The Gift of Cite

This is one of those "just publish already" posts, one that's been sitting in Draft status for a while. Let's start with two posts that my friend Chuck pointed me to, one by Kevin Marshall and one by Kristi Gustafson Barlette.  Kevin's came first, Kristi's a few days later.   Coincidence?  Possibly... except they know each…

Don’t Read That Book!

Those that know me know that I can be critical when reviewing books - one friend said I was more critical than most of the other reviewers she knew.  That's ok, because my policy for reviewing is to help people choose what to read next, always with the understanding that their tastes and mine might…

Diversity in action

At the start of each year, our Admissions Office reports on the composition of the student body: male/female ratio, class sizes, and how many students come from HUGS ("historically underrepresented groups").  What they don't report is diversity in learning styles, economic status, sexual orientation, athletes vs. artists, science nerds vs. humanities fanatics, and other equally…

Community feeling

Yesterday I spent several hours with a group of women I'm proud to call classmates - we didn't all graduate at the same time, but we all feel connected to each other and to our school.  The reason for our gathering was to begin preparing for the bicentennial of the school, in 1814.  One of…

Blinders anyone?

Recently, Buffy had quite the twitter conversation regarding the etiquette of the automatic follow.  Karl asked a similar question yesterday: Twitter / Karl Fisch: Someone thinks I'm impolit ... My response was that if you follow someone expecting to be followed in return, that's nuts.  Some people have thousands of followers, and to expect them…

Nail on head!

Shooting the messenger

One of the programs I attended at ALA was a joint panel sponsored by ACRL and AASL on K-20 information literacy. The first speaker, David Loertscher, has been speaking on the topic of "information commons" for quite some time now, and I've heard his spiel at three different conference. I've also heard (and edited an…

One person’s #TEDxNYED

It's lunch and my brain is exploding - all the great ideas I'm hearing about at this conference, and trying to fit it into some coherent way in which to incorporate it at work. The thing that struck me first was, there's definitely a way to make our students' experience of class both more participatory…

Back[stab]channels

The idea of a back channel is still relatively new to conferences - for those of you who don't know what one is, it's the ability for the audience (and I'm using the term loosely, because it includes both those actually at the session and those following it from afar) to interact with each other…

Making Connections

Julia Stiles' post about Twittering in a forest struck a nerve. People need to have a record of their experience to validate it, to remember it, to understand it. Why else did we start writing? That’s all the more exaggerated now in this hyperactive age of constant reportage; Twitter, Facebook, three million “news” stations each…