Archive for 2007

Yale University is offering seven courses free online through its new OpenYale initiative. Through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yale has begun creating digital videos of select undergraduate courses to make them available to the public online.

“The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years.”

Read the full press release here.

The Sunday New York Times story What Did the Professor Say? Check Your iPod covers new software programs which are enabling colleges and universities to record classroom lectures and automatically sync them up with the PowerPoint slides and other digital images used during the lecture.

Students can download these files to play on their iPods on the commute home and they can search these digitized lectures by keywords to jump into the lecture at a point of interest. The University of Central Florida uses one of these programs from the Tegrity company to capture all the sessions of 300 of their classes per year. Fees for these programs range in cost from $10,000 up to $100,000.

via Social Media

Web Worker Daily has issued an annotated list of the Top Ten Books for Web professionals for 2007. Many of these look good, however, the one that stands out as most appealing has to be The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – who wouldn’t want a four hour workweek?. Their favorites are:

1. Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet–Better, Faster, Easier by Mark Frauenfelder.
2. Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani.
3. One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher.
4. Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk.
5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss.
6. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly.
7. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
8. The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun.
9. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger.
10. Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle

And they have announced their own book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, which available for pre-order on Amazon.

Aaron Wall, author of the SEO Book, along with Giovanna Wall has created a custom guide to search engine optimization for bloggers. Providing screenshots and online video, this guide presents an in-depth, multimedia look at SEO topics and presents focused tips concerning:

• What Google Knows About Your Blog
• Why Blog SEO is Different From SEO for Other Websites
• Domain Registration & Hosting
• Keyword Research
• Keeping Up With the Joneses
• Writing Clear & Compelling Headlines
• Optimizing Site Structure
• Web Analytics
• Controversy
• Use Push Marketing After Launching Your Site
• Understanding Network Effects
• Learn More About SEO

The Employment Digest blogs about getting started in today’s social networking environments, with their Newbies’ Guide to Social Networking. This walkthrough takes newcomers through the process of finding a social network suited for them, details how to register, create a user profile, and begin networking, and describes the types of things you can do within these social communities. The article also includes a Frequently Asked Questions section.

via Social Media

Educause has created a new 7 Things report, this time focusing on the VOIP software program Skype which enables free computer-to-computer calling. Their 2-page reference resource explores the following topics about Skype:

1. What is it?
2. Who is doing it?
3. How does it work
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new presentation available online which was presented to the University of North Florida. Titled Homo Connectus: The impact of technology on people’s everyday lives, the presentation discusses seven hallmarks of the new digital ecosystem which Homo Connectus inhabits.

Tech company Serena Software is introducing a unique program called “Facebook Fridays” into their corporate routine. Each Friday, employees are encouraged to take an hour to fix up their Facebook profiles and connect with personal and professional contacts (including co-workers) using the social networking software. Serena President and CEO Jeremy Burton is hoping that using Facebook as a company intranet will bring a sense of community to their 800+ global employees.

“As our business continues to grow, the workplace becomes more and more distributed, which can make us feel disconnected from one another,” said Burton. “Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers—on demand. A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done.”

via Web Worker Daily

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, half of Japan’s Top 10 bestselling fiction books were composed via mobile phones. Each sold an average of 400,000 copies. This new cultural phenomenon sweeping Japan is called keitai shousetsu or mobile phone novels and it is transforming minor publishing houses into forces to be reckoned with.

These works are oftentimes written by first-time authors using a single-name pseudonym and are delivered to their young female-dominated audience via cell phone, the same medium which was used to create them. One of the most popular of these next generation books, Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold over 1.2 million copies since last October.

via TechCrunch

According to the New York Times, academic researchers are beginning to compare behavior in online social networks to that of tribal societies. Particularly, they are looking at the resurgence of oral culture which is being expressed through online tools which let us communicate in ways which resemble talking such as blogs, Twitter, social networking groups, etc. They are also looking at parallels between tribal gift exchanges and identity, and friending in social networks.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

via Social Media

The Read/Write Web team has compiled A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff including 16 instructional, how-to sites, including all of those covered in iLibrarian’s DIY: 6 How-to Websites Compared and many more!

David Lee King and the folks at the The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library have integrated an interesting feature into their online catalog. They have embedded a Meebo chat widget into the unsuccessful keyword search results page, so that when patrons are having difficulty locating resources, they can contact a librarian via instant messaging, or the telephone number they display beside the widget. What a great way to offer an Ask a Librarian service, right when patrons most need it!

via David Lee King

I will be speaking today at the ACRL/NY Symposium about Social Software in Academic Libraries. My presentation is here on Slideshare.net. Thank you to all of the college and university libraries who gave me great quotes about their social software initiatives to use in my prez. Also, here is a quick guide to all of the websites I refer to in my presentation:

Wikis
Wikipedia
WikiHow
University of Minnesota Libraries Wiki
Antioch University New England Library Staff Training & Support Wiki
USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library Wiki Webpage
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki
Butler University Libraries WikiRef
ALA 2007 Annual Conference Wiki
Library Success Wiki
Library Instruction Wiki

Social Bookmarking
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Southern Connecticut State University Hilton C. Buley Library
MIT Libraries Virtual Reference Collection
University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ PennTags
Libmarks
LIS901-06
Maui Community College Library
University of South Florida Lakeland Library Services
library2.0 tag
ALA2007 tag in del.icio.us

Media Sharing
YouTube
Flickr
Colorado College Tutt & Coburn Libraries
Arizona State University Libraries
Williams College Library on YouTube
School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Michigan
GeorgiaTech Webcasts
LIS901-06 Webcasts
SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science
American Library Association on Flickr

Social Networks
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
University of Central Florida
StonyBrook University Health Sciences Library
Facebook Applications
JSTOR on Facebook
Library 2.0 network on Ning

Blogs
Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
Binghampton University Library
Mohawk College Library
Barnard College
University librarian at the McMaster University Library

IM
Ohio University Libraries
American University Library

Microblogging
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Lunar and Planetary Institute

Second Life
Nova Southeastern University Law Library & Technology Center
McMaster University Libraries
San Jose State University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ohio University

Answers
Answer Board Librarians

Subject Guides
Boston College University Libraries LibGuides
LIS753 on Squidoo

Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research discusses Why Your Company Needs To Be on Facebook with a recent post on the Harvard Buisness blog. She talks about using the social network to build relationships and enter into conversations with people while Tom Davenport, President of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, discusses Why Facebook and MySpace Won’t Change the Workplace.

via Social Media

Presentation Zen, the go-to blog for professional presentation design advice, has put together a list of 10 links to cool, high-rez images. These websites provide mainly public domain photographs in very large sizes for use in photo projects or in presentations. And check out their comments section for a few more suggestions.