Revisting a Blog.

I created this blog called for Michael Stephens’ Internet Fundamentals class couple of years ago. In addition I read the blogs of other people and organizations. Based on these experiences I came to the conclusion back then that I currently have right now: I in the future I will create and maintain a blog when I feel the conditions are right. Until then I will just read and comment on blogs, but not run one.

With the way my life is currently, I would not be able to update and maintain a successful blog. I realized that successful blogs have several traits: 1) Interesting content. I know I have good ideas and an interesting point of view. Someday I may try personal blogging again. 2) Contributor(s) who are motivated by interest and pleasure in the content of what post. Again, I have given priority to school and work. 3) Contributor(s) and blog masters actively improve and keep the blog growing. Again, this requires more work than I can to put in. 4) An active audience and a blog master who knows how to cultivate this audience. Yet, to maintain a consistent quality would take time away from school.

When I am in my library job, I hope to encourage my students to explore using this as a tool. If I were to do a blog for a school library, I would recruit volunteers, the LMC assistant and/or students to help maintain and update the site.

Post#7: Peaceful Planet Library HTML Project

As a part of learning HTML in my LIS753 class, each person was suppose to create a mock-up webpage and show it to the class. I decided to create a fictious medical university library website.

So here's the address for Peaceful Planet Medical University Library, I hope you enjoy it.

http://domin.dom.edu/students/khunmali/LIS753/PPMU-Library-Main.html

Blog Post #5: Is One of the Ten Tech Trends for Librarians 2007, doomed to Mediocrity by the U.S. Cellular Industry?

In reading my teacher, Michael Stephens’s blog Tame the Web, he posted Ten Tech Trends for Librarians 2007.

It was mentioned that one of the Ten Tech Trends was the idea of Convergence.

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“Convergence describes a process rather than an endpoint. More than just technological consolidation, the process of convergence is distinguished by changing consumer flows through the media landscape. It represents a tectonic shift that has altered the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences.

This altered relationship privileges 'expressions' over 'impressions'; engaged consumers draw together information across multiple media experiences creating new touchpoints for your brands. Convergence culture calls for a re-negotiation of the expectations of media content producers and advertisers, of media producers and audiences”

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Professor Stephens uses the iPhone to illutrate the possibilties of convergence in libraries.

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Quote:
“The iPod on some level changed the world.
The iPhone will as well: user interface, ease of use, pulling together a seamless experience of voice, data, Web. Watch closely.

How does this impact libraries? A thread running through all of these trends is the idea that the general public to some degree has adopted tools and technologies that allow them to interact with media.

This will not stop as prices fall and more folks move to one device for access to information, the collection of data and communication with the world. How will librarians and their services position themselves in this world? Trust me, it won't be by taping a sign on the door of the library!

I'd urge some libraries to get an iPhone and experiment. Use the phone. use it in your library. What do your Web services look like? The catalog? Report out to the rest of us.”
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I agree in principle about the trying to realize the greatness convergence could bring and its potential promises.

However I the wireless carriers in the U.S. are thwarting the promises of convergence.

What do I base my thoughts on?

Take a listen to the podcast or view the transcripts of
Mobile Malcontent: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/03/02/04

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Sample excerpt:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the U.S. today there are two hundred million cell phone subscribers. The wireless industry has grown up in the last decade, so it’s a good time to ask, how’s it doing? Columbia law professor Tim Wu says, not so good. Yes, we have service at competitive prices, but we could have so much more.

We don’t, says Wu, because the big wireless carriers, Verizon, Cingular, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile have a stranglehold on product design. In a paper he presented to the Federal Trade Commission, Wu details many of the improvements we could enjoy if the wireless carriers let us.

For example, we could more easily transfer photos or browse the Net, or even keep track of how much we talk. We can’t, because the carriers are engaged in what Wu calls “feature crippling.”
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After listening to the this segment of On the Media, I felt cheated about how US Cellular companies are confining cellular users in the United States and the phone manufacturers to mediocrity.

I felt myself agreeing with points Professor Wu (a Columbia law professor) was making- that we are being short changed by the cellular companies!

Conversely, I felt Chris Guttman McCabe (the vice-president of regulatory affairs for CTIA, The Wireless Association.) was making poor excuses for the wireless industry's business practices.

Well, Mr. McCabe if you or anybody in from the wireless companies is listening then:

"Please, don’t stop progress by giving us mediocrity."

I hope that Convergence does happen. I hope that libraries will get to realize greatness through Convergence.

Blog Post #4: New test shows shortcomings in students' cyber literacy

In section 1 page 6 of the Sunday Chicgao Tribune (2/18/2007) there is an article entitled "New tests finds students' cyber aptitude wanting." about the ICT Literacy Assessment – Information and Communication Technology Literacy,

According to the ICT Literacy Assessment Website:

“The ICT Literacy Assessment is a comprehensive test of Information and Communication Technology proficiency that uses scenario-based tasks to measure both cognitive and technical skills. The assessment provides support for institutional ICT literacy initiatives, guides curricula innovations, informs articulation and progress standings, and assesses individual student proficiency.”

The Tribune article says the piloting testing of 6,300 students in high schools and colleges across the U.S. produced mediocre scores.

“Today’s youths aren’t as tech savvy as they appear", according to the article.

I couldn’t find an online version of the Tribune article the Dominican database (Which hasn’t been working well at home or work, lately. It’s been giving me “This program cannot display the webpage” messages.”), or on the internet. However I found the original article --"New test shows shortcomings in students' cyber literacy.”--the Tribune reprinted in Sunday’s paper, to quote from.

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New test shows shortcomings in students' cyber literacy

By KELLY HEYBOER — Monday February 12, 2007c.2007 Newhouse News Service(UNDATED) Sure, today's students can download songs to their iPods, text message their friends and update their MySpace pages in a flash.But can they use a search engine to find reliable information to help them choose a new car? Can they determine if health information on a Web site is bogus or legit? Can they compose a decent e-mail?

As technology becomes an integral part of everyday life, schools and businesses have started looking for a way to assess the tech savviness of their students and applicants. The Educational Testing Service — author of the SAT and AP exams — has developed a test designed to grade students' knowledge of the cyber world.

The Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment, or ICT, is an online exam that gives test takers a series of tasks to see how they would use the Internet and computer programs in the real world. The tasks include sorting an e-mail inbox, using a search engine to write a report and creating a spreadsheet.

ETS recently piloted the new exam at high schools and colleges across the country. The scores of the first 6,300 students who took the test were surprisingly mediocre.Today's youth, it turns out, are not as tech savvy as they appear.

"We were quite surprised,'' said Mary Ann Zaborowski, executive director of product management at ETS. "It was shocking to us that students did not perform well.''

Just 52 percent of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site and only 65 percent assessed the site's authoritativeness. When asked to use a search engine to look for information on the Web, only 40 percent entered multiple search terms to narrow the results.Test takers also had trouble figuring out when it's ethical to use information they find on the Internet in their own work and how to rewrite the facts they find on the Web for a new audience.

"The preliminary results do raise for us a warning flag ... and a cry for action,'' Zaborowski said. "These skills are not intuitive. They have to be learned.''

ETS officials say the scores from the pilot test are a snapshot and may not represent the technological skills of the entire American student population.

But teachers and librarians say the numbers confirm what they've suspected for years: Being able to use Google and Wikipedia doesn't mean a student knows how to do college-level research.

"They were raised using computers,'' said Sonia Gonsalves, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, N.J. "Students were very technologically competent, but not necessarily proficient at using information.''

Stockton was among the first schools to test the new ICT exam. The majority of the 260 students who took the basic and advanced versions of the test did well, but not great, said Gonsalves, who serves as the director of Stockton's Institute for Faculty Development.

The school, which plans to give the test to another 270 students this year, is developing a two-semester course to improve students' computer and Internet knowledge. In the future, students who score poorly on the ICT exam may be steered into the new elective.

The test currently costs between $27 and $33 per person, slightly less than the SAT fee of $41.50. Test takers sit at a computer, though they never really log on to the Internet. Instead, they perform a series of tasks in a "simulated'' online world using the "Search-a-rama'' search engine and other mock Web sites and databases.

The computer keeps track of how the students navigate the tasks during the 75-minute exam. They are given a score ranging from 400 to 700, with the average student scoring a 550 last year.

A similar exam designed for businesses to test the tech knowledge of their employees is set to be piloted later this year. One of the first customers for the new exam will be a health care company that wants to identify tech-illiterate employees for extra training before it launches a new computer system, ETS officials said.

For now, the student version of the test is being used, mostly as an experiment, at about 80 institutions.

Finding ways to teach students the intangible skill of navigating the Internet and distinguishing shady Web sites from reliable pages may be tough, said Norbert Elliot, a veteran New Jersey Institute of TEchnology English professor who studies how to assess students' skills."It's not writing down equations. It's not identifying a grammatical error in a sentence,'' Elliot said. "A lot of this is experience.''

NJIT is also working on ways to weave better Internet and computer literacy training into its courses after giving the ICT test to 353 students on its Newark campus last year, he said. Having an exam to test students' tech knowledge is the first step in what may become a whole new field of teaching.

"We really are in new territory here,'' Elliot said.

A demonstration of the new ICT Tech Literacy Exam with sample questions is available on the ETS Web site, http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy/demo.html.

(Kelly Heyboer covers higher education for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She can be contacted at kheyboer(at)starledger.com.) "
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I would say that this article paints quite a contrast and counterpoint to my Blog Post #2: What I learned about Net Gen Students at the Third Annual ARL Leadership Institute., the topic of which presents a tech savvy image of high and college students. This new article seems to show otherwise.

Let’s take a look at some of point made in this new article on cyber literacy:

1-“Just 52 percent of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site and only 65 percent assessed the site's authoritativeness. When asked to use a search engine to look for information on the Web, only 40 percent entered multiple search terms to narrow the results.”

Comment: 52% and 65% doesn’t sound too bad to me. I wonder how well adults would do. I suspect they wouldn’t be too much better. Why do I say that? Well, I have seen my fair share of adults to poorly in judging health information from the internet.

2-“ ETS officials say the scores from the pilot test are a snapshot and may not represent the technological skills of the entire American student population.”

Comment: I am intrigued about what the trend will be when more tests are done. However, the ICT test needs to and will probablyl gain more validly and reliability as time goes by.

3-“But teachers and librarians say the numbers confirm what they've suspected for years: Being able to use Google and Wikipedia doesn't mean a student knows how to do college-level research.”

Comment: Despite my comments above, I would have to concur will this point. It is something I have suspected too. I hope there will be more research into this topic and that the ICT will help improve information literacy.

4-“ Finding ways to teach students the intangible skill of navigating the Internet and distinguishing shady Web sites from reliable pages may be tough, said Norbert Elliot, a veteran New Jersey Institute of TEchnology English professor who studies how to assess students' skills."It's not writing down equations. It's not identifying a grammatical error in a sentence,'' Elliot said. "A lot of this is experience.''

NJIT is also working on ways to weave better Internet and computer literacy training into its courses after giving the ICT test to 353 students on its Newark campus last year, he said. Having an exam to test students' tech knowledge is the first step in what may become a whole new field of teaching.

"We really are in new territory here,'' Elliot said.”

Comment: When I look at how I learned to use and be literate with the internet, I see that I mostly did it on my own and taught myself. So it seems ironic that we need classes to do something that in the early days of the internet we had to learn out of necessity. Fend for ourselves and learn as you go was the only way available. Now learning about the internet can be done in formal classes with standards.

My sense is that about the 65% and 52% of students was due to the attitude and aptitude of each student, their reasoning ability, powers of intuition, and critical thinking, which are due to in part to personality, upbringing, biology, and schooling. So it is a combination of nature and nurture.


On a related side note--

I ask one of my previous library teachers about why Dominican University doesn’t have a specific information literacy class for the new incoming GLIS students. It was the instructor’s contention that the graduate program will provide the information literacy via the individual courses that students will be taking as he/she goes through the program.

Wow, that strikes me as an apriori assumption. I hope my instructor is right, do I respect her and plan on taking more classes with her.

It seems odd to me that one of the assumptions or hallmark of being a librarian:

That we as Librarians, are suppose to know about information literacy, and can make good decision about information

, is not a fundamental principle/goal/topic that has been determined or chosen by the library program, to be consciously and overtly disseminated to and nurtured in its library students.

I looked over the GLIS Bulletin 2005-2006, and could not find anything about information literacy.

It feels like it is an implied understanding that students will naturally aquire by the time they graduate.

I do believe my own information literacy has improved since I started school and has been an evolving process. Yet information literacy doesn’t feel like a conscious effort, it feels more by happenstance and being in the right place at the right time (i.e. being in the right class or talking to the right classmate or teacher).

It is similar to what a very knowledgeable lecturer once told me about the connection between enlightenment and mediation; enlightenment occurs in a manner like having an accident, meditation increases your chances of having that accident.

I guess as I hang around library school long enough, my information literacy will improve as by-product my attending classes, and the interaction with classmates and teachers, more so than as a deliberate goal, objective, or action of the library program.

Blog Post #3-My Interview with Jaap and Erik, and Library Gaming.

The Saturday of our second weekend class (LIS 752: Intenet Fundamentals and Design-February 10-11), we had visitors from the Netherlands, Jaap and Erik. They associated with a library in their homeland http://www.dok.info/ (the site is in Dutch). They were at Dominican University as a part of touring the libraries in the Illinois area. After their presentation, students had chance to be videotaped for an interview. Students, such as me, could speak on any topic he or she wished.

Since they mentioned gaming in libraries, I decided to talk about gaming in libraries. I told them about my experiences growing up with videos games when I was younger, starting. I had played video games from elementary school to about college age. So I was playing from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. I eventually grew away from video games, and became more interested in other pursuits and pastimes.

Now that I am in library school, video games have come back into my life, in of all things, as a learning tool in libraries. Both Jaap and Erik were enthused about gaming in libraries. At the same time they did not know how this trend will exactly play out. It seemed that they got involved as an exploration; because gaming is there, so why not play with it.

The interview brought something that I have been feeling about the subject; despite growing up with video games, I feel ambivalent about the subject. I am trying to figure out what is it about a gaming at a library that would make it a uniquely beneficial experience. I do have open and accepting attitude towards to gaming phenomena. I don’t oppose it. But what is it about a library gaming that makes it different and special from a video arcade or playing it at home? Or even just offering a room for game clubs--not affiliated with libraries—for their own use?

Sometimes I wonder if my age and generation is at play in my feelings.

Maybe, what is important is so long as the betterment of library patron is achieved, even with gaming, then it is my duty to do so using this way.

Here are some resources I found for further reading on the subject:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Gaming
http://libgaming.blogspot.com/
http://bibliogaming.blogspot.com/
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2005/12/at-the-top-of-its-game-the-mls-symposium.html
http://gaminginlibraries.org/

When I was searching for the resources in Dominican’s Database and Google, I noticed a pattern. Many of the places where gaming in libraries, or library gaming were taking place, happened to be in the U.S. Midwest. I saw Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan. Of course there were other states like California, New York, and Massachusetts.

Being from the Midwest, I thought that was cool and something to be proud of.

I wonder why the Midwest is so prominent in the library gaming field.

Free File Conversions

For our LIS 753 class we need to make a PDF file. The Adobe site requires you to sign up and login to do online file conversion. I found this site http://zamzar.com/ that does free file conversions without the need to sign up or login.

Michael Stephens asked me to make it available to all my classmates. I haven't used this service yet, but hopefully it will work out well.

It does other formats in addition to PDF, so it seems to be very versatile.

If anyone uses Zamzar, let me know how well it works.

HeldUp:The easiest way to stop windows from disappearing behind other programs.

Here's a neat little program if you are coding a webpage and need to look at the results of your work. It called Held-Up. Now you don't have to switch back and forth between windows. Just use the program and you can have two windows on the same screen.


http://www.johnmacintyre.ca/HeldUp.asp

According to John Macintyre there are other benefits to the program:
"Examples of where HeldUp might be useful

Keep a calculator program on top, while preparing an invoice.

Keep the Windows CharMap utility on top, while writing a foreign language document.

Hold up Notepad to make notes while you browse the internet or read technical documents.

Keeping directory software on top while you manually enter data from it.

Keep online streaming video on top while you do work in the background.

Keep your to do list visible so you don't lose track of your priorities.

You could even keep pictures of your kids visible at all times."

The program is has 20 day trial, and is free if you register it.

I've used HeldUp and find it handy.