« September 2008 | Main | November 2008 »
Apparently November 10-14, 2008 is National Distance Learning Week.
"Sponsored by the United States Distance Learning Association, National Distance Learning Week (NDLW) held on November 10-14, 2008, seeks to promote and celebrate the tremendous growth and accomplishments occurring today in distance learning programs offered by schools, businesses, and governmental departments."
Received via email:
Vancouver, 23-24 June 2009
Following the successful First International Conference on M-Libraries in 2007 we are delighted to call for papers for the Second International Conference in Vancouver in 2009. For more information about the conference visit http://library.open.ac.uk/mLibraries
The conference, will be hosted by the University of British Columbia in collaboration with Athabasca University, the Open University (UK) and Thompson Rivers University. The aim of the conference is to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users ‘on the move’ via mobile or handheld devices, including mobile and smartphones, PDAs, portable gaming devices, MP3 players and ebook readers.
The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments.
If you would like to be involved in this exciting conference submit your abstracts (up to 300 words) to M-Libraries-Conference@open.ac.uk by December 15th, 2008. These will be subject to peer review and authors will be notified by mid-January.
We expect that papers may include research reports, demonstrations of technical developments, practical case studies or reviews. Posters are also invited.
Themes will include;
Papers or presentation
Papers or presentations should last no longer than 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussions.
Poster sessions
Posters will be displayed throughout the
conference and time will be allocated in the programme for poster
viewing. A prize will be awarded to the best poster.
Conference proceedings will be published online
The conference will be held at the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. Situated on Canada's West Coast, Vancouver is a popular travel destination and is a host city for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. For more information see http://hellobc.com/en-CA/RegionsCities/Vancouver.htm
Contact Information
General enquiries: leonora.crema@ubc.ca
Program enquiries: m-libraries-conference@open.ac.uk
Why not join the m-Libraries facebook group? http://www.facebook.com/group?gid=7719700810
Read all about Google's "groundbreaking agreement with authors and publishers."
Unfortunately for me, the changes outlined in the settlement only apply to the US.
Some snide commentary from moi:
Google writes, "For Library Project books that are still in copyright, our results are like a card catalog; we show you info about the book and, generally, a few snippets of text showing your search term in context." Is a card catalogue really the analogy most of your users are going to understand these days?
Google writes: "We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace." Yeah, like the publishers couldn't reprint volumes they thought were gone forever? And let's not mention the tremendous boon to people who want to read the books!
But seriously, there's some really great stuff in here for the user. Anything that's been digitized and is out of print will now be available full text online, either for free (out of copyright) or purchase (still in copyright). Prices TBD, of course. Also cool, "the agreement also creates opportunities for researchers to study the millions of volumes in the Book Search index. Academics will be able to apply through an institution to run computational queries through the index without actually reading individual books."
And,
Anyhoo, looks like the Google Book Searh Project will continue on, which is a good thing, IMHO. You can also read the press releases from the AAP side. There are quite a few more details available there.
I missed this when it was first "announced", but apparently the first RSS to email utility that I fell in love with is no more. About a year and a half ago, NBC purchased Rmail and rebranded it as SendMeRSS. Apparently NBC just stopped supporting it; the SendMeRSS website is down, and Randy Charles Morin, the original developer of Rmail, is reporting that NBC is threatening legal action against him for pointing out the fact that they're no longer supporting SendMeRSS. Seems a little heavy-handed, eh? Interestingly, in his post from August 24, 2008 Randy points to a library blog that detailed some of the problems being experienced with the now defunct product. Scarily, that blog no longer exists, though of course you can still read about the problems (and here) on Google's cache. Pittland simply ceased to exist after the last August 1, 2008 post. Wonder if I'll be next? ;-)
Since it was one of the first RSS to email options I offered on this site I suspect there may be a few folks either receiving (or not) content from me via that channel. I'd be really interested to hear whether you're still getting stuff from me, or NBC, or ? I know it's a long shot, kinda like "raise your hand if you're not here", but it's worth a shot :-)
Educause has published the latest results of their survey of Undergraduate students and IT. The main report is 124 pages long, but the Key Findings is only 11. Libraries and the use of library websites are mentioned several times, but I don't think there's anything earth shattering along those lines. A couple of the things I found interesting include:
"Perhaps most interesting... is the finding that half of SNS users... have integrated SNSs into their academic life as a mechanism for communicating with classmates about course-related topics. Only 5.5%, however, extend their use of SNSs to communication with instructors about course-related matters. Students in focus groups and in the survey comments expressed both pros and cons about the involvement of instructors in their SNS lives - many being adamant that social networking sites should be the exlusive realm of students, but others liking the idea of interacting with instructors and using the same SNS mechanism they already use to communicate with friends and classmates."
Engadget points to a new product from Calgary company SMART Technologies, the Smart Table for kids. It's a pint-sized MS Surface-like product. I'm hoping to see this puppy show up in my kids' school, if not at the UofC! Maybe I need to schedule a field trip!
Spent my drive up to Edmonton for Netspeed listening to episodes of the new NPR podcast Planet Money. Fascinating stuff. Kinda makes me wish I hadn't taken my final undergraduate semester's Economics class as a pass/fail option. Since it was P/F, and my last semester, and a 3-hour course to boot, I ended up playing a lot of golf instead, so I don't "remember" much, so Planet Money is a great learning opportunity. As mentioned in one of the episodes I heard, http://bailoutsleuth.com/ - also quite interesting.
Techsmith has launched a new product that automates the process of capturing and distributing lectures. Camtasia Relay makes use of desktop software (Mac or PC) and a back-end server that handles the encoding and redistribution. Some good background information in the Techsmith Education Newsletter, where I learned of the product. Apparently a lecture can be encoded foro Flash, iPod video, mp3 only, and other formats, and automatically sent to iTunes U, for instance. It ain't cheap, but for an enterprise-wide solution it might be worth it.
Apple has a similar product in Podcast Producer, that appears to be bundled with the OSX Server. I suspect there are others...
Saw a mention of AideRSS go by on Twitter the other day, and just tried it out. The idea is great - give
AideRSS a blog URL and it purports to sift through all the posts and then offer separate feeds to you so you can subscribe to only the "best post" the "great", "good" or all the posts (the naked feed, if you will). Supposedly it's a way to deal with overload, by only getting the best of the posts from the bloggers you want to follow. Sounds great, right?
Maybe, but IMHO they've got some work to do on their algorithms. With someting like this I like to compare myself to someone I know is a "better" blogger. In this case I picked Meredith at Information Wants to be Free. Yeah, we blog differently, but AideRSS appears to place a lot of weight on how many links and how much of a conversation a given blog post has. In that case Meredith definitely blows me away. And yet, here are the screenshots of her blog and mine. Take a look at the highlighted sections. Any rhyme or reason there? Look how many posts, saves and comments her posts have, and she doesn't even get a "best posts" category! Maybe they're placing way more weight on # of recent posts than they should? (click for bigger versions)
By all means go give it a try - maybe it'll be useful to you.
Infobits points out that The Journal of Distance Education has made its complete run of archives (1986-2008) available online. From their website, "The Journal of Distance Education is an international publication of the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE). It aims to promote and encourage Canadian scholarly work in distance education and provide a forum for the dissemination of international scholarship." A search on the word "library" returns 63 results.
Betsy Weber on the Techsmith Visual Lounge Blog posts about Cueprompter.com, a website that allows you to type or paste in a whack of text, and then scrolls it back at you just as a teleprompter would. She suggests it would work well for screencasting, but I think that's only true if you have a dual-monitor setup, otherwise wouldn't it show up on the screen you're recording? I guess maybe if you're recording after the initial capture. Regardless, it works as advertised, and hey, maybe would serve well for those of you giving speeches from your laptop...?
The timing couldn't be better as I'm updating a presentation on Blogs and RSS. Technorati has posted the 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. While changing it up each year is interesting (this year they're kinda focusing on blogger demographics and blogging for profit), I wish they'd keep the basic stats going consistently from year to year :-/ Near as I can tell Technorati claims we're up to 133,000,000 blogs indexed by them. In the 2007 report that number was only 70,000,000. I sure would've like to include an updated graph showing the continuing rising curve like the one shown in 2007. I'm not gonna make one myself!
