Learning new stuff: podcasting

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and author of the forthcoming book Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. The interview will be available as a podcast on the Young Adult Library Services Association Teen Tech Week website during Teen Tech Week (March 4-10). I had to use all sorts of new gizmos to make this happen -- fancy new headset, Skype to make the phone call (I have $7.50 left on my account!), and Hot Recorder to record the conversation. None of this was easy to arrange, given the dictates of operating systems, firewalls, and administrator rights to computer guts. The last straw was finding out that the free version of Hot Recorder only allowed us to record 2 minutes and 6 seconds at a stretch. So Nancy and I made a game of it, recording questions and answers in sound bites. Sigh. But it was thrilling to hear Nancy's common sense, hopeful, and anti-fearmongering messages about young people and social networking software.

Tomorrow I will leave for Commonwealth School in Boston, making up for the trip I missed during the Great Snowfall of February 2007. I will take with me a mental image of the latest item left in the library. Mmm, yum, bag o' seaweed.


At least it wasn't left as a present in the book drop.

Being sent to the virtual doghouse

David Pogue posted excerpts from his interview with Phillip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab, the company that runs the virtual environment called Second Life. In response to a question about punishing those who violate high-level rules of tolerance and non-harassment, Rosedale told this great story:

We're always doing experiments. And there was a period of time where we would give people suspensions rather than kicking them out of Second Life altogether. And one of the funny things that somebody here at the office came up with was the idea that you'd be incarcerated. You could log in, so you could use Second Life, but you'd always be placed in this strange cornfield that had this old tractor. There was nothing in it -- it was a corn field, and then this old tractor. And then a television that sat there incessantly and played these 1950s "Be a Good Citizen" kind of movies. Great stuff.

Ah, justice served.

News and views

In the Legal News department, Senator Dan Kotowski (D-Mount Prospect) has proposed a more reasonable piece of legislation to help students deal with potential danger on the Internet. The Internet Safety Education Act would require school districts to provide education about Internet threats and risks. Imagine -- teaching, not blocking!

In the Fun Department, I've learned from Jessamyn about Archie McPhee's new temporary tattoos for librarians. Gotta get me some.
And for anyone who wants to know more about our visit from klezmer group Veretski Pass, you can stream the interview/performance they did for the WILL AM Focus 580 show. Hot music, amazing people!

In the I Can't Believe It Department, there's the incredible story of the hapless substitute teacher who may serve up to 40 years in prison for exposing children to pornography because she couldn't figure out how to shut off pop-up porn ads. Never mind that the computer she was using was a Microsoft Windows 98 machine running an outdated version of Internet Explorer, the school's license for its firewall program had expired, the machine's anti-virus software was expired and lacked any anti-spyware tools, or that the prosecution hadn't conducted a basic scan of the computer's hard drive with anti-spyware software.
Then there's the outcry over 2007 Newbery Medal winner The Higher Power of Lucky by librarian Susan Porter because she used the word "scrotum" on the first page of the book. The 10-year-old main character overhears the word being used when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum. Being 10, she naturally wants to know what it means. I wonder if this controversy plays out differently in rural areas where animal body parts are the stuff of everyday "normal" conversation.

Finally, in the Very Cool department, the Online Gargoyle has been named a finalist in the National Scholastic Press Association "Online Pacemaker" competition. Nice!

Squashing social networking

Yikes. I recently learned that Illinois State Senator Matt Murphy (R-Palatine) has introduced the Social Networking Website Prohibilition Act, which would banish social networking websites from all public libraries and public schools in Illinois. The bill does not define social networking sites other than to say "social networking websites" (though, oddly enough, terms like "school" and "public library" are defined). Nor is the bill limited to libraries that utilize e-rate funding for Internet access, which means that -- if passed -- the bill would affect us at Uni High. So, very likely it would mean no more Gargoyles Loose in the Library, no more Online Gargoyle, no more web forums, and possibly even no more ability to visit websites that have social networking attributes (like Flickr, LibraryThing, and even Amazon!). According to a February 16th story in the Chicago Tribune, Illinois appears to be the only state where an outright ban is being attempted. But state officials in Georgia and North Carolina have recently called for websites like MySpace to require minors to get parental consent.

I wonder if Senator Murphy really understands the huge range of services that comprise social networking (so much more than MySpace!) and the potentially damaging impact of such legislation on libraries, schools, and young people.

Caption this photo

To reflect what actually happened, the caption for this photo would read: "Zoe's Cure for the Hiccups."

The cure? Take a big mouthful of water and hang upside down in a library chair. When you sit up, *magic*, your hiccups are gone. (And, you appear to have transformed into an overstuffed chair with poking-out legs and a cute little magazine-cover head...)

Here's an unrelated-but-interesting captioning exercise. This video is called "Introducing the book," but I think it might make better sense to call it "Help Desk." What do you think?

The weather did not permit

So, no Boston, at least not for now. Instead, an unprecedented second snow day with lots of shoveling, a fair amount of working online, and - yes - readinginsideallcozy. And what a wonderful book I had to read. The Book Thief (Fiction Z89b), by Markus Zuzak, is a 2007 Printz Honor Book. Set in Nazi Germany, the book is narrated by Death, who tells the story of young book thief Liesel Meminger. Death speaks with irony, sadness, even humor, and eloquently describes Liesel's life with her idiosyncratic foster parents, neighbors, friends, and with the Jew the family hides in the basement. I'd planned to insert a couple of excerpts here, but Annie heard me talking about the book and checked it out!

Snow day

And I am at school. Trying to get a few things done before (theoretically, weather permitting) I leave for Boston tomorrow where I'm scheduled to speak at the Commonwealth School. At Commonwealth, the word "assembly" doesn't seem to have the awful connotation (lame, annoying, waste of time, etc.) that it does at so many schools. They have an assembly every Thursday and often feature outside speakers. Looks like a very interesting school and I'm really looking forward to my visit. But the storm is moving east and the skies are looking distinctly unfriendly.

The world will stay upside down for awhile. First, our friends in the Klezmer band Veretski Pass will arrive Sunday night for a series of events on campus early next week. Having Monday off, I get to escort them to their appointments. The rest of the week will feature an annual Uni favorite, Agora Days. I'm hoping to take Chamber Music from Alex and Martin. But only if they go easy on me and let me play in the second violin section.

Me, Prince Charles, and Yogi Berra

I bet you didn't know this, but we all look alike. That is, according to My Heritage face recognition software. Now I know how people are finding those celebrity look-a-like photos to put on on their MySpace pages. But to tell you the truth, I'd rather people get me mixed up with Q'Orianka Kilcher than Larry King.



And by the way -- snow day tomorrow!!!!!

It was a dark and stormy night...

The folks who write book jacket blurbs have a daunting task. They have just a couple of paragraphs to convince potential readers that, yes, this is the book to buy/borrow/read. Maybe I'm a pushover but, based on their blurbs, I want to read several of the titles that are currently on our new book shelf. Here are a few excerpts:

It all starts the day Stephen Rose arrives in town. Thirteen-year old Davie and his best friend, Geordie, are altar boys at their Catholic church. They're full of mischief, stealing the sacramental wine and battling with the local toughs. But that all changes when Father O'Mahoney asks them to befriend Stephen.

Forty-seven is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed, until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John. The two become inseparable, and Forty-seven soon finds himself swept up in an otherworldly battle and a personal struggle for his own liberation.

Seventeen-year-old Phil has felt like an outsider as long as he can remember. All Phil has ever known about his father is that he was Number Three on his mother's long list -- third in a series of affairs that have set Phil's family even further apart from the critical townspeople across the river. As for his own sexuality, Phil doesn't care what the neighbors will think; he's just waiting for the right guy to come along.

Callum is a Naught, a second-class citizen in a society run by the ruling Crosses. Sephy is a Cross, and daughter of the man slated to become prime minister. In their world, white naughts and black Crosses simply don't mix -- and they certainly don't fall in love. But that's exactly what they've done.

See if you can match up the blurbs with their titles and authors (okay, okay, two of them are gimmes):

Clay, by David Almond (Fiction AL68c 2006)
Naughts & Crosses: A Thriller, by Marjorie Blackman (Fiction B565n 2005)
The Center of the World, by Andreas Steinhofel (Fiction St358m:E)
47, by Walter Mosley (Fiction M853f)

It's all about the sound bite

Lots on the cutting room floor, I mean lots. Jeremy's pithy remarks and his beautiful description of Noodlebib, many more astute comments from Linda and Jacob, and the plethora of concrete examples I gave describing library-Internet goodness (including all sorts of nice things about Google and ways the company is collaborating with educators and libraries).

So, note to self: Speak in short bursts and only say what what can stand alone, without qualification. Trouble is, I can't think of any broad generalizations about the Internet and libraries that don't require qualification. And television news just doesn't allow for qualification. I guess it's why I'm an NPR junkie.

Still, as these things go, what came out isn't awful. I do like the way the online transcript has links to the local public libraries, with little blurbs about each one's services. And, for now anyway, the video clip is available for streaming.

Trusting in groundhogs and local television news

It's been beyond frigid here for the last several days. It's hard for me to believe the word of Punxsutawney Phil, who is calling for an early spring. I finally warmed up this afternoon when a crew from WCIA came in to film a segment on the impact of the Internet on libraries. And they chose this little library to represent all of its sisters and brothers! Being interviewed definitely made my internal temperature rise. The students who happened to be in the library during this event were their usual wonderful busy selves, particularly the ones who also agreed to be on the hot seat by being interviewed (thanks Jacob, Jeremy, and Linda!). The crew was here for at least an hour, and seemed to shoot quite a lot of footage. So it will be interesting to see how much of it survives to prime time (10:00 p.m. tonight) and how much of it ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor. I have a feeling that we'll be reduced to a cliche, just like our friend Punxsutawney Phil.

If I lived it, how can it be history?

Today was hippie day. I find it very odd that the you can now buy peace symbols, bandannas, beads, tie dye, and other such accouterments at costume shops. I just went to my closet.

Here are Cristina and Seth looking awfully charming:


It's already old news, but now we know when to expect the next Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling has something in common with author Philip Pullman, who is urging publishers to go "green" by printing books on recycled paper. I guess many of us are still hippies at heart, if not in looks.