Friday, March 23, 2007

SL buzz meeting

So, I went to my first SL meeting in-world last week. Apart from the disorienting feeling of coming into a meeting cold and having to catch up, there were some unique hazards that don't normally come up during a meeting--like having your avatar slump as if asleep (I've never fallen asleep in a meeting) and also interesting animal avatars lurking nearby and other avatars flying around. I was merely "listening" and so read the conversation intently, although about half of it was somewhat incomprehensible for me.

It's a pretty mindblowing experience though. Information literacy got mentioned fleetingly, though from what I remember it was in the context of finding information on Second Life, in world. (that is how I understood it at least--I don't have the transcript in front of me.) Which, to this mind at least, is a huge jump.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Back from Spring Break! Upcoming Workshop!

And I hope everyone had a very good spring break this year. We're all back to our classes, as the high season for papers approaches.

It also appears to be high season for conferences. It should be quite exciting. I myself am going to Computers in Libraries 2007, and am planning to post while I'm gone. Yours truly also intends to post commentary on some of the Second life happenings for librarians. (What's Second Life?)

So why this sudden surge of interest? As usual, while reading another blog I came across this article: INFORMATION LITERACY IN THE AGE OF AMATEURS How Google and Web 2.0 affect librarians’ support of Information Literacy...........which is a new angle on everything. I am not going to rehash and enumerate every single item in this article--there's plenty of commentary on Web 2.0 and libraries (just go and google it and you'll see). But I will point out that the paper discusses extending IL instruction to include showing students how to access and evaluate information from Blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 content. This ties into yet another cool ebook that talks about new literacies.

Where am I going with all this? Well..........all this good stuff (and more) is going to end up in some form or another in the upcoming workshop Using Blogs and RSS Feeds for Research April 5 at 10-11am, in room 101.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Alkek Library Podcast 03/06/07 Part 2

Library Workshops Podcast

Did you know Alkek Library offers drop-in workshops on topics like demographic and marketing resources for business research and on focused areas like sociology, education, and psychology?

The workshops are usually about an hour long and are held in room 101 of Alkek Library. No registration required.

Some of the upcoming sessions include:

ARTstor, March 20th, 2 – 3 PM
Using Google for Scholarly Research, March 22nd, 5 – 6 PM
Evaluating Internet Sources, April 2nd, 11 – 12
Using Blogs and RSS feeds for research, April 5th, 10 -11


More information and dates/times of Library Workshops

Alkek Library Podcast 03/06/07

RefWorks Training

Thursday, March 1, 2007

More interesting reading

Just saw an interesting new book mentioned on Sheila Webber's InfoLit blog called A New Literacies Sampler which is (oooh!) readable online. I haven't had a chance yet to plow through but a few chapters looked very interesting and probably pretty apropos to what we are doing......
wireless classrooms, gaming, ..............academic blogging.

Alkek Library Podcast 03/01/07

"Information Literacy and Research Skills in a Digital World" from Spring 2007 Bookmarks, Alkek Library's Newsletter