Of all the blogs I’ve been reading over the past week there are two topics which keep popping up everywhere: The Kindle Book Reader and Twitter. While I’ve never used either of these two very different these I have read about them and I’ve heard numerous people talking, and complaining, about Twitter. The Kindle is popular among people in their late 40s and while I can see how it is revolutionizing reading but I still prefer an actual book in my hand to reading one on any type of screen. E-Books are the wave of the future, but working in a library and using IUCAT every day I can safely say that our population at IUPUC also prefers to hold the physical book in their hands as well. Everything has its place. Twitter sounds a little overwhelming, my classmates have had to use it for another class and apparently hate it. It too, sounds like a great tool and librarians are raving over it. There’s got to be something to it and I’m sure in a few short months none of us will be able to live without Twitter. We will think to ourselves, “How did I get along before Twitter?” Just like we all do now in trying to remember a time before Google.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Media Specialist Advocates Education Reform
I found a posting of an article from School Library Journal for a conference that took place in January of this year that included School Media Specialists, librarians, business people, teachers, etc., from all over the world. The conference was EduCon 2.1 and was held in Pennsylvania and was referred to as, “both a conversation and a conference.” After reading about the conference I decided it is something I should definitely look into in the future. It is being held in the same place next year (hopefully it stays that way, PA is not that far away from Indiana!). There was a link in the article for the blog of the author and I found her blog to be quite encouraging. In her latest post she discussed a book Dr. Seuss was in the middle of when he died and how it had been finished by others and published about 10 years ago. The book was a parable about the politics of schools and making it clear that reform needs to take place, more creativity should be encouraged, how standardized testing doesn’t work, etc. I feel very strongly about these things and am glad to see someone in the public eye, at least the public consisting of media specialists who have known this for years, is making some noise about this.
My first post
This is my first blog post; it’s been awhile since I’ve done anything like this. I am doing this for an assignment for my online SLIS class. I’m a little confused on exactly where I’m supposed to be looking for my source of inspiration for my posts but I think I figured part of it out. We were given a few links to lists of blogs and I found several that were interesting to me but many of them were not current. I want to be a school media specialist, which is a librarian in an elementary, jr. high, or high school. I was trying to find blog groups for media specialists so I could not only do some networking but also learn the truth of what it’s like being a media specialist in a school, the trials that they face, and how to overcome them. The ones that were old still gave me some insight; I just wish that I could contact the people to ask questions. On Bloglines, I’ve not quite figured out how to search by topic, or search at all for that matter. It seems like everything is pre-set and cannot be filtered. It’s been a frustrating process so far but I hope to figure it out soon so I can learn how all of this works.
