Thing 23: Copyright, Creative Commons, and Assessment

Discovery Exercise:

• Find an example or attribution that shows this program has been modified from its original.

Of course! I've been looking at it since January, at the inception of my journey with SLL 2.0. On the right panel of the SLL 2.0 blog, just under the red title box, it says "Content and style...have been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons license." Linking to this page was very helpful, since I was losing my way just browsing around CC's site. It explains the type of permission granted--non-commercial share-alike.

OK, that's it. I am onto the online survey. I really like your suggestion to keep this blog going as a professional growth log or a site for my school library. It's been an investment of time and effort that should be sustained.

Thing 22: Audio eBooks and E Books

My school wants to do more with online sources of audio books, such as BookShare, for our students--kids with language-learning difficulties. In fact, the objective for our kids is not reading online, but listening, since reading is such a struggle for most of them.

I have been given the task of procurement--setting up and maintaining the accounts and getting the downloads for the kids. We have only begun looking, so I am thrilled to learn about LibriVox and World eBook, adding to my knowledge-base of ebooks and especially e-audio books. LibriVox has very clear help pages, which I have only just begun to read. It will be a great source for e-audio books in the public domain. I have not yet joined World eBook (doing so would allow me to search for specific titles) but I intend to, since a few collections in World eBook might be of great use, especially the Audio eBook collection. However, the fact that all the files in World eBook are pdf means that our teachers cannot edit them. They want to be able to insert comprehension questions and comments, a la Kurzweil 3000.

As with the Oxford English Dictionary, BookShare, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia, it is volunteers who are responsible for the sites' development, writing entries or, in the case of audio books, reading aloud the texts. I can see that amassing a database of audio titles will take much more human effort and time than amassing digitized texts.

I also linked to World Public Library, the parent of World eBook. A great enterprise.

Thing 20: YouTube

On YouTube, often enormous amounts of time to load clips. Ugh. No patience. So I headed over to Yahoo Videos and Teacher Tube and checked out a few things.

Back on YouTube, I found a piece that had circulated my way a bit ago, and may have come your way, too. Very funny. Mom Song to the William Tell Overture. I think humor is a very key draw of YouTube, which can work for learning. Not this piece, of course, but humor about your topic can make a memorable lesson.

On a serious note, I would like to use YouTube in my library for computer training, like the Creative Commons pieces. Very instructive. I would not produce something original--I don't have the resources. Besides, there is plenty of excellent content in that realm.

Thing 21: Podcasts

Could not access any podcasts on Podcast.net. Success on PodcastAlley. Too much commercial presence on both sites. I liked being able to listen to the podcast and work on another site at the same time, because I'm not patient enough to just listen. Explored Podcast Alley's genres. Went to the genre, Education and from there to History Clip of the Week. Those had images in addition, but they were shorties (less than 60 seconds), and at the end I get a message, "visit our sponsors." No thanks. Also in Education was Mugglecast, but it was too much drivel (of the sort found on talk radio) to keep me engaged. I love Harry Potter, but tend not to like all the hype. This stuff was from March 2007, when there was LOTS of buildup to #7.

Because I am a Mac user, I checked out iTunes podcasts, which I had never explored--have only done music library to play my own(ed) audio CDs. iTunes podcast had some great content, such as the TED talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design)--recorded lectures, containing video and audio, of major thinkers of our time. Unfortunately, the only podcasts in iTunes with RSS feeds are only a handful of Microsoft tech updates--not a good fit for me.

I finally went to Yahoo podcast and searched for book reviews. Nancy Perl, of NPR fame, came up. Yay! She is funny and a good reviewer--and has read voraciously--so I subscribed to her podcast on Bloglines. Her commentary is definitely a great addition to my library web page!

Thing 19 revisited: LibraryThing and Groups.

Feed. In doing a search for this book (by M.T. Anderson, and another favorite of mine), I visited Groups, and recognized the names of some of the groups that had come up in my search for ratings/ravings or a discussion about Once and Future King.

Groups look pretty cool. Some folks are members of MANY groups. There are interesting stats on the Groups page: Standing groups, Groups with most members, Most active Talk, Most read groups, to name a few. You start to see names of participants repeatedly, as they exchange ideas on different books. These are all little communities. I would say that Groups is the very essence of LibraryThing and the social networking concept.

Thing 19: LibraryThing

Link to my library in LibraryThing. I actually set up an account in LibraryThing 'round about Thing 5, since I'd heard about it from the MSLA listserv, and was having trouble finding a catalogue record for a particular item in my school library. When I set it up, I even added the LT widget to my blog. Kinda fun.

I searched LibraryThing Talk for discussions about my favorite book, Once and Future King (I lie; one of my faves--who can possibly limit oneself to ONE favorite book??). It was interesting to see how the results of my search (ie., people's responses) actually were linked to the topic in which they'd originally appeared, so you can get a feel for how your book "plays" in a variety of contexts (eg., some of the topics were: What are you reading now?; a particular book group's discussion; 888 [books] for 2008, etc.). In my search results, I liked how search terms (the title) were bolded, except and came up a LOT, and wasn't necessarily a hit. Most interesting comment was about how the theme of the Arthurian legend is that things always get worse; we go from light (things are ok) to dark (bad kharma of seeds sown earlier; can't outrun fate). That's exactly why the story is so tragic and T.H.White's retelling so powerful.

Thing 18: Online word processing. Zoho Writer.

Very cool. I got into Zoho at school, creating an account and poking around a bit, per the assignment; created 2 documents and saw where they were saved in Zoho Writer. My second creation was a note and a link (to SLL2.0 #18!) so I could pick up the assignment from there when I got home. I didn't even have to email it to myself! Of course using Delicious would have been another way to go (bookmarking the site), or just typing in the url or googling it at home, but the point was to utilize this web-based word-processing app. so this was my little test. And the test worked! There was my note with the link when I got into my account. But alas, it was at the top of the intro page that tells you about some of the features of Zoho Writer, just where I'd created it, since I could not find where to create a new doc (a la Word), but I was being invited to edit the Zoho page (the edit button above the page), so I took it.