Week 8, #19 What's a Reader to Do?

Friends who aren't techie (and have called themselves luddites) have raved about Library Thing for a while. It was one of the first Web 2.0 applications I learned about that my library colleagues praised. No wonder. It's great for promoting reading and more importantly discussions about reading. It allows people to catalog their own collections and it gives you yet another widget.

Student or adult book clubs could use this as home base. Adults might be even more enthusiastic as students can use myspace etc to share fav books.

No surprise that my list was also popular with other Library Thing users b/c Breaking Dawn was one of my titles. I was pleased to see the number of people reading a favorite author of mine-- Walter Mosley.

No surprise either that the reviews are of uneven quality, but few are truly bad. Some are outstanding--full of analysis, deep but readable. Great fodder for writing classes here.

The question soon becomes "which?" Shelfari? Goodreads? librarything? MySpace? What's a reader to do?

Week 8, # 18: David and Goliath

Zoho writer is impressive. It has most of Word's functionality; it's free; it makes documents online accessible; it allows for group access; and it gives you the code for posting into blogs like this. The only things I ponder are these: security, privacy in relation to the Patriot Act, the use of the emails to which we send the documents. I'm pretty sure these have all been considered.

The question becomes: Will people move away from the established industry standard Microsoft Word for an upstart program?

Here's the silly sample I did. You can look at it by accessing it via a link: http://writer.zoho.com/public/msm114/csla-%2318

Or you can view it on a webpage because I inserted the HTML code provided by Zoho:

Week 7, #17

The amazing talents of librarians are evident everywhere and the wiki entries were no exception. In the sandbox are of the CSLA 2.0 wiki, I found enough workable ideas for my school's curricula to fill an entire school year. Some were ideas I have considered and others were ones I should have thought about! My entry was past item 50. I was impressed that people were able to devise so many different ideas. My favorites included the history of the town and the battle of the books (even though we don't do that I could see its use in book reviews elsewhere).

My students created a wiki in world cultures class during a unit on Japan. The students love wikipedia so we decided to make our own for one country. This was a project using two classes that met at different times and never worked F2F. Each pair received a topic from the unit. First they had to create a list of 10 essential facts with sources. Then they submitted a draft essay. Next they posted the essay. They then received a second topic, one which had previously been assigned to someone else. They did a fact sheet for their second topic. After that, they edited the essay on their second topic, an essay that had already been posted to the wiki. Students then added multi-media to the wiki. At the end, the students submitted a reflection on the wiki process, including their feelings on peer editing/being edited. All of this was spread over the course of the Japan unit. I would definitely make changes in the process, especially to resolve some tech issues we had that caused essays to disappear! You can't do this with large numbers of classes at a time because you have to correct a fair number of essays in a quick turnaround. This is the idea that I will post in the Curriculum Connections area.