Second Life Education microsite

Linden Lab announced a link for information about education in Second Life at http://education.secondlife.com/ including a helpful FAQ at http://education.secondlife.com/whysl/faqs/. They are also requesting help building a directory at http://edudirectory.secondlife.com/.

Dan Pink Power of Intrinsic Motivation

The Scholarly Kitchen gives us Dan Pink and the Power of Intrinsic Motivation (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/03/19/dan-pink-and-the-power-of-intrinsic-motivation/) If we want high performance, we don't need sweeter carrots or larger sticks. Yes, pay people a good rate, but then allow for intrinsic motivation. Autonomy, mastery, purpose are important drivers. Sounds good to me!

Citizen 3.0

A movie Citizen 3.0: "A celebration of the cultural products we love and the roles they play in our society, CITIZEN 3.0 explores the relationship between media, technology, culture and democracy through the lens of copyright law." This is a feature-length film available online in 10 parts. You'll need Quicktime and Java to watch this. More about this and more information on copyright at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/enhanced/noted/citizen3.html

Why teaching is not like making motorcars. Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson who wrote "The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything" and has give other excellent TED Talks had some things to say CNN (March, 17, 2010). Everything's broken. We're trying to standardize things that can't be standardized. Robinson is interested in people discovering their passion. I have to say that "discovering one's passion" doesn't seem to be the goal of education at all. It seems like it has to do with developing a workforce. It's not even career education or vocational education. Both of those phrases seem to have something to do with making a choice to involve oneself in something that is personally interesting. But these days people seem to be using the phrase "workforce education." Yes, most individuals need job skills and need to be ready to do whatever it takes to support themselves, but it all sounds pretty dreary.

Sheila Webber's presentation. Information Literate Behaviour in Second Life

Sheila Webber from the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield has put the slides from her Second Life presentation on Information literate behaviour in Second Life. March 18, 2010. Her research indicates that even sophisticated searchers often rely on experts and colleagues to answer their information needs! A couple of snapshots I took view 1; view 2; view 3

YouTube - automatic captioning? Really?

From ResearchBuzz - YouTube Now with Automatic Captioning - Would this work with a pleasant little library video that one might upload to YouTube - and it would be captioned without having to do it yourself??

Joyce Valenza's interactive poster on Google Search capabilities

Joyce Valenza's poster on Google search capabilities from School Library Journal. Great idea! She says she will be working on this, but in the meantime here's her results:

Data + Knowledge = Information

"Data does not create information; information does not create knowledge and knowledge does not create wisdom. People use their knowledge to make sense of data and information. People create information that represents their knowledge, which can then be more widely shared." - Harold Jarche. Doesn't this sound like a friendly expansion of R David Lankes talk at IPL2 "What does the future hold for reference services"? Atle Iverson adds that in his view, the final step is not SHARE - but USE!

danah boyd on Googlem, Facebook, and privacy

A Gigaom report on boyd's SXSW keynote. She's quoted saying "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want to be publicized." She criticized Google Buzz since the settings for privacy are easily ignored. (My sense is that Buzz doesn't seem to allow for much granularity. I don't mind some things going on on Buzz, but other things...not so much.) She's put up a draft of her talk at http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html (I admire boyd's work - For one thing she gets Lady Gaga.)

How students use Wikipedia

How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course–related research
by Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg.
First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 - 1 March 2010
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2830/2476. My take-away from the report of this large survey of students on six campuses is that students depend LESS on Wikipedia than we have feared. Head and Eisenberg note "Wikipedia’s information utility is tied to four Cs it delivers — currency, coverage, comprehensibility, and convenience." They report that students may begin their research with Wikipedia, but don't end their research with Wikipedia. Whew! I can sleep easy tonight. ;) (I wonder if those of us in information literacy can take any credit for warning students about the potential for inaccurate information in Wikipedia - or if our warnings have just been a result of our fears that students are gullible.)
(Thanks to Bernie Sloan for sending along a reference this article on the JESSE discussion list.)

Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy

From Stephen Downes OLDaily: The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy from Pearson Education - "...Arizona State University’s Jay Blanchard and Terry Moore, the white paper examines the latest research on the ways in which young children make use of increasingly personalized and mobile media – including cell phones, television, video games, smart devices, and computers..." I want to come back and read this.

Two finds from Drew - Uninterrupted Text and the End of Publishing

Does anyone read any longer? Maybe not - or maybe... My friend Drew showed me these two things today when I stopped by the library: From The Onion of course "Nation shudders at large block of uninterrupted text - and this video "The End of Publishing"

Derek Baird reports on the Digital Media and Learning Conference

From http://www.ypulse.com/guest-post-four-insights-for-youth-marketers-from-dml-2010 useful for information literacy librarians:
A guest post by Derek Baird for Ypulse ( http://www.ypulse.com/ ) on the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Diego., February 18-20, 2010. Baird comments on a June 2010 Common Sense Media survey on Hi-Tech Cheating. Among the key findings: 19% of the students surveyed said that downloading a paper from the Internet to turn in was not a serious cheating offense. Other interesting data for information literacy champions packed into this nine page report as well. Keynoter Sonia Livingstone ( http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/soniaLivingstone.htm ) suggests that we overestimate the skills of digital natives. Margaret Weigel from Project Zero ( http://www.pz.harvard.edu/index.cfm ) notes that many teachers are using new technology in old ways. S. Craig Watkins reports that the digital divide is about social/cultural skills as much as access to the Internet. (See The Young and the Digital http://www.theyoungandthedigital.com/ )