The SurRural Librarian

I wasn’t planning on mentioning the Higher Power of Lucky broohaha. What more is there to say? Puh-lease.

But when my favorite Saturday radio show had a good laugh at librarians’ expense yesterday, I did just want to hide under the rug. For every rant about the “stereotypes” of librarians just not fitting anymore, there’s a ridiculous librarian out there making a bad name for us all.

Fortunately, a little sunshine was brought to my day by Neil Gamain with this lovely & helpful post on his blog…

An Absence of Scrota — your guide to quality literature…

I’ve decided that librarians who would decline to have a Newbery book in their libraries because they don’t like the word scrotum are probably not real librarians (whom I still love unconditionally). I think they’re rogue librarians who have gone over to the dark side.
…
Helpfully, over at http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/youth_literature_is_filled_with_scrotums.php you will find a list of books for the young, probably already in the libraries, with scrota (or even scrotums) in them. This is probably provided for rogue librarians who now need to hunt these books down and remove them, scrotums and all.

Is his speech announcing his candidacy Saturday, Barak Obmama called for finally getting broadband into underserved population areas. He also decried the lack of computers in schools.

I think it’s just remarkable that in the speech announcing his candidacy, he talked about internet access. This was not a little speech made to a select group of geeky supporters.

You can watch Saturday’s speech here.

When you’re done with that, check out MyBarakaObama.com - it’s a Facebook for the Obama crowd.

It’s amazing how much of the public discourse is happening online. Our kids need to be part of that conversation. We’ve got to make sure they know how to use 2.0 type applications. If we’re not, we are not serving our students.

I was just writing an article for the my state librarian org. newsletter about the new site I made for my school using WordPress, and trying to convey my love of open source.

I understand the concern some folks have about using software that doesn’t come with access to a paid “support” staff. I agree, the idea that you could get excellent, free software, and access to people who would answer your questions quickly without asking for anything in return, simply sounds too good to be true.

I admit right now I’m flying on a cloud of love for Wordpress, all the fun plugins, and the really easy upgrade process I just went through on both my sites.

So, it’s a bad time for help desks that my district actually pays to be sending me “help” like this.

As you probably already know, all that (name of expensive, crummy application removed just to be nice) requires in this situation is for “others” to have “read only” access to all files in the (Crummy App) folder.

Your inability to change permissions is an issue with MacOS Finder, not with (Crummy App). We would recommend that you contact Apple or a consultant for assistance with the Finder.

The problem with the failure of authentication may be as simple as typing
the wrong password, or as complex as a bug in the Finder, or it could be
something else.

We would also recommend investigating 3rd party tools to change permissions.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
-Crummy App Help Desk Guy

I particularily wonder if men who email help desks get replies like this:

(your problem) may be as simple as typing the wrong password

I’ve never contacted a help desk that didn’t insinuate I was probably just typing in the wrong password. Is it a male to female thing, or is their smug attitude distributed evenly across the genders?

My Junior High is engaged in a year-long sustainability unit, and much of their work is focused on promoting the conversion of old lightbulbs to CFLs. They’ve been doing surveys of the town, and working on a publicity campaign and wiki.

This is such a fun topic to work with them on, and there’s always something new to talk about in class. Yesterday, All Things Considered did a long segment on CFLs and talked to the owner of One Billion Bulbs - a site where you can record the number of conventional bulbs you replace with CFLs and get a nifty banner for your site like this:

Please, Join Our Group!

I’ve been so jazzed about our wiki project, that I forgot to share. Our 5th/6th grade class has been working on a unit on advertising. While their classroom teacher covers print marketing strategies, I’ve been applying the same concepts to discussions of internet advertising. It’s the most fun I’ve had teaching yet.

To make it more exciting, the students and I have been creating a wiki on internet marketing towards kids.

With all the 2.0 hype, I’ve been trying not to jump on the bandwagon with no reason. So I got my own little web 2.0 laboratory happening.

And, I’m here to tell you, I am sold.

Just in the short amount of time we’ve been able to spend on it (scheduling? can’t I just have them all day long?) the amount of learning I’ve seen is awe inspiring. Here’s a short list of some of what I’m seeing:

Working as a team and being part of a community
Respecting the work of others
Writing for an audience
Owning a project
Slowing down and being more careful with their work

Plus..
Learning how Wikipedia works. They really get the everyone edits concept now. Librarians take note.

Plus…
Learning great tech skills in multiple apps. They’ve picked up screen shots, resizing images, converting image types. They’re uploading images from desktop to site, and inserting them into pages. They’re formatting with wiki code (pbwiki has wysiwyg now, but they’re having fun learning just a wee bit of code, so we’re not using it).

I’m also seeing:

Community: If they run into a good example of something they know other students are covering, they’ll grab a screen shot of it for them. They’ll upload it to the wiki and let the student know it’s there. (I think they’d put it on the page too, but they don’t want to deny the other kid all the fun.)

Problem Solving: Getting pictures of animations they have to use the mouse to interact with has been a puzzle for many of the kids. They eventually figure out the timer in Grab, and work at it (obsessively) until they get just the shot they need.

Enthusiasm: They come find me in the library when they’re supposed to be looking for silent reading material and ask me when we’re having class next. (don’t tell). I am regularly cheered for upon walking into the classroom.

I love that the wiki gives them the ability to publish on the web and work with formatting and not have to mess around with design. No wallpaper, no animations, but they do have to think about how to best present material to a reader.

A couple of things you’ll probably want to consider before embarking on a wiki project of your own…

Do you have a classroom teacher willing to let you try new things and be generous with class time?

Do you have a good topic, something focused? I think ours is an easy fit because we’re talking about the internet & media literacy, but subject matter could be all over the place.

Do you have any good ideas for multi-media? Slideshows, images, movies, drawings, podcasts really liven up any project and a wiki provides an easy platform.

Do you have fun, enthusiastic students? (I bet you do).

Do you have a willingness to collaborate with your students and learn from them? I never have every answer in class, I often have the kids figure it out and teach me once they’ve got it.

We’re still in the early stages, they’re hardly ready for prime time yet. But the process is what I’m excited about, more than the end product. I’ll post links when it (and the upcoming Junior High wiki on sustainability!) are just a little bit further along.

Here’s a story about a school librarian in California who’s doing great things for the library, the school, the kids and teachers - but the district has no money to keep her on the staff next year.

Hiring Torres to transform Lakewood’s library into a modern-day media center was funded by the Sunnyvale Education Foundation, whose members dreamed of putting a teaching librarian in all 10 Sunnyvale district schools. Lakewood School, where close to 40 percent of the students are still learning English, was the first. As it turns out, it also was the last.

…

Now Lakewood is mounting a multitude of fundraisers and looking at what it can cut to keep Torres on the payroll next year, after the foundation funding runs out.

criminy.

Here’s a short list of places to grab free audiobooks, perfect for car rides or choice time. Most of these are recordings of works in the public domain, which means a lot of material that’s quite old, and hence, pretty out there. But for those little guys who dig the psychedelic travels of Alice, there are some gems.

The LibriVox project is an interesting one. I love the idea of folks donating their time to reading books, just to share online. It’s lovely.

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net (via podcast and catalog). Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

LibriVox Genre = Children

a few more…

Storynory

Voices in the Dark

Light up your brain

The Screen Actors Guild has this site with streaming videos of actors reading recent children’s books. It’s a small collection, I wonder if they’ll be adding to it.

BookPALS Storyline Online