Blog Garden

Since I am a corporate trainer in a higher education setting, I’ve designed my delicious.com site with education and technology in mind.  Please visit and let me know what you think!

For my library management course this semester, I had to create a “power” powerpoint slide show in three slides or less.  The idea was to present in three minutes or less with power, punch and to the point!

Here’s a glimpse of how we may be obtaining information in the near future.

On Saturday, April 4th, I attended the Library 2.0 Symposium at Yale University.  It was presented by the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School.  Four panels of many distinguished representatives from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia ,Yale and the NY Public Library spoke about issues such as the challenges of copyright and fair use, digitizing library collections, the ethical and political implications of Library 2.0 and the future of the Library.  My favorite panelist was a fairly new employee of the New York Public Library, Josh Greenberg , who illustrated the account of a librarian (Jessica) at NYPL who began her own blog about knitting, art, and through the NYPL site.  This was informal and unofficially not a part of her job description.   She came to develop an audience, which engaged in discussion.  A user (Grace) connected who runs a website about design, which has 100,000 readers per month.   Grace proposed a collaboration with Jessica and together they produced a four-part web video series.  A question that come out of this is intellectual property.  These collaborative results become public domain materials.  An additional outcome of this project was a special gathering of the users of this blog at the Library, most of which had never even been inside the NY Public Library!  Here’s an example of a connection made outside of the physical Library and ending up inside the Library – fascinating stuff!  “Library work is happening “out there”, stated Josh.  He is trying to change the face of the Library, especially as it is traditionally seen by the institutional insiders.  The Library leaves its building through third-party platforms like YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, etc.  and the role of librarians is changing, he said.  Visit the ISP blog for more info.

Josh Greenberg, 2nd from left

Today I attended a conference at Baruch College in Manhattan.  It was sponsored by the College library.  I attended one each of all three sessions offered, and they were all interesting.  The College had begun a pilot project on blogs, and have their own server for this purpose.  Three faculty members presented on how they utilized this feature in their classes:  a journalism class, an art class and a literature class.  Each class interacting with the blog enhanced pedagogy for the course, and each instructor had an interesting presentationon on their different approach, and learning outcomes.

The second session explained and demonstrated the use of Macromedia’s Captivate – a screen capture software program for making online videos and tutorials.  An instructor demonstrated how he is using it in a computing class by making snipets of each process the students must master.  Students have access to the server 24/7 and can tap into whatever process they need to review.  The instructor has experienced tremendous positive response to student learning in this mode, and student’s course grades have increased.

The third session presenteda “gaming approach” to student’s research.  After obtaining a grant, one of the research librarians teamed with a gaming educational software company to create specific scenarios for upper level business students to use for researching a final project in their curriculum.  Results of focus group work with faculty unveiled that students had no practical experience with research and therefore, yielded inferior results on their final research projects.  The gaming approach was developed to enhance pedagogy in the research process.  This project is still under construction, and is not being fully utilized at this time.  It is moving teaching with technology in a new direction.

Overall, this conference was very stimulating.  From a competitive intelligence point of view, it’s always enlightening to see what other institutions are doing with teaching and technology.  This conference rose to the occasion.

Welcome to WordPress.co.

Well, this is my very first blogsite, and this is my very first entry.  There are so many things I can talk about. 

I’ll begin with the fact that I have recently become a library and information science graduate student on a full scholarship in a cohort of 20 students at St. John’s University in New York.  It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever received, especially since this is a degree that I’ve always wanted to pursue, and I’m hoping to be able to keep up with a rigorous coursework schedule while working full-time at a community college.  I am an information zealot – can’t live without it!  I love searching and crawling the web, and now I am just beginning to learn a plethora of new ways of obtaining information and use web 2.0 apps (like this one!).  So, I’m with a group of students who also love information – so we share many things that we think are of common interest to all.   In this information-rich environment, it is easy to fall prey to information overload and difficult for me to sometimes sort out, since my eyes are always bigger than my stomach, as the old saying goes.