Atlantic Book Club - on website, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblrrr 1book140

"The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood will be the first selection for 1book140, a book club established by The Atlantic that will incorporate the magazine’s website, as well as Twitter (hashtag #1book140), Facebook, and Tumblr, Mashable reported." Jeff Howe describes the book club here. Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood wins. I ordered the cheapest paperback I could find on Amazon. It may not come until the rest start their comments on chapter 1 on June 1, but I shouldn't get too far behind. I know I will be sorry that I didn't buy the Kindle edition.

Digital Public Library of America

I joined the Digital Public Library of America discussion list for their beta sprint. (Press release) The goal: "To define the vision for a digital library in service of the American public." The more talk, the less clear the picture for me. Is this going to be a Library of Congress for all? Or... If you pay, you play? If the library in your area, doesn't contribute funds, are you cut off from using material? No national library card? Gosia Stergios (and others) have looked a some other national models. (She also contributed a neat vision of how a digital library could be used: A Note on the Letters of Vincent van Gogh.) Should a digital public library of America separate the "public" from "scholars"? Sorry to report it sounds like "scholars" do not have much respect for "the public." The definition of "public" in the minds of some seems to be "patrons of public libraries who like to read current best sellers." I get the feeling from some posts that "public library" are them and "academic libraries" r us. Others are sticking up for the idea of a public that includes learners of all age. It's even possible that some scholars may read contemporary bestsellers. So should there be two DPLAs or one for all? If there's a public library DPLA and a scholarly DPLA are there more funding opportunities? Can work go forward on all fronts? On-going conversation.

On another note: A colleague and I attended (via Elluminate - now Blackboard Collaborate) Oakland University's e-Cornucopia. A stand-out presentation for me: Emily Puckett Rodgers on open.michigan. Her slides are available The Elluminate session should be up at some point. They've got the vision and the people power to make open access at University of Michigan work. (Other presentations listed here.)

What I've been doing

I finished getting my course DETT 611 ready for UMUC's "pre-week" which starts Tuesday. I'm celebrating by looking for some interesting K-12 virtual world activities for a presentation I'm doing for an ed tech grad class in a couple of weeks. I found an old Second Life Teen Grid project - Knowclue's Greek Gods. Sixth graders developed commercials for the Greek gods: One god must be kicked off the island. the students were charged with creating persuasive commercials to make the case for a particular god or goddess. Eighth graders were charged with providing the sets and managing the projects to create the machinima for the commercials as ordered by the sixth graders. The 2011 project: Audition videos for the Egyptian Gods Hall of Fame. The 2011 work has been done on astragrid powered by Aurora-Sim. I'm betting the ed tech grad students are going to be wowed by these projects.

Seth Godin The Future of the Library

Seth Godin writes about The Future of the Library - the future of the public library - as a place that no longer warehouses books. Librarians should take on the role of teacher, data hound, guide, sherpa, passionate raconteur of information. The roles for public librarians that Godin suggests are excellent, but he seems to be saying that libraries no longer need books - or even licenses for electronic resources - since Kindles and Netflix are cheap. Is he really saying that even the poorest among us can afford Kindles and ebooks and Netflix subscriptions? Is he saying that everything's available for free on the Web so there's no need to license resources on behalf of users? Bobbi Newman's one of the librarians quick on the draw: She's already posted a response at Librarian By Day. She points out that even if you don't consider books for public libraries, the cost of proprietary databases, etc. is going up. Can we do without those resources? My experiences trying to find open educational resources for University of the People courses tells me no, not yet. Can we do without providing access to both print and electronic books? My experiences looking around for recent books I hear mentioned in the press and on TV tells me no not yet. Some books coming out this year are still not available in electronic format(!). And prices... If I personally had to purchase everything I'd like to read, well... I couldn't afford it. Does everyone but me really have an unlimited budget for books? As for the rest of it... librarians as teachers? I like it!

May 23: Catching up on my reading... I wanted to be sure to get a link to Kent Anderson's May 23 post "As Book Warehouses Vanish, Is It Time for Librarians to Stop Running Libraries?" I'm not quite sure if he's calling for an end to the profession or not...

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? by Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review, May 13, 2011 pointed out by Stephen Downes. Haque says we should be "doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing" - something other than acquiring.
See also America Is Bankrupt (But Not the Way You Think) April 20, 2011 http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/04/cutting_the_budget.html and... "Someone who decides to become a pastor, a nurse, a social entrepreneur, or a teacher isn't doing it to WIN — but to matter." March 8, 2011. Any way to spread this around?

MobiMOOC

Kristin Gorski put up her presentation on MOOCs, Open Education and Implications for Online Schooling for Middle School/High School Students on Slideshare. MobiMOOC is winding up the six week run soon. Some people are already working on some projects, papers, presentations together. There's a group on Facebook and a Linkedin group... It'll be interesting to see what happens with the most memorably active participants.

Geraldine Brooks remembers using her public library

Geraldine Brooks is on the Diane Rehm show as I write this and a caller asked about books she read that influenced her. Brooks says that her family didn't have a lot of money so she relied on the public library where she grew up in Sydney Australia. Her parents were readers and read to her as she was growing up. The book she's discussing is Caleb's Crossing - a story based on the true history of a man who was the first Native American - a Wompanoag from Martha's Vineyard - to graduate from Harvard College - in 1665. Nice to hear in the midst of a lot of anti-intellectualism and pooh-poohing of public libraries.

Note: There are 112 holds on the three copies of Caleb's Crossing at the Tampa Hillsborough Public Library.