitter's advanced search

7) search by time or search by location

8) track keywords shared on social media by using RSS feeds, adding them to your Google

Reader account or another RSS feed reader.


9) Use Google advanced operators to search Facebook--this will yield more results than a 
search within Facebook


10)  Most importantly, verify your sources  --many tips are included in the article above

For more information listen to this podcast about tips and tools and practical advice for

curating news as 
Sarah Marshall interviews

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Learning about Explain Everything

About this ipad app (from their website): 

"Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. You can create dynamic interactive lessons, activities, assessments, and tutorials using Explain Everything's flexible and integrated design. Use Explain Everything as an interactive whiteboard using the iPad2 video display. Explain Everything records on-screen drawing, annotation, object movement and captures audio via the iPad microphone. Import Photos, PDF, PPT, and Keynote from Dropbox, Evernote, Email, iPad photo roll and iPad2 camera. Export MP4 movie files, PNG image files, and share the .XPL project file with others for collaboration."

Mr. Vargas made a movie explaining an upcoming assignment using Explain Everything:


The audio portion is outstanding. Looking forward to trying it on my ipad.

Monday, October 08, 2012

David Weinberger for the Future of StoryTelling 2012

David Weinberger explains how the Future of Storytelling is becoming transformed by the Internet.
Harvard Internet scholar Dr. Weinberger asks the question:  What happens when the "smartest person in the room is the room"?  In this video Weinberger postulates that the duty and challenge for the 21st Century storyteller is to expose us to points of view other than our own and to free us from the "echo chamber" of narratives that merely reinforce what we already know or believe. Why haven't major network news media received this memo??



Wednesday, October 03, 2012

One of the more powerful web tools is video

In remembrance of Banned Books week, an independent bookstore Bookmans created the video below to heighten awareness of censorship. Listen and watch as customers and employees read passages from banned books.