(Thing 20) Read it! Online, offline—reading skills

First, a few fragments from my experience exploring the “Learn” section of Thing 20:

• Added TwitterLit.com to my Twitter. I love to Twitter, and I love to read—this seemed like an obvious union of two of my hobbies.

• Reading Trails sounds like the way I use the internet, following links to create the paths I want to pursue, but I didn’t join at this time as I have a big enough book backlog.

• BookBrowse also looks like exactly my thing, giving me Amazon style recommendations based on what’s popular and providing reader reviews.

When I receive reference requests from students at Flagler College, most are disappointed when we have access to an ebook only and not an actual hardcover print copy. “You don’t have that as a regular book?” is a question I get all the time. However, there are students who are thrilled about ebooks. They can go home and use their own computers to access the ebooks at their digital pace. They can print pages from their home computer and choose what chapters to follow based on “Search in text” features.

Last week, I had a student approach me with a journal and ask how she could print it. She only wanted a digital version, not the awkward bulky bound print. I was a little shocked, but I showed her how to use the photocopier to get what she wanted. There were only two pages from the article that interested her, which makes me think of “micro-research,” like following hyperlinks to get only the text you need.

I read the article “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” in the New York Times. I really connected with the concept of digital reading and its unique literacy, and I’d like to respond to a few quotes from the article.

“One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. ‘These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,’ said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. ‘Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.’”

Children suffer if they are in a digital divide, a group which often includes low-income and minority students. As the article mentioned, students who do not develop internet skills may not become valuable employees. Their skill-sets may not match requirements of higher paying jobs in the Information Age.

“’Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,’ said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. ‘Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.’”

Watching my husband teach digital literacy, art of film and video, and web-based skills, I directly see the way reading and interpreting audio and visual literacy plays into the skill set he teaches. The Flagler College Communication Department teaches information literacy as a core concept of their required major coursework. For the students’ future careers, multiple media formats are necessary to communicate effectively with diverse audiences, a trend growing across many majors.

Some critics argue that the digital age is destroying literacy, but my experience is that digital literacy is altering the meaning of traditional literacy concepts. As more libraries evolve to Web 2.0 concepts, digital literacy is necessary as much for the practitioners as it is for the users. How could I have completed Thing 20 without knowing to chain through a cloud of hyperlinks?

My personal tastes (Thing 13)

I created my Library Thing badge to share just a few of the books I've read in, oh, relatively recent memory. Or just books I love. I hope you love a few too.



Flagler College library home page has a "New Acquisitions" blog type list, but there are so many buttons on the home page that I wonder what its use stats are. I don't know whether Library Thing would improve our current system or not, actually.

I have asked to have my 23 Things blog linked to on the library home page, but the director thought it wasn't a good idea. If I had my own library blog, I would definitely use Library Thing because of its bright colors and attractive appearance. I haven't used the tag clouds for my books, but they could be useful for our library's virtual visitors.

(Thing 9) So tardy

I took the easy way out on this Thing. I stuck with applications I know, and I feel like I cheated. Thing 9 seems really cool, so I look forward to revisiting it and learning about these other nifty applications.

I did put my neck out there earlier, but it was the application that seemed to not be working--Lazybase. I tried to make a spreadsheet of my vintage camera collection, but Lazybase had different ideas. I'll have to go back one day and put together a power point with photos describing each camera one of these days.

www.flickr.com Go to wysocki.christine's photostream

Great. And then my Flickr flash badge didn't work. I settled for the Flickr HTML badge. Grr. What gives Thing 9? You need some work.

Flick-Flick-Flick-Flickr (Thing 5)

I use Flickr quite a bit already to keep up with my friends. Slowly my network of friends has dispersed around the country, and one way we stay up to date is through sharing our photographs. We use tags to separate our photos by subject, location, and time. We use sets so that we can look at pictures of new babies as one group instead of mousing through a stream of unrelated photos. Some of us are dedicated enough to join groups like the 365 days portrait project. I hope my tags, sets, and groups are all logically arranged because I firmly believe in the sanctity of the bibliographic universe.

For my new Flickr membership for 23 Things, I took a few pictures of me and my student-worker enjoying Flagler College’s archive—and, um, drinking coffee.

I had no problem uploading my five pictures, but I couldn’t for the life of me get my buddy icon to load. Three times I tried the same steps to upload an image from my computer desktop to the buddy icon. No red flag popped up on the photo upload area to tell me what I was doing wrong, but I finally realized my photo exceeded the 2 mb limit Flickr uses for buddy icons. Ugh.

To solve my buddy icon problem—because I couldn’t let my face look like that gray, bland emoticon—I used the same photo from my Flickr account instead of approaching it through my desktop. I went to the “All sizes” page on the Flickr individual photo view, and I saved the square image I wanted. I went back to the buddy icon change it in my profile and, voila, there I was! My square photo was finally less than 2 mb.

I next arranged my photos into two sets: “Flagler College” and “Flagler College Archives.” Yeah, they’re the same five photos for both sets, but I haven’t had a chance to take more photos, making the two sets distinct from one another. I also joined the group “Libraries and Librarians” and put our five pictures in there to share with the world of library fans. I added a friend contact to a fellow 23Things@NEFLIN-er, “cats23things.” I look forward to seeing what photos she uploads.

Behold, me, in action:

I may use Flickr to display some of Flagler College’s archival holdings. Since the archive isn’t really open to the public, I hesitate to reveal very much, but we have some cool pieces that could enjoy the digital light of day.

It's all good (Thing 6)

I am loving the Flickr letters app!

"Pura vida" doesn' translate into Spanish as "Pure life," which it appears to say, but as slang that means "Everything's OK." I try to remind myself "Pura vida" all the time. I get a little "sturm und drang" sometimes.

Onto topic: Mashups in my library. Since we are an academic library here at Flagler College, I’m having a hard time seeing the usefulness of some of these tools. I feel like the gravitas of online academic research would be mocked by cutesy web apps.

The only place I see something like the Flickr letters app being useful in my library would be if our education department had its own library homepage. Since it doesn’t, I don’t foresee particularly extensive use of these online services in our library.

However, if my library had young adult reader services, I would love to use mashups to capture the imaginative spirit of youth services.

Skipping through images ahead to ... (Thing 7)

I’m cheating. I skipped ahead to Thing 7 over 5 and 6---just because I felt like it!

This mosaic from Big Huge Labs may seem like a series of architectural photos—which they are—but they’re all different domes from the original Chicago Public Library. Connecting the images to my current Thing is sort of a stretch since one represents history and one represents the future, but, underneath the stained glass and networked computers, we’re libraries.

Libraries were founded on the radical principle that all people were capable of governing themselves and that the only thing they lacked was an educational vehicle to provide the necessary intelligence. Today's libraries still function on the principle that all citizens deserve equal access to information, even though now our information is delivered in largely digital format. Computers or books, libraries still serve as the radical meeting point where all patrons have access to the information they seek.

And how do I want to use this image tool in my library? I want to mosaic my library’s website header and make a shifting pattern of our library’s photo. That would be cool.

For me, this project was just fun. And skipping ahead on Things wasn’t my only sin; I made a vanity graphic. Enjoy … it describes me.