image by draml

My personally selected top ten from the links I shared on Twitter 2.6.2011 through 2.12.2011.  In no particular order

1. cool! Tool To Create Fake Facebook Walls For Historical or Fictitious Characters via @web20classroom@gwynethjones – just what it says a My Fake Wall gives you everything you need to create a face Facebook wall making it easy to add posts, pictures, events, comments and more.

2. read this! BBC: Are libraries finished? Arguments for & against http://bbc.in/fkZFcr #tlchat #library via @joycevalenza The article is broken down into Only at a Library and Only Online Arguments

Only at a library

1. Specialist research As tempting as it is to view the web as a tool for gathering all information, there are gaps only library documents, books and maps can fill.

“Those libraries that have managed to retain older collections need to go on retaining them… we need that evidence of ingenuity, originality and inspiration that we can lose if we only look at things produced in the last few years.”

2. Environment to learn Sometimes there’s no substitute for human contact. Mr Dalby says just being in a place surrounded by books and information with help at hand to access them is invaluable.

3. Expert staff Anyone who’s spent five minutes trawling the thousands of medical and health websites will know the perils of misinformation.

Librarians have specialist knowledge and are trained to find reliable information and evaluate it – a skill as relevant in the digital age as it has always been.

4. Free internet access With 30% of the population still without a home internet connection, libraries are for many their first and last online experience.

Libraries allow dialogue to flourish and enrich local democracy, supporters say

Ms Smith says libraries reduce the “digital divide” by offering free access to those who can’t afford a pc or monthly subscriptions.

5. Engage in local democracy Community forums in libraries are the perfect place to meet and engage in local politics because they’re neutral, non-judgemental spaces, Ms Smith says.

“The problem with the internet is people flock together and have similar views, there’s no real dialogue between people who have different views,” she says.

Only Online

1. Searchability The speed of research and interactivity of the internet make it an altogether richer experience than traditional libraries.

2. Digital books Forget catching a bus to the library to carry home a limited number, yet heavy stack nonetheless, of books.

For those who can afford a portable reader like a Kindle or iPad, the convenience of accessing books on a beach, up a mountain, or anywhere else for that matter, can be irresistible.

3. Comfort in numbers “You create something together like bees in a hive, like bees building a honeycomb”.

4. Brings niches together If you had a niche interest in something, it wasn’t always easy to find someone with the same niche interest, now it really is, says Mr Belam.

5. Self-publishing

3. every library manager should read this & implement! – 10 Easy Ways to Show Your Employees You Love Them - I don’t agree with all of these, but you get the idea.

1. Don’t Block Social Networks
2. Allow Browser Freedom
3. Work in the Cloud
4. Don’t Ban Personal Cell Phones
5. Friend/Follow Your Employees
6. Even Better, Set Up a Company Social Network
7. Set Up Company Music Playlists
8. Offer Rewards For Location-Based Service Achievements
9. Feature All Your Staff on Your Company Website
10. Set Up an Online Comments System

4. broadband has greater potential to transform education than any other technological innovation in our lifetime -

a report on teachers’ media usage, sponsored in part by PBS, offers new evidence to support the National Broadband Plan’s finding that broadband has greater potential to transform education than any other technological innovation in our lifetime. The report talks about the incredible increases in teachers’ use of digital content in their teaching—not just layering technology on top of lessons, but digitally transforming their classrooms. The survey found, for example:

• Three in four teachers (76%) stream or download TV and video content, up from 55% in 2007. These teachers are also accessing content in completely new ways, with 24% reporting that they access content stored on a local server, up from 11% in 2007.
• Teachers view TV and video content as more effective for student learning when integrated with other instructional resources or content. More than two-thirds (67%) believe that digital resources help them differentiate learning for individual students, and a similar number (68%) believe TV and video content stimulates discussion.

5.  Diagnosing the Digital Revolution via @itsjustkate – this look at Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, discusses why its so hard to tell if technology is really changing us, and if it is, if it is for the better or worse. Definitely worth a read even if you don’t intend to read the book.

6. Facebook Privacy: 10 Settings Every User Needs to Know via @msauers – an up-to-date guide to Facebook’s privacy settings from Mashable. Quick go check yours before Facebook changes them. Again.

7. Digital Media and Learning conference “Designing Learning Futures” Mar. 3-5 in Long Beach, CA. Reg deadline: Feb. 14. I wont be attending this conference but I’ll bet watching Twitter (hashtag #DML2011) and blogs for information and discussion of what is happening there. If you’re going to be there let me know your blog and/or twitter handle

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at University of California, Irvine. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

8. F.C.C. to Propose Expanding Broadband Service to Underserved Areas via @jdscott50 #broadband#digitaldivide – this was tweeted on 2.6.2011 about an announcement expected to be made on Monday, you can listen/read more about the actual announcement and the plan in this NPR story: FCC Pushes For Universal Broadband Access

9. The Next Big Thing: Making library e-content accessible to people with disabilities

…ensuring access to people with visual and print disabilities in the digital age.  There are three major steps that libraries can take toward this goal.

• The first is enhancing awareness of what materials are provided by law and where those materials can be accessed.
• Second, we need to validate our websites for accessibility compliance so customers with special needs can access our resources.
• Finally, we must proactively engage vendors about adopting open publishing formats. Don’t despair, these steps are clear and achievable.

10. Why Integrity Is Never Easy

Browse through the mission, vision, or value statements that corporations post on their websites, and you’ll notice that almost every company includes a statement about integrity. And if you Google the following examples, you’ll find that many companies use these stock phrases:

“We combine integrity with excellence…”
“We act with integrity in all we do.”
“We hold honesty and integrity as our guiding principles.”
“We are proud of the integrity, sincerity and transparency our employees demonstrate every day.”

Morally upright statements, right? But have you ever wondered why they are needed in the first place? After all, integrity should be the basic building block for doing business: Nobody wants to get involved with a company that lies, cheats, and tricks its customers; nor do people want to work for a company (or a manager) that is dishonest and disingenuous with employees. In other words, integrity should be a given, without the need to trumpet its existence. As one senior executive said to me, “Integrity is a threshold characteristic for our people — if they don’t have it, they aren’t here.”

Similar Posts:

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Since last months What I’m Reading post went so well I thought I’d write one for December.

Books:

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky. I’ve been a fan of Shirky since reading his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, when it came out.  I watch or listen to any of his speeches I can get access to and he writes just as well. I love this section when he is talking about “finding the time”.

Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit—every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought, back when I was talking to the TV producer. (Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude.) One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it, though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television? Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias’ projects’ worth of free time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous: we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials. This is a pretty big surplus. People who ask “Where do they find the time?” about those who work on Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, relative to the aggregate free time we all possess.

And here is a visualization of that

Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping – As I listen to this so much of it applies to libraries that I’m writing a separate post detailing it, stay tuned! 

Reports:

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, the latest report from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy written by Renee Hobbs. Note while this is a great and interesting paper it fails to fully address the role of librarians, especially school librarians.

The Knight Commission recognized that people need tools, skills and understanding to use information effectively, and that successful participation in the digital age entails two kinds of skills sets: digital literacy and media literacy. Digital literacy means learning how to work the information and communication technologies in a networked environment, as well as understanding the social, cultural and ethical issues that go along with the use of these technologies. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, reflect upon, and act with the information products that media disseminate.

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, a new policy paper by Renee Hobbs, Professor at the School of Communications and the College of Education at Temple University and founder of its Media Education Lab, proposes a detailed plan that positions digital and media literacy as an essential life skill and outlines steps that policymakers, educators, and community advocates can take to help Americans thrive in the digital age. (Download PDF or Read online)

Use of the Internet in Higher-Income Households from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  Given my interest in broadband and the digital divide neither of these last two should be a surprise to anyone.  Just a few stats

The relatively well-to-do are also more likely than those in lesser-income households to own a variety of information and communications gear.

• 79% of those living in households earning $75,000 or more own desktop computers, compared with 55% of those living in less well-off homes.
• 79% of those living in higher-income households own laptops, compared with 47% of those living in less well-off homes.
• 70% of those living in higher-income households own iPods or other MP3 players, compared with 42% of those living in less well-off homes.
• 54% of those living in higher-income households own game consoles, compared with 41% of those living in less well-off homes.
• 12% of those living in higher-income households own e-book readers such as Kindles, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.
• 9% of those living in higher-income households own tablet computers such as iPads, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.

Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009 (pdf) from the FCC discovered via CrunchGears article - FCC Says Two-Thirds Of Americans’ Broadband Isn’t Fast Enough To Be Considered Actual Broadband

The FCC has just released its latest report on the sate of broadband in the US of A (PDF alert), and the results are… less than encouraging, and for a number of reasons. The agency found that around two-thirds of Americans’ broadband connections don’t actually qualify as broadband under its definition. (Broadband to the FCC is 4 mbps down/1 mbps up.) What’s sorta odd is that this isn’t a result of the lack of infrastructure or anything, but a result of people choosing low speed plans.

Lighter Fare

A Great and Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy) – I read this last weekend

Rebel Angels (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy Book #2) – I’ll be reading this one next. 

I really need more time to read!

What are you reading?

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It is Get Online Week in the UK! How awesome is this?

Businesses and the government have teamed up in order to persuade Internet virgins to try out and use the World Wide Web.
The UK Get Online Week was launched on Monday and will run from 18th to 24th October 2010. The week-long national drive is being led by UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox, who is trying to get the last remaining ten million Brits online. This is despite the fact that Lane Fox has no budget to complete the project.
“There is no money and we don’t need it to make a big stride forward,” Lane Fox said back in August.

The simple idea behind the campaign is to encourage at least some of these estimated 10 million Britons who have never used the Internet, to give it a go.

There are a couple of helpful sites Race to Online 2012 list events, resources and provides a 67 page Manifest for a Networked Nation and research on Digital Inclusion. If you’re interested in broadband access there are a great resources on this site.

Pass it On has a great videos and lists 5 reasons to Pass it On:

1. Money – An estimated £560 can be pocketed over a year by paying bills and shopping online; not to be sniffed at!
2. Time – Time saved for them performing everyday tasks at the click of a button, and time saved for you by not having to be a surrogate surfer.
3. staying in Touch – 3m people in the UK are socially isolated, and the Internet can help them connect with their friends and family.
4. Smash the Barriers – The Internet isn’t scary, it’s fun! Helping someone get over their initial fears can let them into the wonders of the web.
5. Create Opportunities – Having Internet access can increase GCSE performance by two grades for kids and give access to millions more job opportunities for adults.

found via Stephen FrySimilar Posts:

• Post at Broadband for America: Libraries Are Essential for Bridging the Gap
• The UNICEF Bee and the Digital Doorway
• Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy Warns of “Second Class Citizens” in the Digital Age

My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 3/5/2010 thru 3/11/2010

1.How to Overcome Idea-to-idea Syndrome via @dmlcentral – Ideas are great, but its the follow through that matters. The idea is the easy part, the dream the vision the excitement, putting it into action requires rolling up your sleeves, late nights, long hours, convincing others and more. The follow through is where most ideas fall down.

2. How to Stay Positive…when the boss isn’t – via @buffyjhamilton for the record my boss is great and more positive than I am

1. Make Your Bus Great
2. Your Positive Energy Must be Greater than All of the Negativity
3. Live it, Breathe it, Share it – Walt Whitman said we convince by our presence.
4. Invite Your Boss on Your Bus – Give your boss The Energy Bus or another book on positive leadership.
5. If Your Boss Doesn’t Change, You Can – If all else fails then you have a choice.

3. Digital Literacy Skills Essential to Closing Broadband Gap – from the The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

The survey findings reinforce the growing body of research that finds digital literacy skills are critical to bridging the gap between those who are able to fully participate in the information age and those who live as second-class citizens in informed communities. While the cost of Internet connectivity was cited by 36% of non-adopters as the  reason for not having Internet access at home, issues related to digital literacy came in second, with 22% citing this concern. Other reasons for non-adoption included relevance of Internet content (19%), other reasons outside of these categories (11%), combination of the above (4%) and lack of availability (5%).

4. Deliver a Better Presentation by Reminding Yourself It’s Not About You [Mind Hacks] RT @MLx

There are five main components to pulling together a good presentation:

1. Choose a goal;
2. Find a storyline that will help the group reach that goal;
3. Develop a series of activities or a method of presentation that allows you to develop your storyline. Don’t let your media determine your storyline!
4. Remember that your role is to facilitate the group reaching its shared goal. This is your primary responsibility!
5. Remember that it’s not about you. All that matters is the experience of the other people in the room.

5. Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused#ebooks via @cindi an ebooks must read

6. Are These 3 Odd but Common Obstacles Standing in the Way of Your Success?

1. drama
2. Small invisible barriers.
3. You fall back into old patterns, thoughts and behaviors.

7. U of Michigan debuts PictureIt Rare Book Reader via @GMLGeek @ericrumsey @jgreen31@archivesnext @lljohnston

PictureIt is a web-based animation program that gives users the sensation of turning the pages of digitized rare materials that would be otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to view or obtain.

8. Digital Natives? Naive! Are we embracing the ill-defined notion of “digital natives” via @Strng_Dichotomy – a good reminder that the digital divide is  not just along generational or age lines

9. eBooks in Libraries a Thorny Problem, Says Macmillan CEO

Sargent is not afraid of changing the publisher’s relationship with libraries. In fact, change may well be required.

“That is a very thorny problem”, said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it’s a popular book, maybe it gets lent ten times, there’s a lot of wear and tear, and the library will then put in a reorder. With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it, maybe you check libraries in three other states. You get the book, read it, return it and get another, all without paying a thing. “It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?”

“If there’s a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that’s an interesting model”

10. RT @vonburkhardt: Good post from @blendedlib about finding the right market for libraries: Will What Worked For Groucho Work for Libraries

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The Knight Foundation has released a new report Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. A good deal of the content either is or could be applies to libraries.  The entire report is 148  pages, you can also download a 2 page summary that includes recommendations like these

• 2: Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.  Read more …
• 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements of education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.  Read more …
• 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.  Read more …
• 10: Support the activities of information providers to reach local audiences with quality content through all appropriate media, such as mobile phones, radio, and public-access cable.  Read more …
• 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.  Read more …
• 14: Emphasize community information flow in the design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces..  Read more …
• 15: Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.  Read more …

The Foundation has also taken actions that affect libraries:

$3.3 million to improve free, public Internet access in libraries in 12 communities

$2.28 million in broadband access projects in underserved neighborhoods in three cities

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