IBM's Next 5 in 5

Pretty interesting stuff here from the engineers at IBM:

The third annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBMs Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

It would be nice to have reminders about the people that I have met. I've always been weak on remembering names. At any rate, will technology save the day, or simply lead to more information overload? Feel free to add your comments below.

Tech Talk: Rosemary Arneson on Second Life

Please join us in the library next week for our second in a series of conversations with faculty on the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning. Carmichael Library director Rosemary Arneson will speak on Tuesday, April 1^st about her work in the virtual world of Second Life. The talk will begin at 3:30 in the library's Ebsco classroom. Rosemary's presentation will include a tour of the virtual version of UM's Ebenezer Swamp that she's created.

You may also be interested in our past posts on Second Life:

• Internet Librarian, Continued
• Live from Mississippi Library 2.0 Summit
• Carmichael Library goes virtual
  

Photo credit: Creative Commons license

Tech Talk: Michael Patton on Podcasting

Last week, Rosemary announced the first in a series of conversations with faculty on the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning. In this first Tech Talk: Michael Patton will speak about his experiences with podcasting his classroom lectures and other materials. Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, March 12 at 3:30 in the library’s EBSCO classroom.

Tracking us in My Yahoo! Beta

A while back I wrote about how to read our blog using a desktop widget, but if you're like me you follow many more blogs than just one a day. After using My Yahoo! for some time, I've been using Bloglines for most of the past year to track the dozens of sites and feeds that interest me.

Recently, Yahoo! has upgraded their feed reading product with a beta version of My Yahoo! While I like the look and feel of My Yahoo! better than Bloglines, Yahoo! hasn't won me back just yet. Still, I thought I'd list the steps to tracking Carmichael Library's multiple RSS feeds in this popular feed reader.

1) From this blog, choose the library feed you want to follow from our list in the right-hand sidebar below. You can choose from this page, our New Browsing Books feed, our Flickr photos, or our events calendar. Right click on the corresponding orange RSS button and choose Copy Shortcut. (If you're a Firefox user, choose Copy Link Location.)

2) Once you've logged in to Yahoo!, go to your My Yahoo! page by pointing your browser to http://my.yahoo.com.

3) Click on the Personalize this page button toward the top of your screen.

4) Under the Add Content heading, click the link that reads Add RSS Feed.

5) Paste the RSS feed address into the box, and click the Add button. You're now subscribed to the library's feed!

6) Repeat steps two through five to add more feeds.

Firefox devotees know that there's an even easier way to do all of this: left-click on an RSS button and choose your feed reader from the drop down menu that appears on the following page. It doesn't get any easier than that! For still more information on adding content to your My Yahoo! page, check out Yahoo's FAQ on the topic.

If there's interest, we'll post more tips to tracking our feeds in Bloglines, Google Reader, and perhaps other places. As always, if you have questions or want to see us blog about a particular topic drop us a line.

The above screen shot is my own implementation of My Yahoo! featuring all four of our library feeds.

Pitzer College offers YouTube class

A few weeks ago, Alan posted the story about wikis being used in the classroom in lieu of the traditional textbook. Today, the Associated Press published a short piece about another Web 2.0 technology that's being used to teach. Here's a sample.

CLAREMONT, Calif. - Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube.

Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling...

...Class members control most of the class content and YouTube watchers from around the world are encouraged to comment, [professor Alexandra] Juhasz said...

The AP piece includes a link to the group Learning from YouTube, where students are posting their content for the class. Naturally, I had to go there and find the short video described in this story. This clip has the grainy, garage-band quality of a lot of user-generated video content, but it turns out that the guy and his friend are pretty talented jugglers! I also like the music used here:



On another note, you may have noticed that our own Charlie Conway has now joined our list of blog contributors. As many of you know, Charlie has a critical eye for movies. He'll be sharing some of his notes on our popular DVD collection here. Check back soon to read his dispatches from the Ask Here desk.

Finally, I wanted to mention that we have about a dozen pictures to share from this week's Academic Success Fair. With all that's been going on, time for photo editing has been in limited supply. I hope to have these posted sometime next week.