Ohio Gov’s “Seniors to sophomores” plan

I don’t know much about the governor of Ohio, but I love the man and wish he had been a governor in MY state in time to create his “seniors to sophomores” plan that would have gotten me into college one year earlier. The idea is just an extension of dual-credit classes: allowing students to take classes that meet both high school and college requirements. Where I’m at, students take these classes at their high school and the credits are applied both toward their high school graduation as well as their college degree.

 Governor Strickland’s plan takes it one step further: skip the whole senior year of high school (if you meet their qualifications, which were not specified in the article I read about this) and instead head right on into your freshman year, getting credit for both your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college at the same time. Considering how much I hated high school, I would have been chomping at the bit to get outta town and head on to college. Not only would kids be saved the misery of completing one more year of high school, but it would save the state a little cash by getting kids out of school earlier. Sweet!

Of course, it’s bound to be much more complicated than that, but the idea sounds quite promising.

Web 2.0 vulnerabilities report

It had to happen one day. There are always the baddies who have to take something that’s good and ruin it for the rest of us. Apparently, the computer baddies are exploiting vulnerabilities in Web 2.0 technologies to do naughty things. According to an article in Campus Technology (“Web 2.0 Threats Loom Large for IT”), “The very technologies that make Web 2.0 a reality (AJAX, in large part) seem to be considerably vulnerable to security breaches that can lead to data loss and theft and other malicious activities. And the growth of converged devices taking advantage of these technologies adds further to the problems.”

And then there’s this quote from the same article:  “Exploits against converged devices, such as smart phones and iPhones, were named the No. 4 threat.”

Dang. How am I gonna make a case for getting an iPhone for my birthday if it’s highly vulnerable to cyber-security attacks?

Dual-boot Mac coming to a computer lab near you

I don’t see this happening anytime soon at MY campus, but apparently some colleges are switching to a Macs-only environment, utilizing the dual-boot feature available in Leopard (for you PC people, Leopard is like Windows Vista – it’s the latest and greatest operating system from Apple).

Read more from this article to learn all about the campuses making the switch and Mac v. PC populations and all the other usual stuff you’d expect from a Mac v. PC article. Well, except for a picture of the Mac guy and the PC guy duking it out on a college campus. I guess InsideHigherEd.com just can’t afford the graphic artists (or the Macs!) for such picture wizardry.

Toodle-oo!

Librarian wins couch potato contest

I don’t know what this says for librarians of the world, but a NYC research librarian just won a couch potato contest for sitting around and watching sports TV the longest.

I wonder if we’ll see a Stan the librarian action figure (a la Nancy Pearl) coming out anytime soon? Instead of “shushing action” he could come with a recliner that reclines!

The end of “23 Things” – iHCPL Week 10 #23

When I publish this post, I will have completed HCPL’s 23 Things program, a learning experience about Library 2.0.

On a whole, I’ve enjoyed this experience. It’s always nice to get to play around with cool stuff on the Internet while on company time. And it’s forced me to check out some things I probably wouldn’t have bothered looking into (like the Flickr tools and avatars and such).

I think that for me, the thing I really got out of this program is more knowledge of myself. I’ve learned that I’m quite the skeptic when it comes to new technology (and to think I consider myself a technophile!).  I think new technologies are cool, but when it comes to the practicality of them and their application in my work and personal life, I’m quite unenthusiastic. I suppose I have a problem with adopting technology just for technology’s sake.

Some of the things I like (Flickr, for one) I doubt I would actually use. Most of my pictures are of my children and since I know about all the creepy creepertons trolling the Internet for cute kids to prey upon, I’m less than enthusiastic about openly posting my children’s photos online. Instead, I’ll stick with a service like Shutterfly, which allows me to share my photo albums with people I invite, rather than sharing them with the whole world.

I also like Wikis for certain purposes: a quick and dirty way of getting some basic information about any topic in the world. You wanna know about Vincent Van Gogh? Got it covered. Your geeky friend making reference to Replicators that don’t make any sense to you? You can find out all about ‘em. But don’t even bother coming to me at the reference desk needing help on citing an article from Wikipedia in your research paper. All I’m going to do is give you a stern talking-to about doing proper research and using valid research sources and such. I might even put my hair into a bun and glare at you over my glasses as I adjust my pearls and roll up the sleeves of my sweater set in my fiercest librarian posture.

Anyhoo, all in all this has been a great experience that I am thankful for having. I’m hoping to continue the journey by keeping up with some of the blogs I’ve found and continuing to explore new technologies. Hopefully I’ll find a few I like and find good uses for them too!

Stay tuned – I’ll keep posting on my continuing journey for all who care to keep up with me!

Toodle-oo!

Downloadable Media – iHCPL Week 9 #22

Now that someone did me the favor of breaking into my car and stealing my purse, including my new iPod Classic, I can once again take advantage of HCPL’s downloadable media service using my old standby MP3 device: a Creative Zen MicroPhoto. (like other media services that don’t go by the name “iTunes,” the HCPL downloadable media service isn’t compatible with iPods)

I’ve taught a session on the service at my library, so I’m quite familiar with the service already. However, even if I weren’t, the ease of using the service would make me a quick adopter of this service.

If I were the type of person who could listen to a book (see my previous post on this issue).

If I were this type of person, I would readily hook up my old Zen MicroPhoto and start downloading some Janet Evanovich or James Patterson or Nicholas Sparks or Meg Cabot.

But I’m not, so instead I’ll go back to worrying about how Comcast has messed things up by switching me from my current cable company to them while they’ve been digging around in my backyard, performing “cable upgrades,” which has in turn required us to temporarily reset our Tivo so that it will record things on the proper channels. But even though the channel lineup is correct our season passes to shows have not updated to the correct channels and things aren’t recording correctly. I’m beginning to understand why a 75-year-old woman would want to mete out some revenge by taking a hammer to her local Comcast office.

But back to the original topic: downloadable media is cool! You should try it some day!

Podcasting – iHCPL Week 9 #21

I’ll be honest here. Podcasting just isn’t my cup of tea. And I’m not quite sure why.

In the past, I tried out just about every library-related podcast that I heard about in various listservs and blogs, only to stop listening just a few minutes into the recording. I know of fellow librarians who have created podcasts and the technophile in me wants to be like them, but how can I create something that just doesn’t grab me? Is there a way I could improve and make it better?

I’ve pondered this issue quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that I’m just not much of an auditory learner. Here’s something I’m a bit embarrassed to admit: I don’t even listen to NPR because it bores me. Shh! Don’t tell anyone else! And if you happen to listen, I hope I’m not offending you when I say it bores the socks off of me (but it does not bore the pants off me, because this is a PG-rated blog and we’ll have no pants coming off here!). I *can* manage to listen to the morning talk show on the local pop station, but that’s because I only have to listen to it for about 10-15 minutes and because they’re talking about light, mindless things that don’t require much concentration. And because I’m driving and I’ve got nothing else to listen to or think about, I can pay enough attention to the radio show to actually retain some of what was discussed. Once I get in my office, however, is another thing. I turn on the radio, start checking my email, and next thing I know I’ve totally shut out all things auditory and missed the celebrity gossip segment and (*sniff!*) don’t know what horrendously poor parenting or PR decision Britney Spears has made lately.

At this point, I’m going to try a bit of self-diagnosis: I might be a bit of a visual person and this auditory-only stuff just doesn’t work for me. So for us visual people, I’d like to suggest a revolutionary new technology: the vodcast (video podcast). It’s catchy. It’s hip. It’s portable. And it’s visual.

Oh wait – that’s already been done.

iHCPL Week 9 #20 – youtube and such

I could be a YouTube junkie if I didn’t have a job to do. Or a life. There’s just way too much stuff to check out. Of course, half the time you wonder, “I just wasted 5 minutes watching THAT?” That’s the power of YouTube. Anyone can post a video…and sometimes even if it’s highly rated you’ll find that the tastes of everyone else who viewed the video don’t necessarily follow your own tastes.

But even still, I could spend hours on YouTube…here’s a video that I found entertaining and you’ll find it entertaining if you’re a mom or if you happen to have had a mom. Which I think should be just about everyone.

Zoho Writer Review (iHCPL Week 8 #19)

So today I’m trying out Zoho Writer to see how it works. I’ve used Google docs in the past and while I found it useful for collaboration, when it came to crunch time and I needed to get my document edited quickly and reading for print, I went back into Microsoft Word to create the final product.

Just from the looks of it, Zoho Writer seems to be much more robust than Google docs (formerly called “Writely”). Some of the features in Zoho Writer that you won’t find in Google docs include:

• Page Setup
• Web publishing
• Library of Templates
• Tables and Images
• Special Characters, subscripts and superscripts
• Comments
• And more!

Even with all the functionality, I have to wonder why I would really want to use a web-based app when I have a perfectly good software app on my computer. Zoho answers this (for me, at least) in their FAQ. The 2 main qualities I like are:

1. The ability to use Zoho to post to my blog (I’ve discovered that Blogger just doesn’t have much along the lines of text editing options – WordPress is slightly better in that regard, but Zoho has even BETTER text editing).
2. Viewing my documents’ revision history – nice to be able to see how I’ve improved the document over time. And if I discover that some of the changes I made aren’t the best, I can go back to a previous version.

Now, on to try to actually post from Zoho Writer and see if this functionality proves its worth!

Toodle-oo!

Note: I did successfully publish my document to my blog. I chose to publish it as a draft so that I could go back and make any changes to it before I actually posted it. Zoho allowed me to choose tags for my post (from the ones that I had already used – I couldn’t create a new one). The title of the post was taken directly from the filename of the document, so if you didn’t take that into account when saving your document, you’d need to change the title when you checked the post in your blog (I had to do this). The confirmation from Zoho to show that my document had been added to my blog was not very visible, so I had one of those moments of “did it work? I can’t tell? What’s going on?” before I saw the teeny note at the top of the page stating it had posted. Well, I guess I can’t be too picky when I’m getting something for free!

On Social Networking (iHCPL Week 8: #18)

Recently, my old college roommate nearly begged me to join MySpace: “it’s the ONLY way I keep up with my friends,” she said. Begrudgingly, I joined, even though it took me an eternity to “add” her to my network – she had so many plugins and such on her MySpace page that my computer couldn’t load the page. So I waited and waited until she changed her page and I could finally access it to add her. Even though her page is a little tidier, it still gives me a headache looking at all the slideshows that she has on it.

Facebook, on the other hand, is much less messy. And that’s why I like it better. I don’t fear having seizures from looking at all the flashing gizmos that people have on their pages (like they do on MySpace).

My thing with social networking is that I really don’t care that much to know all my friends’ friends. I have my own friends – why do I need to get more friends from my friends? And I don’t have much time to keep up with my own friends, so making friends with their friends isn’t a very good idea. How am I supposed to keep up with them all?

And although I know that email isn’t really personal (messages can be intercepted and read quite easily) – it’s much more private and personal than leaving messages on someone’s page for all people to see.

On the professional side, there are many public and academic librarians (mostly academic librarians) who are creating their own MySpace and Facebook pages in order to communicate with students in the way that students actually communicate. Some librarians worry that this is a way for us to stick our noses where we’re not really wanted, but those who have actually leaped in have had some success with it. This page has links to some of the articles written about libraries involved in MySpace.

Where do I stand on this issue? I’m still on the fence. I’d like to try it out, but then I fear the potential embarrassment of my library getting some unsavory friends. For crying out loud – wear clothes when you take pictures of yourself to post to online services!

Toodle-oo!