Posts from — November 2006

Library NOT Heart of University, Survey Shows:
“Every faculty member here knows students’ papers are already just swaths of text cut and pasted from shit sites they found on Jackpot strung together with their own pathetic run-on sentences. Faculty apathy and grade inflation are the only things keeping students’ GPAs and campus retention from plummeting through the floor and our funding from going with them. Without a library for faculty at least to conduct their research all bets are off!” The Library Association of North America (LANA) has issued a terse response to both the NCUP’s report and developments at Wilburn: “Looks like the party’s over.”
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The party is over for libraries? i’d say it ended years ago, prolly in the reagan era. the library is still a necessity, but I don’t think it is a heart…. the heat of a university is the total environment for learning that it provides. not the classroom, not the library, not the lounges, but the whole and how it is architected in passing to encourage learning.

Web Curator Tool:
The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a tool for managing the selective
web harvesting process. It is designed for use in libraries and
other collecting organisations, and supports collection by
non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the
web harvesting process.

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this looks like a great tool.

Take Back Your Time:
TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

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I missed take back your time day.

Season Shot – Ammo with flavor.:
Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!

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finally… hunting with flavor….

Want a lesson on what can happen when you anger the blogosphere? (and you happen to steal pictures):
Unbelievable right? It gets worse. After the 441 comments are posted to Kris’s blog post about this, then it takes off on Kris’s flickr site – where people start to discover that the thief had stolen almost every photo on his web site. The poor schmuck eventually apologizes and admits his wrong-doing after one of the absolute worst web-based pummelings I have EVER seen.
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web based pummeling…. A new concept?

How many calories are in Coke Zero?:
If you answered zero, go to Question 2: how many calories are in Pepsi One? If you answer one, you are wrong. Nancy, a friend and colleague of mine, told me her son did a college project to find out how many calories are actually in soda. Pepsi One, it turns out, has something like 28 calories. Pepsi One pays a little fine every year to the Food & Drug Administration for lying about its calorie count, because it is much more profitable to pay the fine every year than change the calories.

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ahhh trüth in advertising is great…. government complicity is better.

Welcome to the Bottom Half:
In terms of retention and graduation rates, American colleges and universities are now in the bottom half of all higher education institutions in the developed world. According to a New York Times story and editorial, the U.S. is now 16th out of 27 countries.
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yep… but how do you resolve it.

Around the Corner v2 – MGuhlin.net – Librarians are obsolete:
A few folks–David Warlick (2cents) and Chris Harris (InfoMancy)–are
complaining about how librarians have been left out in the cold, found
to be obsolete/irrelevant to a world that can do its own research, work out information literacy
on its own, and really, come on, do we REALLY need those grumpy librarians?

You know, I bet librarians are laboring under the same draconian policies teachers are…basically that there are too many OTHER duties in addition to being a teacher-librarian to engage a classroom full of students in learning information problem-solving a la Big6/Super3, that there just isn’t time in the day to engage in the levels of reflection required by the Read/Write Web.

So, School Libraries Work…but are the people who advocate for technology instead of people…well, do they even care what people are going to help students use that technology? If teachers and librarians can both teach Technology Training in a 2.0 World, why should anyone think they have to pay extra for a librarian?

What’s the value-added of a librarian?

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SO there is a huge debate about the value of librarians now? is there? buy laptops fire librarians? is that the real answer? I think not. However, i do no think that librarians and archivists have an easy argument when so many different fields now make strong claims to performing all but their most mundane tasks.

about gng
| global nomads group:
Using interactive technologies such as videoconferencing, GNG brings young people together face-to-face to meet across cultural and national boundaries to discuss their differences & similarities, and the world issues that affect them.

Global Nomads Group programs aim to:

Increase young people’s knowledge of the world and its people

Increase collaboration and dialogue between students of different cultures and nationalities

Highlight critical world issues ranging from HIV/AIDS to global warming, to war

Provide an educational framework in which students can become active leaders in their own education

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This is a great idea…

Nine Shift : Education: The Gallaudet protests :
The issue is also about the biggest educational struggle in this early century: the switch from making every student “normal” to understanding that every student is not normal, in other words, unique.

And once again bloggers kept the issue alive. Bloggers, those journalist advocates for a niche, a slice of people. One of the leading deaf bloggers is Ricky D. Taylor, or Ridor, at RidorLive.com.

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non-normality is the key to actually understanding and structuring learning these days.