SLIS 5720 - Blog 5

Select one (1) of the following topics for your final journal entry:
1. At the beginning of this course, you were asked to assess your present strengths and weaknesses in technology. Has your assessment changed? If so, how?
2. How do you plan to keep up with new innovations in technology once you have completed your classes at UNT?
3. What specific plans do you have for implementing technology in an educational setting as a result of what you have learned in 5720?


I plan to keep up with new innovations by reading blogs and more importantly talking with my students. The amount of information that can learned from our students is amazing. Students are able to keep up with current technologies and are eager to share that with their classmates as well as teachers and librarians that surround them. Of course reading books and newspapers, not to mention other informational sources on the web can also help me keep up to date on the newest innovations.

SLIS 5720 - Blog 4

Organizing books and materials used to be in the domain of professionally trained catalogers and indexers. Now, through Web 2.0, it is in the hands of everyday "folk." What are the implications of this trend for librarians? Also, for additional food for thought, go to your Delicious site and examine your list of tags. In your opinion, are these tags more or less helpful than traditional subject headings?

The trend of everyday users organizing books and materials is a double-edged sword. While I think it is a great idea for certain educated people to add their opinions about where to find information I also think it could be troublesome as the information might not be more accessible or might even be harder to find. Also I think it’s important for librarians, who have studied and learned the formal ways of organizing information to be in charge of their profession and provide a valuable to service to seekers of information. That being said the tags added with Delicious do help everyday users organize information in a way that is meaningful to them. This helps users create an Internet that is in essence “theirs”.

SLIS 5720 - Blog 3

The title of the video that you were asked to view this week is "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/Using Us." Referencing what you have learned about Web 2.0 through the readings in the Courtney text and through watching the video, why do you think that Professor Wesch gave this title to the video?

I think the video has this title because like Courtney points out the changes in the Web "can be felt in politics, in business markets, and in society in general. New ways of communicating and sharing information over the web are increasingly becoming integrated into everyday life." Because Web 2.0 is about users creating and using data in new ways it is the like the web is us but also using us. Also stated in the Courtney text, "the increased participation and collaboration in the creation of web content and tools is full of potential for libraries and librarians." Librarians are in fact the "original" search engine and therefore able to provide data to users in new ways. These ways are changing drastically, almost daily.

SLIS 5720 - Blog 2

For my $10,000 dollar budget I would purchase about 40 PDA’s. This would be enough (depending on the average class size) for students in 3-4 classrooms to use these as part of assignments. I would have students work either in partners or small groups with one PDA per group. These could be used for so many purposes both outside and inside the classroom. Students could download books and take turns reading aloud to one another. For social studies, math, and science lessons, students could use built in cameras to take pictures of things around the school or their community to use in presentations or explanations of different concepts. For example, students could use the camera function to find arrays or shapes around the school, bring those back to the classroom to share with others. Getting students up and moving sometimes gets them more involved and the more involved they are the more likely they are to be engaged in the learning process. Students could also check these devices out from the library to do research at home or take files home to share with their parents.

SLIS 5420 - Module 15 - Book Blog - Draw Me a Star

Reviews

Publisher's Weekly

During his youth, this gifted author/artist explains in his newest book's afterword, his German grandmother would often draw him a star while chanting a nonsense rhyme. Taking that symbol as his foundation, Carle here creates a world pulsating with life and color-a world that bursts forth from a good star sketched by a young artist. This kaleidoscopic pentagram requests a sun from the artist's pen; the sun asks for a tree, and so on until a man and woman are living happily among Carle's characteristic collages-flora and fauna of all shapes, sizes and vivid hues. Meanwhile the artist, now a bearded old man, continues to draw and create. This unusual, practically plotless work seems to embody a personal scenario close to the artist's heart. His unadorned language, pulsing with a hypnotic rhythm, adroitly complements the familiar naive artwork. Though some may be disturbed by similarities between Carle's evolving world and the biblical creation story (the unclothed male and female figures, for example), this tale of imagination and creativity pays homage to the artist within all of us-and may well fire youngsters' imaginations. Ages 4-up. (Sept.)


Children's Literature
This poetically dreamy story tells of an artist whose creations continually inspire until he actuates a universe bursting with dynamic color and life. Subtle themes are inscribed in the simple text. There is the life-long consuming passion of the artistic process, and the glory of an artist who holds onto a star and "together, they travel across the night sky."

SLIS 5420 - Module 14 - Book Blog - Here in Harlem

 

Selected Honors for Here in Harlem include:
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Notable Book, Capitol Choices, Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, CCBC Choice, Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books for Great Kids, IRA Notable Book for a Global Society, and the Claudia Lewis Award.

Publishers Weekly

In nearly 60 poems, Myers (145th Street) treats readers to a tour of Harlem's past and present, its hopes and fears, through the voices of narrators young and old. Together they create a pastiche of the community's fixtures, the church ("Wake up Lazurus! Wake up Paul!/ Wake the congregation and lift their hearts"), the barber shop for men, the hairdresser for women ("My mouth is sealed, you don't even see a crack,/ 'Cause I ain't the kind to talk behind nobody's back"), rent parties (where people gathered to eat, drink and to help the host pay the rent) and Sylvia's restaurant. "Clara Brown's Testimony," parts I-IV provides a continuity through the collected impressions, as she describes her love for Harlem, through heartbreak (when she and her sister do not make the Cotton Club chorus line, she's told it's because her skin is too dark: "That was the day I learned that being black wasn't no simple thing, even in Harlem") and more often joy. Myers offers differing perspectives on milestone events such as Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, as well as subjects closer to home, such as young love, or a pairing of poems by a father and his drug-addict daughter. Another especially moving cluster of poems rotates among three WWII vets from the 369th Infantry, known as the "Harlem Hellfighters," one of them blinded by a Southern sheriff after the war, on their way home. And Harlem is indeed home, to all of the people who give voice to its pains and pleasures. Readers will want to visit again and again. Ages 12-up. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Barbara L. Talcroft - Children's Literature

Myers has won numerous awards for his fiction, but he has always been a poet, and in this collection he becomes a poet of Harlem, where he grew up and heard its pulsing rhythms. Inspired by the Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters, Myers recreates the voices of Harlem dwellers he has known—from students and poets to artists and evangelists, street vendors and veterans, nurses and party girls. The poems are loosely connected by the testimony in six parts of a fictitious Clara Brown, who adds her perspective to life in Harlem through the years ("Yes, it's done changed some, honey / And rearranged itself some / But when I was young, I danced these streets"). Of the fifty-four poems, it's impossible to pick one favorite. Readers will have to find their own, perhaps drawn to the almost unbearable poignancy of "Terry Smith, 24, Unemployed" or the rueful cadences of "Helen Sweet, 27, Party Girl." The accompanying photographs from Meyers' own collection are piercingly evocative, although he says they aren't chosen as illustrations of particular poems. One can only marvel at the image of Al Sharpton as a boy evangelist, for example, or at the jacket photo of Duke Ellington posing elegantly with two of his singers in 1938. Even the endpapers demand attention, with "George Ambrose, 33, English Teacher" (Myers' lovely tribute to Yeats), superimposed on a map of Harlem. This beautifully produced volume with its vision of a vibrant and beloved community is outstanding in every way. 2004, Holiday House, Ages all.

SLIS 5420 - Module 13 - Book Blog - Baby Mouse Queen of the World

 

Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Jennifer Holm (Our Only May Amelia) and her brother Matthew Holm, a graphic designer, make an incursion on Captain Underpants territory with these comic books about a girl mouse. Both tales share eye-grabbing black-and-pink graphics, and a perceptible Spiegelman influence simmers in the energetic ink illustrations of the dot-eyed heroine. Queen of the World! introduces Babymouse and her nemesis, a popular cat named Felicia Furrypaws. Babymouse desperately wants an invitation to Felicia's slumber party (which she feels could confer "queen" status), although her best friend Wilson the Weasel expects her to watch monster movies with him that night. Fantasy sequences testify to Babymouse's reading habit and active imagination: in one reverie, she's Babymouserella, transformed into a princess by "fairy godweasel" Wilson, but undone by Felicia on the way to the ball ("In `Cinderella,' the mouse pulls the carriage. Duh!"). A sequel, Our Hero, centers on a gym class where unathletic Babymouse faces dodgeball whiz Felicia. Before the competition, Babymouse daydreams of boot camp, stomps on her antagonist as "Babymousezilla" and indulges in a Peter Pan sequence where a combined Felicia-Hook makes her walk the plank into the jaws of a crocodile (who doubles as the gym teacher). The Holms make humorous allusions to novels and movies, and interject sympathetic remarks from an offstage narrator. This personable, self-conscious mouse, with her penchant for pink hearts, resembles Kevin Henkes's Lilly, with some extra years of grade-school experience. Ages 7-10. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz - Children's Literature

The graphic novel format has arrived in the elementary school with a charming anthropomorphic heroine with whom female readers in particular can identify. As she goes through her boring, frustrating daily routine at home and school, Babymouse wonders where the glamour and adventure can be. Her friend and helpmate since kindergarten has been Wilson the Weasel; her nemesis the popular and snooty Felicia Furrypaws. Babymouse's wide-ranging imagination offers her adventures while she waits in vain for an invitation to Felicia's slumber party. When she finally gets one, she realizes the value of a real friend. With only a black felt marker and pink washes, the artists create the cartoon characters and simple settings. The visual narrative is presented in a variety of frames and vignettes, with most of the text in speech balloons, as is standard in comic strips. There is a driving energy to the drawings, along with animation, dramatic adventures, and lots of fun. 2005, Random House Children's Books, Ages 7 to 10.