The Community College Librarian

For IT intensiveness (use), education is below Coal Mining. Mind, I’m not saying coal mining isn’t technical but there are a heck of a lot more students than there are coal miners! This video highlights some heavy-hitting free thinkers discussing the need for better IT in schools, less IT control in schools, MORE bandwidth for all, and my favorite part: the need to let students embrace and learn 21st C literacies. I love the idea of students who are on my space and facebook, those who are twittering, blogging and just generally using social networking tools being in the “nearly now” or almost-synchoronous spaces where great learning can occur and where knowledge is created. What does this mean for Community Colleges? In my humble, we should align ourselves with what is happening in K-12 rather than consistently trying to be little inexpensive universities. We should provide for our students what they did not get in high school, using college-level curricula. Let’s face it, universities are taking too long to catch up and community colleges are forever trying to follow in their wake, to the detriment of our students. Some of our students go on to the 4-year’s and beyond. So what? Why can’t we give these transfer students the tools to learn how to learn in the 21st century so they are better prepared to kick ass when they get to university? And for the majority of our students, those who are learning for work, the new model of teaching and learning in the social space will prepare them for success in a 21st C. career. And that career just might be in coal mining!

So, I’m still on the YouTube revelation from yesterday. Instead of being fully engaged at one of the presentations I attended today I was pondering YouTube (and TeacherTube and Blip.tv).  Many colleges block or slow down YouTube and other popular sites at peak teaching times to free up bandwidth for the classrooms and library research. Only problem is that people are using it in their teaching. So, tonight I was trying to find a recording of my all-time favorite piece of music to share with a friend. Low and behold, dearest google offered me not only that concerto, but a recording of it being performed by one of the most astounding violinists of all time. Christian Ferras! (he was an artist, not one of these modern violinists that treat their performances as though they are Rock Stars.) Being able to see this incredible artist perform my favorite concerto was the best thing that’s happened to me all week. YouTube officially rocks and we all need to battle for more bandwidth.

Irving spoke yesterday at his keynote about how miserably behind the U.S. is in providing broadband to its citizens and that the Digital Divide is still here. If a college in an affluent area in Illinois has to slow down YouTube to maintain bandwidth, then how horrible is the situation at schools with fewer resources?

Here’s Ferras and Sibelius’s Concerto in D Minor, Op 47. (watch all three movements and be joyful!)

I am at a conference. The keynote speaker was Larry Irving, the man who coined the phrase “The Digital Divide.” Much of what he had to say needs to percolate in my mind but, since I’m at a conference and most people feel compelled to blog when they are at a conference…here’s my Conference Tidbit of the Day:

Larry Irving quoted at stat about youtube usage that was so astounding that I had to look it up to believe it. Irving said that over 150,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Daily. I am astounded by this. As a librarian, it made me think about the evolution of information and a whole bunch of other stuff that I’m too tired to deal with right now. So, here’s a youtube video. It is not information…or is it?

The Community Colleges in SL group finally has a wiki. See the pretty tab above or go to: http://ccsl.wetpaint.com I hope we’ll make it a useful tool for all CC’s interested in getting into virtual worlds. What I’d really like to post about today is my search for the free wiki. I looked at pbwiki, wetpaint and wikispaces. PBWiki is by far the nicest in terms of user-interface and editing features but it is not customizable unless you pay for it AND you can’t have your wiki just be open for anyone to work on it. Collaborators have to be invited. What a pain for a large group. Wikispaces is a nice vanilla option but its sort of ugly which I know is a really helpful assessment. I chose wetpaint because I could add a logo, a theme and the editing is really easy, and anyone can edit unless I lock it up.

Here’s a video I did with the excellent multimedia services television super heros at my college. It was made for the Soaring to Excellence teleconference tomorrow. The teleconference, Trends, Fads or Folly: Spotting the Trends that Really Matter looks at virtual worlds, folksonomies and new ways of reading. Lori Bell and Tom Peters are presenting. I did the visuals for this one. So fun. Note to machinima people out there: sit with a professional for an hour and watch them edit your work. You will soon learn not to be too precious about what you have filmed.

Players of Glass Bead connect concepts within a subject or field of interest. You can play in all sorts of subjects like Literature, Art, Food, Tech, People, or go crazy random all while interacting with other players with the same interests. Players have to justify their choices in chat windows with on-the-fly research on their bead choice. So much for online chess!

Play2Train , originally uploaded by notmarian.

 It seems that state and local agencies are trying out virtual worlds like Second Life to prepare for emergencies. There’s Play2Train’s build for the state of Idaho and the State of California Health Department is using it to simulate emergency triage in hospitals. And, low and behold, even the Army is saying that virtual worlds are a great way to train civilians for a variety of scenarios. Here’s an article: http://www.govtech.com/gt/261426?id=&topic=117693&story_pg=1

I made this little video for a presentation I did today. Avatars, you know who you are!