The SurRural Librarian

Last week I went to a talk in Second Life by Doug Johnson on copyright (you all should have been there, great talk.) I’ve been playing around with 2nd Life just a bit - in fact, I even held a class in there for my graduate students one night. I am not a gamer (Well - there was one weekend in the 1989 with the Mario Bros. But just one, I swear!). I think Second Life is pretty silly. But - I’ve got to tell you - I really like this idea of having conferences & talks in there and I would love to encourage more people to check it out.

Here’s why. Here’s a short list of conferences for Vermont school librarians:

Vermont Library Conference
VSLA Fall Conference
Red Clover Conference
DCF Conference
VITA - Learn
Dynamic Landscapes
Vermont Open Source and Education Conference
Windham County Reads Annual Breakfast
Materials Review sessions

And that’s just the local organizations!
Then I’ve got
NEEMA
AASL
ALA
& other cool places I’ll just never get to - that national conference for IT in schools, Computers in Libraries, the conference for picture book artists, children’s book authors, author talks at book stores, local chapter meetings of various organizations, etc.

Even at MIT I couldn’t take this much time off. Missing classes more than once or twice a year just does not seem OK to me, especially when I truly can not make the argument that it’s integral to my professional development. As much as I enjoy talking with other school librarians, the benefit I’ve gotten from the presentations has been variable.

And then there’s the expense to myself & the earth in terms of travel. Most Vermont happenings are over two hours away from me. Here in Green Liberal Vermont, it’s frustrating that so many groups are encouraging so much travel. District-wide professional development is a 45 min drive, with no fuel reimbursement.

So - I ask you. Can we just think about this 2nd Life thing a bit? I know it’s a little odd. The avatars are usually pretty racy. Figuring out how to move around and not accidentally take off your garments can be tricky. But there are plenty of (professionally legitimate!) ways to safely try it on…

www.iste.org/secondlife

And check out the links here at the Blue Skunk Blog

Extra cred if you can find my avatar in that screen shot on Blue Skunk. Hint: I’m the freaky one.

(cc. image by Roberto Rizzato)

I’ve got a few crafty blogs in my feeds these days, and occasionally I run across a perfect project for the library. Here’s a place where you can buy temporary tattoo inkjet paper, so you can make your own tattoos. Why not make some for the kids with your library logo? Or a “I remembered to return my library books today” tattoo?

Here’s a cute DIY ribbon dispenser, which would work great for organizing rolls of labels.

I am always finding inspiration for fun bookshelf ideas. Here’s a nice one made from an old ladder. Furniture with bookcases built in are everywhere - here’s a chair and here’s a bench with built-in bookcases. Or how about this Cave bookcase, the kids would go nuts!

This one has got to be my favorite. This fellow built a bookcase around his bed, but I could just imagine this surrounding a cozy reading spot for picture books.

After a short discussion on lm-net & further discussions at Blue Skunk on hyper-compliance with copyright, I thought I should mention a couple of handy applications for teachers needing to download video for use in class. We hear so often from teachers who can’t access online videos at school due to strict filtering. It’s ridiculous to cut off this wealth of free, useful material for instruction and I do hope some are successful in convincing their schools to re-think their policies. (Chant with me now…fair use, fair use, fair use)

In the meantime,

Download Helper is a very easy to use Firefox extension that will quickly grab any material you need from a website, and Miro is my favorite application for viewing media files of many types. Easy peasy.

The Boston Public Library has been rapidly adding photos from their archives to their Flickr pages, including sets of great oldey-timey New England postcards.

They wrote to Jessamyn that they’re hoping to use the “No known copyright restrictions” license the Library of Congress uses.

How cool is that?!

I’m aware that this sounds needlessly geeky. However, if you’ve got a school full of Intel-based Macs and are in the business of finding fun literacy games, you know how many are in the (up to now) inaccessible Shockwave format.

Well, weep no more young gamers.

Adobe has finally release a version that runs natively on Intels. Hurrah!

(tip: get the full installer.)