What digital natives want from their library

Out of the mouth of a baby! This is a lovely video to open a conference.

This video of 3 year old Abbey was used launch the 15th Biennial VALA Conference and Exhibition in Melbourne Australia. http://www.vala.org.au #VALA2010

From VALATV: “This is actually Abbey’s voice, she sat in front of the camera and said these things. While Abbey was following a script, she really does like libraries (and books and story time). Actually, she willingly gave up an afternoon playing with friends on the beach to go to the library and make this short film.”

Cirque Du Freak : The Official Trailer

There is now a movie based around one of our library’s popular series, The saga of Darren Shan. It  is a well read series, with the borrowing being reasonably constant over a number of years. Many of our boys enjoy this series and the Demonata series. The first book, Cirque du Freak, is the compelling saga of a reasonably normal teenager’s journey into a much dark world than he has been living, the world of vampires. Darren and his friends go and see the banned Cirque du Freak. The Freak Show scene is really quite creepy. It is not just the blood, but also the way that the ringmaster manipulated the audience. After show has to make a choice/deal offered by Mr. Crepsley (Vampire) that will end in him saving his friend ‘s life but Darren himself becoming a vampire. He enters a world filled with grotesque creatures, murderous vampires, and there is an unexpected ending.  The first 3 Darren Shan books Cirque du Freak, The Vampire’s assistant and Tunnels of blood are part of the Vampire Blood Trilogy. There are 12 books about Darren Shan in total. The horror genre has continued to bubble along with its devotees being a very loyal band so I think there is a ready-made audience for the new film.   I will be interested to have a look at how the film makers have handled the stories. I liked some of the quirkiness in the later part of the trailer.

For you interested students, you can visit Darren Shan’s Official Website here and there is also the Darren Shan YouTube site that is worth a look at as well. Harper Collins also have the Darren Shan BEBO site  as well to tell you all about the author, his books, his book talks, any competitions, etc.

UC09 – Will Richardson Breakout Session

eWill Richardson gives another great presentation about using social media in (for) education. The example of some student work (via YouTube) he puts up for discussion is good way to start. The whole presentation is worth a look and/or a listen. It certainly has a lot of information about how young people can learn today and how we can assist them. If you were at the SLAV conference earlier this year you might remember some of the sites and ideas but he has expanded on that presentation. 

Navify – Searching Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube

My colleague Tania found this tool via the Free technology for teachers blog. I had seen Nibipedia, but Navify was a new tool for me to look at. It is a mash-up of Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube.

We all know that many of our students use Wikipedia,which may be developing into the world’s most extensive encyclopedias, as people continue to build on the information it contains. It does sometimes lack visual content, ie. pictures and more often videos, to assist with the written explanations. This can, at times, place a limit on its informative value. 

Navify seeks to redress this problem. Like Nibipedia, it attempts to match videos and images to Wikipedia articles.

Navify

To use Navify:

Go to the Navify site and do a standard Wikipedia search (no log in required) by simply entering your search term, just as you would in any search. The results will be returned in a tabbed form displaying:

• Wikipedia article
• related images and
• related videos.

The images tab offers photos added by Wikipedia (or Navify users) and those automatically discovered on Flickr. It is very new at the moment but, as more users come on board, I can see this becoming a great source for relevant and useful images.

Video tab

The videos tab works exactly the same way except that it finds related videos from YouTube.

Commenting on articles is also allowed. Navify is also supporting these comments using Disqus, so you will be able to read what people are saying about the Navify article pages.

The service is also planning on offering a music player so that users can listen to full related songs and audio content. So far I have found with my searching that Navify enhances the Wikipediaoption. It is still developing but has potential to become much greater. There seems to be no end to what tools people are thinking up to try and create better searching options. They won’t all survive and it will be the users who decide, in many cases.  It is a very interesting time for those of us interested in information searching.

Keeping your profiles in Sync. – AtomKeep

 

 

 

 

I, like a lot of people, am now joining/using quite a number of social sites.

Today I read about AtomKeep,which is a tool that attempts to rectify the problem of keeping all your profiles up-to-date. It supports a large number of sites (Twitter, Technorati, Facebook, Digg, Ning, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube and more) and they are adding more sites all the time. Partial support of MySpace started towards the end of last year. 

I really like idea that I can enter an update for my profile into AtomKeep and, when I use the “sync”, the data in my other profiles is updated at the same time. As a professional tool this is a good way to keep everything updated and accurate.

There is another thing that is possible. I find filling out profiles for new sites fairly boring and irritating. You know what sort of information you have to fill out: Name & Address, Contact, Education, User Image, Work, Professional Summary, etc.  Atomkeep offers a useful alternative to this because it can fill them out for you. Bonus I say!

Reading about the tool, it warns that, if you do choose the “sync” option, all sites will be changed, therefore if, for example, you have a different photo on different sites, they will all change to the new one, but I don’t think this is a major problem and of course it can be changed back again by you. So I’m going to give AtomKeep a try and  see how it works.