Did you know?

At the conference I went to listed below I was able to see the premier of the new version of Do You Know?

Metronet IL conference

On June 15th I attended an Information Literacy Conference, sponsored by Metronet. The event was held on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. The conference provided an opportunity to talk/update on what Metronet is doing with the St. Paul Public Schools. rather than explain all of it, I will just link to their project.

Worldcat Lists

Being reported by a lot of the librarian blogs that Worldcat.org has added a “lists” feature. You can read more about it here. Why is this timely?  Tonight I am doing instruction for one of my capstone classes.  In the past I used to only show databases, as the students had  already had instruction on the use of the catalog. Since the worldcat.org site went live I have been showing the students some of the features, expanding on themes from the catalog.  With the capstone students, it will be a nice tool/addition to show.

Hell Week

While a good portion of the library community will be in Washington D.C. for the annual ALA conference, the librarians of Bush library will be staying home. probably, just like me, they are either too busy with summer projects or even busier trying to enjoy the summer. However, unlike most of my fellow librarians, I do quite a bit of classroom instruction in the summer. This is due to the department I liaise to….Grad Ed. The Graduate School of Education at Hamline is pretty much a 365 days a year operation. Even during the few weeks class is not in session, we still see a LOT of students working hard on their capstones or other projects. The thing about the summer classes, is that they are condensed a bit from the regular semester, which means I have to do a lot of teaching in a short period of time. Starting tonight, with the exception of Tuesday, I will be teaching every day and twice on Friday. I have no problem with that, it’s just my schedule gets a bit long. There is very little time to reflect or even keep up with the RSS feeds. Last Friday, I did get to go to a conference, which I will discuss soon.

Current reading

Currently reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. Actually, I am skimming through some of the parts. The parts that describe the technology, like what an rss feed is or what a blog is. Absolutely nothing against Will, as I am really interested in his take on these technologies. I just can’t wait till we are past the point, in books and articles, that have the need to spend so much time describing the technology as opposed to spending more time discussing uses, research, pros, cons, etc….