The Unquiet Librarian

I am normally not a numbers kind of girl, but I totally love the new tabular stats you can now view for your blog (or blogs!) in Wordpress.  You can read more at http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/tabular-stats/, but the highlights include stats in table form for:

• Months and Years
• Average per Day
•  Recent Weeks

In the past, we have been able to view blog stats, but these new tables give us all kinds of new data to contemplate and explore.  I especially love the comparative nature of the new tabular stats—for example, I now can easily see my blog stats for August 2008 compared to August 2007.  Be sure to check out this terrific new feature!

Although I do not live on the Georgia coast, I am keeping a cautious eye on Hurricane Hanna, a hurricane that may strike the Georgia coastline this Friday or Saturday.  While looking at the National Hurricane Center’s website this afternoon, I found you can subscribe to RSS feeds for each hurricane and tropical storm that is named in the Atlantic. 

You can go to the page and grab the RSS feed, or you can subscribe to the feed at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/nhc_at3.xml .

According to CNET, Google will be releasing its own browser, Google Chrome, tomorrow.  Here is the official scoop from the Google Blog:

09/01/2008 02:10:00 PM

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We’ll post an update here as soon as it’s ready.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

I am quite impressed with the Web 2.0 features that the New Orleans Times-Picayune and NOLA.com have incorporated into their website!  You can:

• Follow the hurricane blog at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/schleifstein_blog/ and subscribe to a RSS feed for the blog.
• Follow the newspaper’s latest headline updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NOLAnews
• Bookmark your favorite blog posts and articles to your social bookmarking service, such as del.icio.us.
• The use of Cover It Live on the blog at http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/schleifstein_blog/
• Subscribe via RSS to the Hurricane Gustav photo gallery and view a cloud tag for the photos.

Photos from the Times-Picayune – nola.com: Photo Galleries

I don’t think they have a YouTube Channel for the hurricane or a Flickr account at this point, but that may change as this historic and menacing storm barrels toward the Gulf Coast.    Hopefully, these tools will help disseminate information in a timely and helpful manner.   I also discovered the National Hurricane Center is testing out Hurricane Gustav podcasts—these are brief updates on the storm.

NHC Experimental Podcasts

For now, my prayers and good thoughts for safety and comfort go out to anyone who may be in the path of this hurricane.

As a proud alum of UGA, I’d like to welcome Loran’s Best, UGA VII!

Check out our new Environmental Science Pagecast at Pageflakes! Our Pagecast provides you the latest RSS feeds from our favorite Environmental Science publications and resources! Please take time to check out our Environmental Science Pathfinder page as well!

Panik Science Current Events Research (theunquietlibrary) via kwout

Pew Internet: Search Engine Use

The Pew Internet and American Life project has just published a new study that reports 49% of Internet users employ the use of a search engine use on a typical day.  The report also found that younger users are more likely to use search engines regularly than older Internet users.  What accounts for this jump in search engine use from the 2005 study?  The authors surmise that increased access to broadband Internet connections, improved search engine performance on individual websites, and the improved quality of general search engines are the three major factors for the increase in search engine use.

What implications does this study have for us as librarians and educators?  More than ever, we need to take the time to show students tips and strategies for effective searching of major search engines; in addition, we need to expose students to alternate search engines that may better fit their searching needs.  As we continue to teach our students about website evaluation strategies, we should also make our students aware that search engines yield paid and unpaid results—many users may not realize how this factor can “color” the results they get from a particular search engine. 

You may also be interested a more detailed study of Internet use conducted by the Pew foundation in 2005—although it is three years old, the findings are more detailed than the 2008 study and reveal some interesting data about Internet usage.

Check out the great new “image” feature of PollDaddy!  You can now incorporate images into your PollDaddy polls!  Here is an example:

[polldaddy poll="857359"]

I just read at Fox News this morning that Texas Rep.  John Culberson has been using Twitter to post updates and as a means of communicatoin with his constituents.  However, some members of Congress feel that “Twittering” violates house rules regarding communications outside of “official” websites.

However, Culberson has several counterarguments.  In the article, Culberson states:

By communicating on Twitter, Culberson said he can tell his constituents to watch a live video he’s about to broadcast on a site called Qik.com. By blasting an announcement that he’s going to hold a town hall meeting, Culberson said anyone with a mobile e-mail device, an Internet connection or a phone can tap into the discussion. Or if a vote on a confusing or quickly-moving bill is coming up he can shoot out marching orders as needed to his supporters.

“It’s a great way to instantaneously communicate with a large number of people,” Culberson said. 

We have already seen something similar to this happen in some school districts.    District leaders want official school content to stay on official school websites so that content will appear professional; I am also surmising that there may also be legal/liability issues behind those policies as well.  However, sometimes these policies inhibit educators from harnessing the power of these web 2.0 tools.

What do you think about this?  Should Culberson be allowed to Twitter from Capitol Hill?  Personally, I think it is great that an elected leader is trying to find other means to dialogue with his voters and to alert them to his official activities.  However, I’d love to hear your ideas!  What do you think?

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Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/