Carnegie of Carnegies

It is the 70th anniversary of the Carnegie Medal and the 50th of the Kate Greenaway Medal and they are celebrating in style. Last year the public was asked to vote for their favourite winners of the past and a week or so ago the shortlists were published for a final vote coming up.

Meanwhile there is also a living archive of the winners. What a great way to remember Each Peach Pear Plum, Charles Keeping's The Highwayman or Gorilla. If you've been around long enough you are sure to find an old favourite or two in the top ten lists (mine is Alan Garner's The Owl Service).

And don't forget this year's shortlists for the Carnegie and Greenaway.

Now, this could be quite a good way into READiscovering for Book Week 2007. This year's Children's Book Council of Australia Awards Shortlist is also out, as is the more useful Notables. Perhaps we should be trawling through our own children's award favourites. I have strong memories of Ivan Southall's Ash Road which won the year I was in 6th Grade. Southall also won the Carnegie in 1971 with Josh.

The Carnegie/Greenaway site has some images to download (including a bookmark sheet on PDF) if you want to share the joy.

A vision for digital libraries

Most of us have probably heard about Google’s Digitization project. Here is another from Internet Archive. The Internet Archive aims to provide permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images and software as well as archived web pages.

The Director of Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle has a vision for digital libraries. In a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast interview titled How digital book collections will change acadame he discusses this vision and the differences between the Internet Archives project and Google’s project, as well as the challenges of copyright in the area of digitisation.

2020 Vision - what it's all about!

Of course!
This video from Karl Fisch, reminds us of the futures of our students. I thought I would share this, as 2020 Vision is the topic of my NewZealand presentation.

Why let student's blog?

I'm heading to Nelson, New Zealand this Friday to do a Keynote presentation, plus workshops for LIANZA (Library & Information Association New Zealand Aotearoa) in association with SLANZA (the school library folk), for their 2007 Weekend School on "Technology without Tears".

With a bit of serendipity I was led to this great video from Rachel Boyd , a teacher in Nelson, New Zealand!! [via Kerrie Smith]

Museum of Modern Betas

I have been busy playing with Twitter these last few days. Those who Ning! also like to Twitter!

The MoMB just crossed the 3000 betas mark (the 3000th application added was the super sharp twittervision)



Twitter: Heyjudeonline

23 Learning 2.0 Things

Numerous sites have linked to this, but it’s worth highlighting - 23 Learning 2.0 Things. Once you’ve completed the list, you'll be cool!

Wetpaint enables private messaging!

Wetpaint, the online wiki community builder (that we have previously previewed), has released a major new feature, which is (surprisingly) about social networking (and communicating)! Teachers are finding Wetpaint a good tool to use - so this new enhancement lends itself to adaptation for education.

Wetpaint users can now send private messages to other users. The demand for a private messaging system became overwhelming for Wetpaint, and they’re happy to announce that messages can be sent from one user to another, from one user to many users, and from many users to many users. This is the first wiki of its kind to bring about this level of communication, and further blurs the lines between social networking and wikis. Many features are overlapping from various realms of communication tools, from widgets becoming available on social networks (and WetPaint wikis) to mainstream services incorporating social networking components.

Bringing in private messaging options for Wetpaint users really brings their community aspects full circle.

From: Mashable! - the Social Networking Blog.

If you want to keep in touch with the changes and developments in Web 2.0 tools, or want some of the latest code!, then take out an email feed from Mashable, or add it too your RSS reader. Mashable is the world's largest blog focused exclusively on social networks.

Online Learning

The motivation of online activities for our primary school students was once again reiterated – two of our year 6 classes have been involved in a competition created by NSW Country Area Program related to their unit of study, Australian Identity. Their enthusiasm was transparent because the activity was real. Whilst the classes did not win, our students remained engaged and excited to see their peers’ movie file and word file online. Participating in simple and straightforward online activities is a useful strategy to involve teachers who have limited access to multiple computers. Their students are motivated, meet success and we all move ahead: “From little things big things grow” [Paul Kelly] –digital immigrants who start ‘small’ and are successful are more likely to engage in the next level of read-write online environments.

School 2.0

More about Digital Books

Just to keep the options going, here is another interesting service for getting digital audio resources for your school.

Simply Audiobooks has the option to rent, buy, download, and listen! What I particularly liked is the option to collect yourself a FREE download each month.

I grabbed free download of The Art of War, just to test the quality of this service out. I found quite a few relevant resources, though pricing is always a big question.

Managing the copyright labyrinth seems easy with this supplier.

Another interesting article is Downloading Books with iPods, from TechLearning.

Google Librarian

Have a look at Google Librarian Newsletter. It has useful links to a variety of tips and hints as well as providing product updates, how-tos, and news relevant to the library community. In conjunction with the newsletter Google has now added a Google Librarian blog called Google Librarian Central.

One of the most useful links is to the Google posters available at Google Librarian Tools
The posters portray a variety of information relating to searching. The best part is that Google are allowing the free distribution of these posters.