By 4/30: Vote for Your Favorite Mashup

For those who may not know, Mashups combine 2 or more online sources to create something new. One example is WikipediaVision, which combines updates to Wikipedia on its public page, with the MaxMind database that translates IP addresses into geographical locations.

Just posted to the NMC Technology Advisory Board List:

Hello NMC,

Something fun to share from the University of Pennsylvania - Our annual mashup contest has taken off this year with 32 entries, and for the first time, we are taking online votes at http://wic.library.upenn.edu/mashup/2009voting.html

All entries are linked there with descriptions. Online voting closes on April 30 at 10 am.

Would you help us spread the word and get as many people as possible to watch the entries and vote for their favorites online?

At our awards event this Thursday, we will award prizes to the winners selected by our judging panel as well as certificates to the winners of the online voting. If you have any suggestions for us, please let us know.

best wishes,
- Anu

--
Anu Vedantham
Director, Weigle Information Commons
Rm 122 Van Pelt Library
University of Pennsylvania

Phone: (215) 746-2659
Cell: (609) 553-7962
vedantha@upenn.edu
http://wic.library.upenn.edu

Correction: 5/4 Mellon Seminar

The next Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities will take place on Monday, May 4th, 2 pm to 5 pm SLT/PDT. See the April 23d LILi blog post for other details.

Invitation: 5/6 Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities

This message is being cross-posted to a number of lists. Apologies for any duplication

You are invited to attend the May 2009 Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities: http://tinyurl.com/472nah

These Seminars are hosted by Todd Presner (Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, UCLA) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Laboratory, and Mellon Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities, UCLA).

Topic: Animating the Archive and Digital World
Presenters: Lynn Hershman, Henrik Bennetsen and Jeffrey Schnapp
Date: Monday, May 4, 2009
Time: 2 pm – 5 pm SLT/PDT
Location:
Real Life (RL): UCLA Visualization Portal (5628 Math and Sciences Bldg.)
Second Life (SL): Entropia, the Digital Library Federation’s SL island—rsvp needed

Second Life basic accounts are free: http://secondlife.com

NOTE to SL attendees: Please rsvp to Esther Grassian estherg@library.ucla.edu to reserve a space and receive the SLURL (SL url), as well as instructions for viewing the live video feed and adjusting the audio in SL.

The May 4th presentation will be devoted to the medium of virtual worlds, with particular emphasis placed upon mixed reality approaches to scholarship, collaboration, creation, cultural programming, and archiving. The presentation will be divided into two parts, the first devoted to the Lynn Hershman / Stanford Humanities Lab Life Squared project; the second devoted to a broader conversation concerning virtual worlds, with special emphasis on Sirikata, a new open source virtual world platform being developed at Stanford the inaugural application of which is SHL's Speed Limits project.

For more information, and for seminar readings, please visit
http://tinyurl.com/d9zjdb

Additional readings will be posted as they become available.

Information Literacy Panel & Poster Session in Second Life

On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, from 1:30 to 5 pm SLT/PDT, I’ll be hosting a panel and poster sessions related to information literacy at the Second Life Info Island Open Air Auditorium:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/97/116/33

This panel and poster session event will be held during a regularly scheduled class session for the UCLA Information Studies Department graduate course I’m teaching this Quarter. The course is called “Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice.” There are 21 students in the class, and they’re interested in various types of libraries, including academic libraries and public libraries. Most of my students are new to SL and have been asked to get an avatar and attend the session in SL. Many will probably also attend class in our regularly scheduled computer lab in RL.

There will be about 8 panelists and about the same number of poster sessions during this timeframe. Panelists have been asked to address several questions regarding their library’s information literacy instruction in any format, including virtual worlds.

Because of the size of my class and the number of panelists and poster session participants, as well as limitations on the number of avs that can be accommodated in order to minimize lag, I am only posting this announcement to the SLL Google Group and to the LILi blog: http://lifelonginfoliteracy.blogspot.com/

With the permission of the participants, I will try to make available any notecards created and the transcript. If possible, and if it’s agreeable to the participants, I’ll also try to leave the posters up for a while in case anyone would like to drop by and view them afterwards.

This is an experiment in using SL for this panel discussion and a poster session, and I hope that if you're interested you'll feel welcome to attend, but if lag becomes a problem, I hope you'll also consider leaving the session and allowing me to provide you with a transcript and then return to view the poster sessions at a later time.

I want to thank Abbey Zenith in advance for her encouragement and support, and for her excellent training session in how to create a poster, as well as embed a notecard in an object. Abbey will be welcoming the students, the participants, and attendees at the beginning of the session. Thank you so much, Abbey!

Join CARLDIG on Facebook

CARLDIG is now on Facebook. Please take a look and join, and send invitations to all your librarian friends on Facebook to join too.

The program last Friday went really great with wonderful presentations and a great discussion. The Facebook page will be a good way for us to continue the discussion. So join today!

Billy Pashaie, CARLDIG Chair

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=72736670892&ref=ts

Details Re Summer 09 Inforrmation Literacy Course

New for Summer 2009: IS 448 – Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and
Technique – a blended instruction approach.

Are you interested in enhancing your understanding of information literacy and improving your teaching and presentation skills?

Does the idea of a blended approach to learning that combines face-to-face meetings with online instruction intrigue you? Then the summer 2009 offering of UCLA's IS 448 is for you. Taught over a ten-week period, students will only be required to attend face-to-face meetings on three out of the ten Saturdaysduring the session. The course will make heavy use of Moodle. All course materials (except for the course text) will be posted to the site.

Students will be expected to monitor the site each week for assignments, exercises, activities, and discussions. Completed assignments will be posted to the site and in some cases will be peer –reviewed as well as instructor graded. Face-to-face sessions will concentrate on community building, brainstorming, discussions, and for exercises and activities that engage learners with the course material being addressed.

Face-to-face sessions will be held on the following dates.
Saturday June 27 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM with a lunch break from noon to 1 PM
Saturday July 18 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM with a lunch break from noon to 1 PM
Saturday August 8 9:30 AM to noon or 1 PM to 3:30 PM

NOTE for August 8 only: Students will have the option of attending either the morning (9:30-noon) or the afternoon (1 to 3:30) session. They will be required to sign up in advance for their selected session.

Regardless of the type of library you are headed for or the type of library work you plan to pursue, IS 448 can provide you with the skills, knowledge and ability to…
o Help your users become information literate
o Train you co-workers in the use of new resources and/or technologies
o Make persuasive presentations that “sell” your ideas to colleagues, administrators, your user community etc.
o Prepare for professional presentations at conferences and meetings.

The course instructor is Joan Kaplowitz, a leading expert in the field of information literacy instruction and co-developer of IS 448 with Esther Grassian. Their textbooks are considered the definitive ones in the field.

For more information about Dr. Kaplowitz see her Web site Transform
Your Teaching – www.joankaplowitz.com. You may contact her at joan@joankaplowitz.com for further information regarding this course and/or about information literacy instruction in general.

For information about enrolling in this course go to http://www.summer.ucla.edu/

Summer 09 Info Lit Course

Joan Kaplowitz will be teaching IS448, "Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice" during the 10-week UCLA summer session. This course is open to librarians as well as library school students, and will taught as a blended instruction course, part online and part in-person. See http://www.summer.ucla.edu/ for details.

Communications in Information Literacy

Just wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of this relatively new open access title. Scope and mission are defined as follows:

Communications in Information Literacy (CIL) is an independent, professional, refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge, theory, and research in information literacy. CIL is committed to the principles of information literacy as set forth by the Association of College and Research Libraries. CIL is also committed to the principles of open access for academic research.

Bellingham Schools

I found this also an interesting approach to k-12 IL from a school in the state of Washington. Anyone thinks this will be useful for the LILI survey?

21st Century Literacies

I found this chart for assessing k-12 literacy levels fascinating; it is part of the Big6 approach to IL. I’d like to hear comments if you know more about this…

Cloud Tools for Teaching & Learning

A recent query on this topic in the New Media Consortium (NMC) Technology Advisory Board List resulted in a number of interesting responses:

All:

I am updating my presentation on teaching and learning tools from the cloud with a specific focus on, “Low/No costs, Little Support Required”. In addition to the usefulness of these tools, I am looking at the equal consideration that should be given to product costs and to the effort required to support these tools with our campus environment.

An example of some of the tools that I like and that meet the low support criteria are: VoiceThread, aniMOTO, gabCAST, the livescribe pen, ustream. (to name a few) What are some of the useful tools that you feel meet this criteria and have value? Any thoughts?

Thanks, in advance.
Steve
Steven A. Terry
Director, Technology Utilization
The University of Memphis
AD 377
Memphis, TN 38152
---
Lately I've been incorporating, or planning to incorporate:
• xTimeline: http://www.xtimeline.com/
• Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/
• Utterli: http://www.utterli.com/
• TextReminders: http://textreminders.net/
The first three are all tools I've been having student use for multi-modal composition/alternative assessments (aka, you tired of reading boring/bad term/research papers?).

Shelley
--------------------
Some of my favorites that I have used recently are Jing (techsmith) http://www.jingproject.com/ , vuvox http://www.vuvox.com/ , cfkeep http://www.cfkeep.org/static/index.html pachyderm http://www.pachyforge.org/ , eXe http://exelearning.org/ , create comics http://pixton.com/ Poll everywhere http://www.polleverywhere.com/ Have not paid for any of them.

I haven’t tried this next one, but it looks like it is a comer. Build a web site from and for your cell phone: http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html

Anne-Marie Armstrong, PhD
Instructional Systems Designer
Office for Teaching and Learning
Technology Research Center, P/K Library
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan 48202
dv3709@Wayne.edu

I've been interested in Drop.io http://drop.io/; Zoho http://www.zoho.com/; and Tonido http://www.tonido.com/

Pam Patterson
Instructional Technology Group
Yale University

K-12 2009 NMC Horizon Report - Free

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has just published the 2009 K-12 Horizon Report. The Report focuses on 5 technologies to watch over the coming 1-5 years in relation to K-12: Collaborative Environments, Online Communication Tools, Mobiles, Cloud Computing, Smart Objects and the Personal Web. The Report is free and available as a pdf or as html:

http://www.nmc.org/publications/2009-horizon-k12-report

Steven Bell's LJ Column re Incoming College Students

Library Journal has just published Steven Bell's excellent column called "From the Bell Tower: Know Your Students--Before They Arrive," focusing on finding out more about incoming college students before they arrive, rather than waiting for them to get to college and then studying their information literacy needs.

NMC Releases K-12-focused Study of Challenge Based Learning

Just posted to the New Media Consortium list:

Dear NMCers,

In the largest study to date of the practice anywhere, new findings from the New Media Consortium's K12 think tank confirm that challenge-based learning is extremely effective with 9th grade students, including those most at risk of dropping out. The report, entitled Challenge-Based Learning: An Approach for Our Time [PDF, 38 pp, 672 kb], followed six schools across the US as they implemented the practice in high school classes.

Challenge-based learning is not a curriculum. It is a strategy to engage kids in any class by giving them significant that have real-world implications. More than 320 students and nearly 30 teachers in the schools, all of which had implemented a policy of providing full-featured notebook computers to every student, worked together to research, formulate strategies, and ultimately implement local solutions to problems of global significance. Students used their laptops for just-in-time research, to document their rationales, and to present the outcomes of their strategies. The outcomes of the three-week experiment, conducted last fall, were overwhelmingly positive.

The study revealed that both teachers and students found challenge-based learning significantly effective and engaging, even with the students most at risk of dropping out. Teachers noted that students learned more, and produced more than expected. Students reported learning skills that overlapped almost completely with the critical competencies identified by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

The project was organized by and built on work by NMC Platinum Partner, Apple Education, where the concept was initially developed. (For more on the approach, see Apple's site at http://www.challengebasedlearning.org.) The NMC's role was to assess and evaluate the outcomes of the work.

The teachers, students, and staff that participated agreed to allow their experiences to be exhaustively chronicled and researched. The students, primarily 9th and 10th graders, were chosen based on the desire to represent not only a variety of urban, suburban, and rural settings, but also private, public, and magnet schools, richly diverse schools and relatively homogeneous schools, and both affluent and low socio-economic status schools.

The report traces the development of challenged-based learning over the last several decades, and makes a strong case for why it is needed in schools, especially in programs serving ninth graders. (Studies from the National Center for Education Statistics show that more than 30% of students will drop out before the end of their first year of high school. Challenge-based learning is offered as a strategy to reverse that growing trend.) In addition to reporting on the outcomes of the experiment, the report extensively details teacher and student experiences throughout the project. Recommendations are provided for schools that wish to try the approach themselves.

The 38-page research report is available free of charge and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its widespread use, easy duplication, and broad distribution.

The report is online at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Challenge-Based-Learning.pdf [PDF, 38 pp, 672 kb].

Larry Johnson
Chief Executive Officer

___________________________

The New Media Consortium
sparking innovative learning and creativity

6101 West Courtyard Drive
Building One, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78730

tel 512 445-4200
fax 512 445-4205

email johnson@nmc.org
web www.nmc.org
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