Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios

Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios via kwout

If you are a school or academic librarian, you will want to read Jeff Utecht’s new PDF, “Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios.”  In this PDF, Jeff pulls together a series of blog posts  “… to help schools looking at adopting Web Based Portfolios (WBP) as a form of assessment with students over a period of time. By adopting a web-based platform as a container in which to house portfolio content, schools give students a web-based vehicle with endless possibilities to create, collaborate and communicate their learning to the world.”   If you work in an academic or K-12 library environment, consider how you and your library program can help facilitate and support this kind of learning.

If you are attending ISTE in Denver this month, you may want to consider registering for Utecht’s workshop, “Blogs as E-Portfolios in the Classroom.”

Libraries and the New Media Ecosystem

[tweetmeme source=”librarianbyday” only_single=false]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has posted a presentation by Lee Rainie which he gave at the Catalonian Library Association’s biennial meeting and to librarians at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The site posts not only the slides but also a transcript of the presentation.

In this presentations, Rainie describes how the information ecosystem has changed in the past 10 years. In doing so, he points to many interesting and informative facts, such as how in 2000, 46% of American adults used the Internet compared to 75% in their most recent study and how less that 10% of people worked in the cloud in 2000 compared to more than two-thirds today.

But the crux of his presentation is his more philosophical description of the 8 ways that the Media Ecosystem has changed.  Although he does not specifically refer to transliteracy in his presentation, he does outline the challenges presented to technology users who are now faced with more outlets to gain and to give information via a greater variety of media.

The 8 changes he discusses are:

• The growth of the volume of information
• The increase in the variety and visibility of information at its creators
• The impact on people’s use of time and attention
• The increase in the velocity of information
• The changing nature and availability of information venues
• The compelling vibrance of virtual environments
• The improved relevance of information results
• The participatory nature of information exchanges

Fotologs as Storytelling and Narrative

Emergent Networks: Fotologs as Performances of the Self | DMLcentral via kwout

“Emergent Networks: Fotologs as Performances of the Self” at DMLcentral describes this social networking site that blends social media, photographs, and text as a means for connecting, telling the story of self, and engaging in narrative performances.   Blog post author Raquel Recuero describes Fotolog as ” a photo-sharing site, grew quickly in South America, becoming one of the most popular social networking services in Chile, Brazil and other countries. Fotologs became interesting narratives of everyday life, carefully constructed by users to share the impressions they wanted to display for their audience. They became identity performances.”  How might we as librarians and libraries help our patrons use a resource like this for storytelling and narrative?

Beyond ‘New’ Literacies, A Special Themed Issue from Digital Culture & Education

[tweetmeme source=”librarianbyday” only_single=false]Digital Culture & Education latest issue looks beyond “new” literacies.  DCE is an international inter-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal, that is interactive, open-access web-published journal is for those interested in digital culture and education. It is apparent right from the introduction by Dana J. Wilber that this is a must read for anyone interested in transliteracy

In fact, new literacies change so quickly, they can be thought of as deictic, or dependent on the context on which they are used at the moment they are used (Leu et al. 2004, p. 1591): “Today, technological change happens so rapidly that the changes to literacy are limited not to technology, but rather by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge”. Deixis, a linguistic term, relates to words such as “now” or “here”, that are understood completely in context – what is “now” means something completely different five minutes later from when it was first uttered. From a research standpoint, deixis means we must research and understand new literacies as they are happening, as users adopt new technologies and make them a part of their lives. These new literacies span the multiple spaces—education, family, leisure, private, public, work—of our lives, and are embedded in our daily activities (Coiro et al., 2008). New literacies change faster than traditional literacies because of the rapidity of technological change; what it means for someone to be a Facebook user now may be very different two days or two weeks from now, as changes to the technology or to the user’s life occur.

This special issue, entitled “Beyond new literacies,” seeks to broaden the conversation around new literacies research by extending the possibilities to include multiple lenses and research perspectives. Here we mean “beyond” as “in addition to” – in the sense of adding to the conversation between new literacies research and other theoretical and methodological frames that will enrich the study of new literacies. It is a call to augment a complex field. As Coiro et al (2008, p. 12) write in the Handbook of Research on New Literacies: Research questions on the new literacies of the Internet and other digital technologies take place in contexts that are far too complex and too rich for any single perspective to account for all that is taking place. We believe that to understand these new literacies will collectively require us to bring multiple sets of perspectives to research on new literacies.

Even better because it is open access all of these article are available online for you to read!

• The Language Of Webkinz: Early Childhood Literacy In An Online Virtual World
• Classroom Uses Of Social Network Sites: Traditional Practices Or New Literacies?
• Talking Past Each Other: Academic And Media Framing Of Literacy
• Education Remix: New Media, Literacies, And The Emerging Digital Geographies
• Digital Technologies And Performative Pedagogies: Repositioning The Visual
• Improvable Objects And Attached Dialogue: New Literacy Practices Employed By Learners To Build Knowledge Together In Asynchronous Settings

Libraries & Transliteracy Receives 1st Place in Salem Press Blog Awards

[tweetmeme source=”librarianbyday” only_single=false]Salem Press recently announced the winners of it’s Library Blog Awards and we were excited to learn that this blog, Libraries and Transliteracy was first place in the General Blogs category. First, second and third place awards were given in five categories: General Interest Blogs, Quirky Blogs, Academic Library Blogs, Public Library Blogs and School Library Blogs.

About the Awards

Blogs about libraries have spread across the web. There are (literally) hundreds of people writing about books, libraries, librarians and related subjects. If you count the blogs that come from specific institutions, spreading local news, there are thousands of the things. Some are funny. Some are brilliant. Others… aren’t.

This area of our website is devoted to blogosphere excellence. Salem (and the bloggers and librarians who are helping with this effort) are attempting to promote good blogs generally and draw attention to interesting and provocative news and opinion as it appears. To that end we will:

• Reward and celebrate blogs about libraries and library issues
• Maintain a (reasonably) accurate listing of blogs so librarians
• Develop a site that points out ongoing excellence as it appears.

THE WINNERS
The winners in each of the five categories of “topical” library blogging we established are:

General Library Blogs

• First place: Libraries and Transliteracy
• Second place: Centered Librarian
• Third place: Librarian.net

Quirky Library Blogs

• First place: Awful Library Books
• Second place: Library History Buff
• Third place: Going Green At Your Library
• Another Third place: Judge a Book by its Cover

Academic Library Blogs

• First place: No Shelf Required
• Second place: Resource Shelf
• Third place: The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Public Library Blogs

• First place: Agnostic, Maybe
• Second place: Blogging for a Good Book
• Third place: Library Garden

School Library Blogs

• First Place: Bib.20
• Second Place: Not So Distant Future
• Third Place: 100 Scope Notes

Congratulations to you all.