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The Chronicle has a very brief piece mentioning San Jose State University's use of Second Life to deliver instruction to distance students enrolled in their SLIS program. Also included is a video segment from their local PBS station in which several faculty and students are interviewed. Lots of strong comments about the use of Second Life for this sort of venture below the story.
Technorati Tags: Second_Life
Just learned about the Social Software, libraries & distance learners blog at the University of London - it's part of their LASSIE (Libraries and Social Software in Education) Project. LASSIE "is exploring how social software might enhance distance learners' use of libraries. It also considers more widely the value of new technologies, commonly called web 2.0, or social software, for libraries and also explores the role of the library as a social space." Should be a really interesting one to watch!
Technorati Tags: LASSIE, Distance_Education
Too busy to blog about anything substantial these days, but I needed to pop on and note that flurries were spotted in the air this AM. Mark the date - September 19, first "snowfall"... Might try a linkdump later in the week. Until then...
Connie Hildebrand writes to the OFFCAMP discussion list that Lynn Copeland, Dean of Library Services at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC has been selected as the featured speaker for the 2008 Off Campus Library Services Conference to be held in Salt Lake City, UT. From the announcement, Lynn's own words: “Among the accomplishments I am most proud of, first as Manager for Systems, Data and Resource Sharing and then as University Librarian and Dean of Library Services, has been the success we have had in providing services to support off-campus students. Guided by our motto 'Our Library is where YOU are', we have taken advantage and indeed led a number of Canadian and BC initiatives to provide access to print resources through document delivery as well as reciprocal borrowing. The software development at SFU Library has had as a primary function, support for off-campus students. With a good percentage of its regular students taking CODE courses and the increase in online components for campus courses, I believe our services have been highly successful in meeting twenty-first century academic needs.”
I can vouch that the folks at SFU have done some really slick programming work!
A reminder that paper proposals are due on September 30th!
Technorati Tags: OCLSC
Just learned about the oSkope visual search engine, currently searching Amazon, eBay, Flickr and Youtube. Kind of fun to play with - here's a quick screencast.
Would a display like this make it more "fun" to use the library catalogue?
Technorati Tags: oskope
To go along with the previous post, Stephen Abram also notes an interesting statistic about DE: the U of Phoenix and Western International University are among the top 5 largest US Universities.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a very short piece about the rising stock (as in stock market) of Capella University - lots of support in the comments from Capella grads! I've met librarians from the U of Phoenix, but never from Capella, though the website says they exist. Can't actually get to the Capella library site w/o a login though, it seems...
I haven't heard of any libraries making use (or wishing they could) of file transfer over meebo, but it could be useful to push a subject guide or something. Meebo just announced they now support file transfer between the different networks.
Technorati Tags: Meebo
Last month (August 7), Meredith Farkas and I did a SirsiDynix presentation called Free your content! RSS for Libraries. The recordings (audio and video) for that session are now available on the SirsiDynix website, as is a PDF of our slides. The video is in WMV format and doesn't play very nicely for those of you on Macs, so I've also made a Flash version of the presentation available here (sorry about the mouse pointer in the middle of the screen - forgot to choose not to capture that). I still have the Q&A log to get through and post - plan to do that soon, but man it's been a busy month! It'll come, thanks for your patience.
Technorati Tags: SirsiDynix, RSS
