Techno Librarian

Agglom lets you save and organize sets and ists of links.  I’ve used it several times now for classes coming in to research.  Basically, agglom provides a website where students can access the links I’ve compiled, while also providing small images of the websites. What makes this tool particularly useful for me is how it works.  There’s an Agglom add-on for Firefox and a bookmarklet for other browsers.  Here’s how the process works from me:

• A teacher signs up for library time.  Organized teachers (my favorite) provide me with a handout for the activity.  Otherwise, I go by what we discuss or what they place on the request form.
• I pull up any websites included in the teacher’s handout, each in separate tabs. (love tabbed browsing, see here for Firefox, here for IE)
• I search for other quality reference material, each open in a separate tab as I find them.
• Once I have a good set of links, all open in separate tabs, I then click the agglom button.  The agglom website comes up, with all the links listed.  This I find easier then the other method of individually entering the URLS into the agglom site. I name the set according to topic and presto-chango.
• When the class comes in, I direct them to Agglom and have them type the subject in the search box or have the direct link ready for them.  This way, they have all the links ready and saves the time of entering the URLs.
• In addition, agglom provides a slideshow feature for all the links you have in your set.  This is handy when doing my presentation to the class before they start.

You’ll need to set up an account for all of this.  Agglom also has social features built in.  Groups lets you create a group where users’ sets can be compiled.  I started the High School Research Topics group to gather the sets I create for classes that come in for research.  While you’re there, Agglom also has a “Coffee Break” page with updated news organized in different topics.

You can also embed sets! Here’s my set for Cancer research:

I’m a pretty avid user of delicious and looking for ways to use the service beyond just storing my bookmarks.  Just the other day as I finally returned to thinking about this blog, I made the mental connection between the sites that I bookmark and the purpose of this blog.  That is, many, or most of the sites I bookmark are teaching-related.  As i looked into it, what I found was the ability to post my delicious links to this blog as a post, which you should be seeing around this post.  I found the instructions by searching the edublogs forum (thank you to the questioner and answerer that provided this info!).  Basically it involves using the experimental features in delicious by going to Settings- Blogging-Blog Posting (as pic’d below)

You then have to enter all your settings, which takes a little know-how, which takes some digging and patience.  Hopefully, this will fill in the gaps between my quite infrequent postings.  An unfortunate side to this (and perhaps someone knows a work-around) is that sites I mark for personal use will also be listed.  There won’t be anything that off-key, though.

How’s that for a new word?  I’m creeping to the edge of librarianship and setting up large sections of my fiction by genre (or quasi-genre). Is this part of Library 2.0 or 3.0? So far I have “Chick Lit”. “Guy Stuff”, “Street Lit”, “Big Boys and Girls” (these are those adult fiction boks not expresssly written for YA, but have the YA appeal [or at least some of them do, others i'm not sure why thery're in our library]).  I’m trying to decide what section to do next.  It’s a slow process, of course, as I’m having to create the new spce and then shift books on the shelving.  I’m thinking this won’t be the whole of fiction that gets genre-ized.  And then, what’s going to really appeal to the students?  This is definitely developig my relationship with the collection, so I think that’s a good thing.

Mighty Quiz is an online quiz with user-generated questions.  Sign up is free and the site utilizes several of the web 2.0 conventions we’ve come to know and love.  Earn points for creating questions as well as your score from answering others’ questions.

I can see here a neat little alternative student assesment tool where you  have them all create questions from your topic of study (they could print the screen before submitting the question) and then answer each others’ questions (although I’m not certain how well that can actually be done; isolating those questions, that is) .  I don’t see how you might consolidate certain questions into one quiz.  It appears the questions are all lumped together.  You can search for certain tags and it then seems to give you questions based on that tag.  What you might do is have students add a specific tag to their question.

I also discovered playing is quickly addictive.

Came across this in a post at the Information Literacies Blog, http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-literacies-sampler.html

You can download the book in pdf format. Here’s the link to the Table of Contents, available as a separate one page download. The book text is 263 pages. The cover and links are here-
http://www.soe.jcu.edu.au/sampler/

From chapter 1:
“This book “samples” work in the broad area of new literacies research on two levels. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies. These are video gaming, fan fiction writing, weblogging, using websites to participate in affinity practices, and social practices involving mobile computing. The question of what it is about these practices that makes us think of them as “new” and as “literacies” will occupy much of this introductory chapter.
Second, it samples from among the wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies. The studies assembled in this collection are all examples of what is referred to as research undertaken from a sociocultural perspective on literacy. New literacies can be studied from a range of research and theoretical orientations (cf. Leu et al. forthcoming). For reasons that will become apparent from our account of “new literacies,” however, a sociocultural perspective is especially appropriate and valuable for researching new literacies.”

index

technorati tags:new_literacies_sampler

I’m in week 3 of this fabulous online course, Five Weeks to a Social Library, where we are learning to use/integrate/leverage many social software tools such as blogging, social bookmarking and rss feeds, wikis, Flickr, etc. I’m learning a lot and developing a better understanding of how these tools work. Best of all, I’m learning and conversing with other librarians while doing it! At some point you’ll want to check it out as there are some wonderful resources to learn from. There’s a Social Library Lurkers wiki for those following along, if you’d like to lurk yourself.

In the sidebar you’ll notice a Grazr widget, where I have put feeds from some of the blogs of the course organizers. Something new I learned how to do in the course and successfully implemented today!

Just discovered, by way of Lifehacker, that Wikipedia has a page of resources for public domain images.  Good to have these resources for student projects, as they sometimes tend to pull images from whatever website they find.  As part of our duty to instruct students in evaluating and utilizing appropriate resources, here’s a good example we can use to instruct students in understanding copyright.  Even within the websites provided on the page, copyrighted images may stil be contained.

Find some images for the research students are doing, both public domain and copyrighted, and use it to instruct students on how to see the difference, where to look to find out, etc.

Wikipedia:Public domain image resources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

technorati tags:wikipedia, public domain, images, lifehacker

Google Maps Mania: 50 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups

If you like to play with Google Maps, here’s 50 things you can do!

Here’s an idea:

For social studies research, have students do a mashup of event or people locations.  For example, if they’re researching biographies for Black History month, create a mashup to show locations of: where inventions were created, famous African-Americans were born, events in Black history took place, etc..

Use the maps to find distance between events in history.

If you’ve seen somethign like this already done, please let me know.  If I find an easy explanation of creating a mashup, I’l let you know.

technorati tags:google_maps

Here’s another way to search.  Sugarcodes is a website where you can search using command lines created by sugarcodes and users.  For example, typing “g keyword” searches google for your keyword.  Sugarcodes has quite a few command words already, and users (you included) can create more.  I created a sugarcodes, lzn, for LISZEN, the Library & Information Science blog (Google co-op) search engine.

yubnub does the same (looks like it was first), and has a browser plugin.

Thanks to this TechCrunch post!

technorati tags:command_line, sugarcodes, yubnub, search_engine

Here’s a new search engine for kids. Quite different than usual, it includes a tag cloud where you can click and existing searches for that word appear. In addition, as you click on a word, related terms appear, perhaps giving students guidance toward refining their search(?)

Thanks to: Hey a Search Engine for Kids that I Like?!? Library Tourguide to Technology

technorati tags:quintura, yahoo, search_engine