Serendipity35

I came across a site intended for library staff at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) called Learning 2.0. It's a blog that features 23 Things (or small exercises) that you can do on the web to explore and expand your knowledge of the Internet and Web 2.0.

It's intended for their library staff, but it could easily be adapted for faculty and students at any grade level. They have even built in a way to record staff progress in the program.

This is not just a "webquest" of clicking around the web, but includes actually creating a blog of your own, setting up RSS feeds etc.

I've been doing some of these same things this semester with my students, so I wish I had found this site before the semester began.

I did some further surfing and discovered that Learning 2.0 & 23 Things is not unique to that North Carolina library. It's a movement!

I found a library association that encouraged their members to complete all 23 items by October 31st in order to to receive recognition and be eligible for prizes. (See California School Library Association - CSLA).

Turns out that I lucked onto the original site with my first click. Some history from CSLA:

The CSLA 2.0 Team modified The Learning 2.0 program designed by Helene Blowers, Technology Director, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County and is loosely based upon Stephen Abram's article, "43 Things I (or You) might want to do this year" (Information Outlook - Feb 2006) and the website 43 Things. We also drew heavily from the jslibrarylearning2 program.

The San Jose version includes audio files too. The more I click on these links, the more I find. Helene has also done animated tutorials (using Articulate, a program we also use at NJIT too) on topics, like this one on "Seven & a half habits of successful lifelong learners."

I don't know how far this has spread and how many libraries (or others) are participating, but I think it's a great idea.

Has anyone set up a version, adaptation or similar site for their teachers or students? Please comment below...

Sure you do. You probably still use them sometimes.

BookCrossing.com is a community site that organizes people who love books to share them.

The word bookcrossing actually was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 as a noun - the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

The world as library.

They have 3.8 million books registered and more than half a million users now.

So what's involved?

You read a good book. Decide you want to share it with others by giving it away. You go to bookcrossings.com (free accounts) and register the book and add a little comment about it.

You'll get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) to put on the book. Most people print out the labels that the site offers and put them on their book. The label says that this is a free book and explains how they can report that they picked up the book and journal it online.

Then you release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and you'll get notified by email each time someone goes to the site and records journal entries for that book.

Serendipity takes over. A person who loves to read discovers your book and makes a journal entry. Sometimes, people take them and never make journal entries - that sucks - but at least your book found a reader.

I suspect there are plenty of books that you have at home that they could send into the wild. You hate to throw them out, but even charities sometimes don't want them. I try to use hardcovers when I can so they travel better, but I've done paperbacks too.

Here's a sample tale from my account-

I registered a copy of The Virgin Suicides and released it in 2004 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Somerville, New Jersey USA.

Then I put my own journal note about it. Someone found it and was good enough to go online and add an entry:

"The book lay on the folding chair for quite some time, unclaimed. People glanced at it, but skirted it, as if they were respecting that it might be someone's property. The poetry reading began, the chairs filled, and I wanted a place to sit down. I hesitated, because I thought it might be "saving" the seat. But then I sat down, holding the book on my lap, in case the owner came to claim it. No one did. I enjoyed the poetry reading a great deal. Then opened the book, as I was about to leave, because of the note taped to the cover. I saw that, strangely enough, the book was meant to be taken, and so I carried along with me."

I guess anonymous didn't get to read it for a while...

"October 02, 2005 - I'm sorry I waited a whole year to read this book. This is one of the best "first books" I've read in a while. About the Lisbons, a troubled family of five sisters in a Detroit suburb. The first thing that struck me, aside from the wonderful writing, is the voice. This book is told in first-person plural (as "we"), in the collective voices of the boys who were watching the Lisbon sisters growing up. First time I've seen this since Faulkner's story, "A Rose for Emily," which is also told by a sort of Greek chorus of townspeople, witnessing death, sex and tragedy from the outside. I am going to pass this on through PaperBackSwap.com. There's a waiting list for the book, so I'm sure it will be out traveling into the world again in just a few days."

So it was sent from Mount Vernon, NY to New Hampshire using PaperBackSwap.com.

You can visit my Bookcrossing bookshelf to take a look without having to register.

I haven't used paperbackswap.com yet. It uses the mail to exchange, so there's some mailing cost, but you get the book you want.

I think either of these services could be a good classroom experiment in the social net that still has a hand on good old paper and reading.

Little experiments like this have been done in K-12 classes for years via mail to tie in with geography, journaling, penpals etc. For Bookcrossings, if the account is the teacher's, it seems a safe, interesting use of the Net. Inside or outside the classroom, it's just an interesting way to use your books and encourage reading.

I heard author Jonathan Lethem interviewed yesterday on Fresh Air, one of my favorite radio interview programs. Besides talking about his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet and his semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude, he discussed his Promiscuous Materials Project.

The details are on his website jonathanlethem.com but it's a kind of literary rip/mix/burn project. There are stories and songs for filmmakers or dramatists or songwriters to adapt, remix, reuse - choose your verb.

They're not totally free (you pay a buck) or totally without restrictions (you sign a written agreement) but then "you're free to adapt or mutate the story as you please."

Lethem says:

I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, appropriations, collage, and sampling.

I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay
for Harper's Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice reflect that belief.

Lethem knows that what he is doing is not totally new and that he's not the first on this path. He lists a number of influences including David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts site, the Free Culture movement, and a book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift. He also has a page on his site with links and embedded videos of more Cultural Re-use and Appropriation.

Lethem says he was influenced by Open Source theory but he doesn't consider this open source or quite the same as Copyright Commons projects either.

It's a project to keep an eye on and I hope it motivates other authors and artists to put more of their materials online for creative reuse.

More and more online MS Office-styled applications are showing up online for word processing & spreadsheets etc.

Another app that I'm coming across are online ways of drawing flow charts, layouts, org charts, diagrams and even far more sophisticated 3D artwork.

So, I suppose some of these are alternatives to Microsoft’s Visio.

NJIT offers Visio to all its students as part of our larger Microsoft licensing, so here it's not an issue of having the software available.

Perhaps, you do not have access to Visio or similar software - OR - perhaps you find Visio too difficult to learn. You might want to try using an online app.

OmniGraffle (from the OmniGroup) is an interesting one (but it's for Mac OS X). It's great that software like this gathers a community around it, so if you go to Graffletopia, you'll find many free downloadable stencil sets for it from maps to science or architecture - even Lego People and blocks.

Take this drawing up a few notches and you have Google Sketchup which is a powerful but fairly easy drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design.

If you use Google Earth, Google SketchUp allows you to place your models using real-world coordinates and share them with the world using the Google 3D Warehouse.

Check out the review of the commercial version of Sketchup 5 that goes for $640 to get a good idea of what it can do, and what a deal it is to get the free version.

Anyone out there have drawing programs they would recommend in either the Visio or Sketchup categories? Free & open source preferred, of course...