Archive for the ‘education’ Category

You Can’t Just Walk Away

Gareth-Michael Skarka tweeted this morning: Deleting Facebook accounts over privacy concerns is the new slacktivist hotness. If you’re concerned about less-savvy users — TEACH THEM. And he’s absolutely right. Colleen Harris blogged last week: It’s not the nerds, social networking experts, librarians, Alex Scobles or other techgeeks Facebooks awful privacy settings take advantage of, though [...]

Circles

As I said in my previous post, I went to a school in Kansas City called Loretto for 5th-8th grades. Loretto was a private school that promoted self-paced education, cooperative learning, broad educational study and free thinking. It wasn’t quite “anything goes,” but it was much looser and more open than almost any other school [...]

The News of the Day

The New York Times has released TimesMachine, a specific wayback machine that allows you to browse replicas of past issues, from September 18, 1851 to December 31, 1922. Hovering over an article brings a little box that contains the beginning text of the article and a link to read more, which opens up a PDF [...]

Your Future, Now With Extra DRM!

Utterly despicable. New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students… The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) applauded the proposal, which is [...]

Get Schooled

My coworker Erin has started a new blog, schooling.us. If you’re interested in the intersection of schools, education, libraries, and technology, check it out.

Have I Mentioned I Love My Job?

I love that I get to work with people who think great thoughts and want to put them into action. (That would be the blogger, not Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken’s speech is great, too, and I encourage everyone to watch it, but I don’t work with him.)

Hacking the Dominant Paradigm

Here’s an assumption of mine: the majority of library professionals expect that continuing education and professional development in the field will be done through formal classes, seminars, and conferences–which cost someone (the library professional or their place of employment) money and require face-to-face, in-person attendance. Technology and society being what they are, this isn’t as [...]

Lib Ed

In the Library Journal, ALA President Leslie Burger talks about reforming library education: I’ve asked Dan O’Connor (chair, ALA Education Committee) to focus his group’s attention on creating an action plan for reforming library education at the ALISE/ALA Education forum planned for Midwinter 2007 in Seattle. Rather than getting educators and practitioners together for a [...]

Degree or Not Degree, That Is the Question

I was asked not too long ago to give my rant about having an MLS (or whatever your local library graduate program is calling its degree). I don’t usually do requests, but that’s mostly because I don’t usually get requests. Since this particular request came from a friend of mine, and since this is a [...]

Playing With My Toys

Even though it’s my day off work today, I logged into OPAL to participate in Brenda Hough‘s and Michael Porter‘s “Top-Notch Technology Training for Patrons” presentation. I got some great ideas for technology training classes to have at MPOW and how to do those classes. Erica Reynolds made a great comment about library staff getting [...]