Minor Musings

Books, Reading, Etc.

• More on E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report  (I don’t annotate, but I can see the appeal for many readers… and the loss.  What will we do when marginalia is completely lost? It’s a great insight into the reader’s mind.)
• Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors (and this article from the Atlantic Wire on how reviewers and authors are behaving badly, this on Slate pleading Hey, Writers on Twitter: Stop Being So Nice to One Another) Of course, the Guardian writes So much more than sock puppetry: in defence of reader reviews which contrasts nicely to this one asking Are Amazon reader reviews killing off the critic?)
• Several years ago I had an argument/discussion with one of my staff about Modern Classics.  Guardian asks What makes a Modern Classic?, which leads to the question: when do you know it’s a modern classic?  After five years? ten? less?  more?  And what defines “classic”?  There’s also the question of Why we reread some books, and not others
• Let’s talk teens and books:  6 Great Platforms Where Students Share Book Reviews and Reading Recommendations (great for starting conversations about appropriate ways to interact online and review). Sadly, Be seen with a book? It’s just not cool, say one in five children

School Life

• As the start of the school year, it’s a good idea to have this conversation with everyone in the school community: Secure your online life
• Another great start-of-year conversation:  Is plagiarism the result of journalists being stretched thin?  (my feeling is that they’re just lazy – and that publishers need to employ more fact checkers).  More questions about ignorance, laziness or something else are posted in this article, reporting that Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses. Barbara Fister has some thoughts about plagiarism, and you can read my other musings here.
• Following on that, those MOOCs that everyone’s talking about?  The Globe & Mail says There’s no online substitute for a real university classroom.
• Students find e-textbooks clumsy and don’t use their interactive features (no surprise: the “killer app” for e-texts hasn’t arrived yet… but I suspect it’s close)
• Curation is still a huge buzzword (my thoughts here) but RebelMouse: Smart Curation for the Classroom may be a good way to collect/curate.
• Beating an old horse: Why kids need to fail to succeed in school

Tech, Tools and Other Stuff

• This looks like a great new tool: Annotary (I’m about to embark on some serious research/writing, and this will really help!); if I had an iPad, I’d use ZotPad to better use Zotero
• Recently I was asked about tech trends that were fads, or not worth the ROI.  I mentioned Pinterest (don’t hate! it’s a time suck, with little proven ROI) but this provides additional food for thought: Electronic ink could kill QR code
• Curated cool: Where to watch the strange and the worthy on the Internet
• ProfHacker has a Mac App Pack for you Mac people
• Much like the various NYPL iniatives, Historians Ask the Public to Help Organize the Past
• We often complain about how the shortness of tweets is killing grammar and spelling, but  there’s also Tu and Twitter: The death of ‘vous’?

 

And finally, I just loved this quote from an interview on Powells:

Straub: I had to do so much research. I had no idea how much fun research could be. It turns out, to my great delight, that if you write a book about something that is really fun and interesting, research is also fun and interesting. [Laughter] (Emma Straub on Laura Lamont)

 

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