Break time

We won the un-lottery this year, getting the last final on the last day of finals. Everyone is a little punchy, and even the RifRaf book club meeting was more disjointed than its usual disjointedness. So it's well past time for a break.

Mitch and I will be going to KlezKamp again, driving all the way to the Catskills in New York. Anyone who's interested in keeping up with the doings, can check in with the official KlezKamp blog. This year I get to take my new-to-me fiddle, in its spanking new purple case with the backpack strap. Don't tell anyone, but I look much cooler than I sound.

So... see you in a couple of weeks!

Facebook is fun, but...

I just can't keep up. Really. All those apps make my head spin. But I'm not quite as cranky as Jan, from Shelf Check:

And I must say, getting messages and pokes from near and far on my birthday was pretty awesome.

I love it when they come back

The young alumni pizza party...

Former library workers

Former RifRaf stalwarts

It's getting to be that time of the semester.

When everyone is on everyone else's very. last. nerve.



And some people simply will not leave the library. Even when it closes.

In print!

In the shameless-self-promotion department, I am pleased to announce that the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, in which I have a contributed chapter, has been published by MIT Press. It seems like I was working on this a really, really long time ago, but the six volumes came out in record time for the publishing world. My chapter is in the volume called Digital Media, Credibility, and Youth.

One of the very (many) cool things about this series is that it was published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) license and MIT Press has made each chapter available for download. Mine is right here.

Back to the drawing board

I developed some new questions for Monday's test that I hoped would require students to demonstrate their knowledge rather than just parrot-repeat definitions at me. Natalie was (ahem) kind enough to graph the frequency of wrong answers for each question.



So, if 47% of students (14 out of 30) miss a question, does it mean that something is seriously wrong with the question or that something is seriously wrong with the teaching? Can't be the kiddos, or the percentage wouldn't be that high. Sigh.

Shopping spree

Thanks to a generous community and the Pages for All Ages bookstore book fair, I got to spend $309.95 on books this morning. We've been building a wish list for just such an occasion (Lily, I got the Gorey!), which included some items of whimsy that no library should be without. For example, Return of the Bunny Suicides. So, for the literary-minded suicidal bunny -- order Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix online, then sit under the mail slot.

From the feeds

Stir-fried Wikipedia, anyone? The comments really make this one.
From the SurRural Librarian.

An understated-but-searing critique of Kindle, Amazon's new e-book reader.
From the Free Range Librarian.

Finally, the Harry Potter Personality Quiz. Which Harry Potter character has the same Myers-Briggs personality type as you? I'm Olympe Maxime. Though a bit on the short side.
From Tangognat.

Another bold experiment

Well, maybe not bold, but definitely new and different for us. For the past month or so, we've been experimenting with using wikis for some of our class project pages. The idea is that as students and faculty find helpful resources, they can add links to the pages themselves. So far, just the Cutting Edge page has seen many contributions of this sort. I've only had one instance of tomfoolery (committed by a senior on the Chicano Research project page -- who said, when caught red-handed, that he "just wanted to see if it worked"). Later this week, I get to try something new with Mr. Vaughn's section of World History. They'll be using wikis to collaborate on comparisons of how the human figure is portrayed in the art of different cultures. We'll keep their work private since they'll be downloading images from databases.

Jennifer Erbach, this semester's GSLIS practicum student, also converted our Recommended Reads page to a wiki platform. So far it's been a soft launch. Natalie put up a bulletin board in the hall, but it promotes the website as a whole. I've spoken about the wiki at the book club and now I'm writing about it here. If I really want to see some action, though, I'll need to send out a general e-mail announcement. Either that, or we'll never get much past three titles on the Absolutely Best Books Ever page. What's stopping me? Mostly that editing is not quite as transparent as I'd like it to be. We keep adding to the instructions, but that can be a losing game. Still, it's time to get the word out. It's just too much fun to keep to ourselves!