Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

It’s Cesar Chavez Day here, which means the library’s closed and I’m at home reading articles and wandering around the apartment. I just read Paul Stacey’s article “Open educational resources in a global context,” which gives a good overview of the major open online educational projects (MIT’s Open Courseware, Rice’s Connexions, etc.) and transcribes parts of a large-scale UNESCO conversation about the benefits and drawbacks of trying to share online educational tools around the world.

Then I spent a few minutes flipping through this month’s Wired magazine. It occurred to me that I have stacks of old Wireds that I don’t want to hang onto, and wouldn’t it be great if I could donate them to, say, a school media center in the East Bay? But I don’t have any of that handy information–which school to contact, who to get in touch with at a school.

Then it occurred to me that this would be a great new subscription model for magazines to offer, along the lines of a gift subscription. You could choose to subscribe to the magazine and pick from a designated list of locations to donate your read copies to. You might want to donate your current, read copies of Wired to a local school media center, or your copies of Runner’s World (hint hint) to a local running group for disadvantaged kids, or your copies of Lucky or Harper’s Bazaar or Ms. to a halfway house or women’s shelter, or your copies of Popular Mechanics or The Nation to a prison. Or whatever.

The subscription would arrive in a Netflix-style envelope, you’d read it, and when you were done with it you’d slip it back into the reusable, preaddressed sleeve, and away it would go to its next set of readers. Somewhere, a giant database would keep track of who needed a copy of this month’s Wired, and would make sure it arrived. It might not be 100% accurate–some months the school might get three copies, some months they might get none–but it would be reliable enough to keep everyone happy and keep magazines out of the landfills. And schoolkids would get to read Wired without a million extra copies being printed and subsequently pulped.

I don’t think Conde Nast is in any hurry to launch this program, so consider it a golden business opportunity, for the right person with the right organization skills, technology, and do-right attitude. The perfect gift for someone who has everything–a subscription to Mags4All, clearing out clutter, recycling, and benefiting social programs all at the same time. Voila!

And with that, I wish you all a happy weekend.

Holy cow, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that the number of information literacy classes in community colleges has increased by 38% between 2006 and 2007.  That’s enormous!

All hail the ANTS project, which is doing a terrific job of serving as a collating point and clearinghouse for library screencasting tutorials.  They recently added a new Best Practices in Screencasting page to their wiki.  I highly recommend checking it out, and contributing a tutorial to their collection!

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on.”

The New York Times has an interesting piece on a well-known phenomenon: old technologies are only rarely completely replaced by new ones. Most of the time, they persist in some form, and coexist with the new.

Of interest to anyone who worries about a world without print books.

Thanks to iLibrarian for pointing out the recent game-apalooza at NYPL. NYPL branch libraries lend over 2,500 video games for one-week intervals. Apart from all the quotes from kids saying, “Wow, I have to come to the library more often,” there’s this to consider:

“What we’re seeing is that in addition to simply helping bring kids into the library in the first place, games are having a broader effect on players, and they have the potential to be a great teaching tool,” Mr. Martin said. “If a kid takes a test and fails, that’s it. But in a game, if you fail you get to take what you’ve learned and try again.”

Indeed!

And a quick pointer for my own reference, in the “to read” category:  a group of instructional designers list their favorite ten books on instructional design.

Just a quick pointer to Cathy Moore’s e-learning blog, which is aimed toward e-learning for corporate (i.e. workplace) settings, but is often very interesting for those of us working in academe.  Here’s a recent post she did on instructional design for online tutorials, in which she recommends putting questions before answers, and explains why.  (And the presentation itself is one more reason to use Keynote–it converts easily to Flash!)

Thanks to Chris Barr, Interface and Design Specialist at Villanova’s Falvey Memorial Library, for sending out a link to their new digital library website.  They’re using a flip-through interface like the Apple iTouch and iPhone interface–the one that floats images through a rotating display for you to manipulate.  No touch screen, obviously (unless your computer is more advanced than mine), but wow, what great curb appeal!  (And if you put focus on the display, you can use the mouse to control it, at least in Firefox 2.x on Windows XP.)

For everyone wondering how to present a smooth, professional face for a library’s digital site, this is a very good-looking model to consider, IMHO.

There’s a great collection of WPA-era library posters on Flickr, here.  Thanks, Library of Congress!

I’ve joined the team over at Re: Generations, a blog for Canadian academic librarians.  My first post (a little longer and more thinky than my usual fare here) is about filtering and organizing information:  how do we do it, how do we teach it?