Wednesday, October 17, 2007

What role will we have in the Information R/evolution?

The third video that we will watch from Michael Wensch's Digital Ethnography project is titled "Information R/evolution" and picks up where "The Machine is Us/ing Us" left off. It incorporates some of the ideas behind David Weinburger's excellent Everything is Miscellaneous and better yet is filmed in large part in a library.

For this optional discovery exercise, watch the video below and write a short blog post detailing your response. What elements of the video struck you as interesting? What do you think the future role of library staff will be if everything truly becomes miscellaneous?

Posted by Cindi at 9:35 AM 5 comments

Do we know our students?

After a short hiatus during the busiest part of the semester for many of us, Learning 2.0 @ EKU Libraries is back!

In one of our first lessons, we watched a video titled "The Machine is Us/ing Us," created by "Digital Ethnographer" Michael Wensch from Kansas State University. The video served as an introduction to the limitless possibilities of Web 2.0 applications and ideas. In this optional lesson, I have two more videos from Dr. Wensch for you to watch.

The first, titled "A Vision of Students Today," was put together by Dr. Wensch with the help of one of his Anthropology classes. For this optional discovery exercise, watch the video and take note of any facts presented there that you are surprised by or did not know, then write a blog post reacting to the video. What did you learn? What stuck out at you as different about you and today's students? Think back to when you were a student--did "adults" seem different and out of touch with you and your peers? How is that gap different from the gap that may exist today? If you are a student yourself, did this resonate with you? How? What is different about teachers that you connect with and those who seem clueless?



On second thought, the second video deserves a post of its own; stay tuned!

Posted by Cindi at 8:42 AM 1 comments

Friday, September 21, 2007

EKU Library Learning 2.0 Update

The lessons are officially over! Please join me in applauding all the library staff and faculty who read and created blog posts and did lots of experimenting over the last 10 weeks. Yay, us!

The good news is that we’re extending the program through the end of the semester. The EVEN BETTER news is that IF there are any more lessons, they will be completely optional; to qualify for our grand prize drawing at the end of the semester, you must complete and write blog posts about only the 21 lessons offered between July 2 and September 14, 2007.

The best news of all is that everyone* who completes all 21 lessons will be eligible for a drawing at the Learning 2.0 celebration at the end of the semester.

So, there is still plenty of time to get your lessons finished, no matter where you are in the program. I look forward to reading more blog posts over the rest of the semester!

* To qualify for the drawing, participants must:
1) complete the 21 lessons in the EKU Library Learning 2.0 program;
2) write a blog post about each lesson;
3) submit the URL for EACH Lesson to the program's email address;
4) be a member of the library faculty or staff.

Posted by Cindi at 2:45 PM 0 comments

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The Commoncraft gang has done it again, this time for Social Bookmarking. In Lesson 13, we learned a little bit about the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. This short video demonstrates the three main points of social bookmarking, using del.icio.us as an example: it's a way to organize your favorite web sites; it uses tags; and it's social because you can see what others are bookmarking. Enjoy!



The weekly "talkcast"--a talk show that is delivered via streaming audio and podcast--Uncontrolled Vocabulary provides us with a good example of social bookmarking: each week, listeners and participants in the show add bookmarks to their own del.icio.us accounts and tag them with "unvocab." Before every show, the host, Greg Schwartz, reads and organizes content to be discussed in the show using these bookmarks. It's added great variety to the articles and websites discussed there. Read this post on how to participate or listen.

Posted by Cindi at 2:33 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 9, 2007

#21 Mashup Editors

Are you thrilled by the many Mashups you have played with? Actually you can create Mashups on your own by using something called Mashupu Editors. Another good news is that you don't need to know anything about coding. The three major Mashup editors, Yahoo Pipes ,Google Mashup Editor, and Microsoft PopFly, provide you with a graphic-based intuitive interface to create fun Mashups in a few minutes. Yahoo Pipes is especially designed to create unique Mashups of RSS feeds. Yahoo defines Pipes as a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You can create your ultimate custom feed , power widgets/badges on your web site, and geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.

Using Microsoft PopFly and Google Mashup Editor, you can not only create Mashups but also create web pages via a graphic-based, user-friendly interface.

If you already have a hotmail account, a google account, or a yahoo account you can simply login and explore the amazing world of Mashup editors.

Resources:

About Pipes
Pipes Blogs
Learning How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes
Basic Instructions for Creating a Mashup

Discovery Exercise #1:

Let's study some extended uses of Mashups: Go to Mashable.com and discover the 11 crazy ways to browse Flickr photos

Discovery Exercise #2: (To complete this exercise you have two options:)

Option 1:
1. Go to Mashup Awards' website and explore the many mashups created by different mashup editors
2. Now it's your turn! Try create your own Mashups by using the Mashup editors. (Be sure to add the link to your Mashup when you email to ekulibrarylearning@gmail.com)

or Option 2:
1.Go to Mashup Awards' website and explore the many mashups created by different mashup editors
2. Blog about your experience with Mashup editors and be sure to email your blog entry to ekulibrarylearning@gmail.com


*some information was retrieved Sept. 13, 2007 from http://cit.duke.edu/tools/web20/mashups.html

Posted by Ning Zou at 6:21 PM 1 comments

Saturday, September 8, 2007

#20 Mashups

[Sorry, no podcast for this "thing."]

Welcome to the learning 2.0 finale -- Play Week 2. This week we will be exploring some fun web 2.0 Mashups. So what is a Mashup? Regarding to the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University Libraries, It is a web application that combines data from two or more sources and creates something altogether new or different with those sources. "At their most basic, mashups take data from a source and filter it through another source or application. For a low-end example, look at iPhone Maniacs, a news site which mashes together Flickr photos and blog postings/news headlines tagged as "iPhone". For a more elaborate example, try MoreMap.com, which takes data from the web about weather, traffic, movies and even earthquakes and mashes their locations through Google Maps. Applications like SearchMash allow users to search for a keyword, and find not only search results but also related blog entries, Flickr photo feeds and more." (Retrieved Sept. 8, 2007 from http://cit.duke.edu/tools/web20/mashups.html )

In the past, you may have already used Mappr, Badges, and other Flickr mashups to create fantastic image mashups. Take a look at the following resources and begin your fun journey with Mashups.

Resources:

More about Mashups
Mashup Directory
Ten Best Flickr Mashups


Discovery Exercise #1:

1. Go to Mashup Directory or Ten Best Flickr Mashups
2. Play with a few Mashups
3. Blog about your experience with Mashups and make sure to link to your Web 2.0 Mashups' thing.

Discovery Exercise #2 (optional):

Think about how Mashups can be used in education in general. We can discuss about this during our brown bag lunch.

*Don't forget to e-mail your blog posts to ekulibrarylearning at gmail dot com.

Posted by Ning Zou at 9:14 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 31, 2007

#19 Podcasts

The word podcast is used to refer to a non-musical audio or video broadcast that is distributed over the Internet. What differentiates a podcast from regular streaming audio or video is that the delivery method for podcasts is often done automatically through RSS (which you know all about already, right?).

In 2005, "podcast" was named the "word of the year" by New Oxford American Dictionary and with the growth of podcasting over the last 24 months, it's easy to see why.

Podcasts take many forms, from short 1-10 minutes commentaries (like the ones that have been used in this Learning 2.0 program) to much longer in-person interviews or panel group discussions. There’s a podcast out there for just about every interest area and the best part about this technology is that you don’t have to have an iPod or an MP3 player to listen to them. Since podcasts use the MP3 file format, a popular compressed format for audio files, you really just need a PC (or portal device) with headphones or a speaker.

iTunes, the free downloadable application created by Apple, is the directory finding service most associated with podcasts, but if you don’t have iTunes installed there are still plenty of options, including Windows Media Player. Besides, iTunes a just a dandy music player anyway (psst, and you can download just about any song you like from the iTunes shop for only 99 cents each).

For this discovery exercise, participants are asked to take a look at some popular podcast directory tools. Do some exploring on your own and locate a podcast that is of interest to you. Once found, you can easily pull the RSS feed into your Bloglines or Google Reader account as well, so that when new casts become available, you’ll be automatically notified.

Discovery Resources:

Discovery Exercise:

  1. Take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed above and see if you can find a podcast that interests you. See if you can find some interesting library-related podcasts here like book review podcasts or library news.
  2. Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your Bloglines or Google Reader account
  3. Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here?

Posted by foxtwin at 3:21 PM 1 comments

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