Community College Librarian

My good colleague at http://genneaux.wordpress.com (and next door to my office in the Library) has just posted this adorable and useful video on social networking.  It totally cleared up social networking for me. I love this video so I’m posting it myself though it would just as easy for my 6 readers to go to Jenn’s blog and see it there. In addition, I had an hour of my sunny Saturday morning sucked away into the other videos available from CommonCraft.  Plus, they’ve made their videos download-able which is just so great. I see all these great vids on youtube and teachertube but I can’t easily use them in SL or other venues. [see my other rants, er, posts about youtube]. So, thanks CommonCraft and thanks to you, Jenn.

ALA Junk Mail, originally uploaded by notmarian.

I made the grievous error of joining ALA with my home address. Well, I used to have a membership with my work address but the ALA website and database is so stellar that I couldn’t use my work address and could not simply renew (long story). Almost at the very moment I gave ALA my home address, the junk mail from publishers started to arrive. Here is the pile from the last 4 weeks or so. Advertising and catalogs from publishers and, my favorite, boxes of books from vanity presses. Really awful books they have to give away. This is my final straw with ALA. I will not be renewing my membership unless threatened by pain of torture. Well, maybe I will renew if ALA improves. At this point, I feel quite sure that I will never have to make good on that bargain. I’m ashamed of ALA for selling our addresses to vendors. Not to mention the crap state of the ALA website. As a librarian, I’m more ashamed of that than this tree-killing pile of junk.

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!)

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.

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!

I belong to an enormous listserv of educators in Second Life and have been following the discussions there regarding the NMC’s venture with Sun Microsystems. Some people are a little concerned this new platform may take the place of Second Life since many edu’s have made enormous investments in SL. The NMC is huge in Second Life and seems to have made the greatest investment of all and is at the center of much edu activity in SL in terms of support, events, community maintenance, etc. So its understandable that people are a little concerned. Here’s the NMC’s video on the project.

From my point of view, I am excited about this and any other viable application that can be used with students. I do not see any of these other applications taking the place of  Second Life because the others simply cannot provide the community found within an open grid. That said, I do like the idea of being able to make standalone 3-D simulations on a secure platform. The ability to create technical training/simulations that are not meant to be synchronous or community-driven will, to my mind, become more and more important to CC education. As well as the ability to share these simulations and collaborate on their creation! Of course, these things can be done in SL. But let’s face it, SL can be a tough sell because of the very thing that makes it so powerful. The huge community, the openness of the application and its commercial nature can be just as limiting as it is liberating.

If commercial vendors can get into the business of creating proprietary training simulations why shouldn’t we take advantage of these synchronous VR platforms and make our own? Here’s an example of a company that does these game-train modules. http://www.etceteraedutainment.com/virtualtraining.php

Though this company designs for students who cannot pay attention for more than an hour (!), they do have a point about traditional training being ineffective.