Another year, another top 10 list

ReadWriteWeb posted their Best Products of 2009. Among the top 10 lists, you'll see the big names like Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and Chrome as well as some I had never heard of like Feedly, DBpedia, and Echo.

CARLI proposed bylaw changes

If you haven’t yet voted on the CARLI Bylaws changes, voting began on Monday, November 16th and will continue through 5pm on Friday, December 18th. The CARLI Board of Directors considered and unanimously recommended adoption of a series of changes to the Bylaws of the consortium at its September 25, 2009 meeting. The full text of the proposed changes as well as a brief news release is available online. An affirmative vote of two-thirds (2/3) of Governing members is required to adopt these recommended changes.

IL Webcast December 3

Steven Bell and John Shank, co-founders of the Blended Librarians Online Community and their guests, Laurel Cornell and Carrie Donovan, invite you to join them for the live webcast, “Collaborating With Faculty on Information Literacy Instruction: Using Visual Methods to Enhance Student Learning” which will take place on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 3 pm. EDT.

Event Description: Students’ ability to create visual work is important in their understanding and learning of complex concepts. While visual literacy is a growing phenomenon of interest amongst librarians in a variety of settings, visual methods for teaching are centered around the learner’s ability to take in new knowledge and express it in an original, visual form. In this session, two members of Indiana University’s Visual Methods Research Group will explain their research in exploring visual teaching methods, as well as their collaborative efforts to integrate information literacy into an undergraduate course using visual methods.

Although this event is free, advance registration is required to reserve a virtual seat. More information and the registration page is at: http://home.learningtimes.net/library?go=2266281
If you are not a member of the Blended Librarians Online Community, you will need to join in order to register (no fee to join).

MLA News Technology column

MLA News is looking for authors for their technology column. Here’s the information:

Are you starting to plan your goals and activities for 2010? Include writing for the *MLA News*! Writing provides a great opportunity to either share expertise you already have or delve into a topic you've been wanting to learn about--and earn AHIP points in the process.

Address a Technology topic that assists hospital, special, and academic medical librarians.
Columns present a brief overview of important technology concepts and issues facing professionals in 2010. Maximum length: 700 words.

Examples of topics we're interested in for 2010 include:
Open source catalogs
SMS Text Reference
Crowd sourcing / "wisdom of crowds" (definition of concept, online examples or websites that support crowd sourcing of problems)
Pocket Virtual Worlds
Top iPhone/iTouch apps for librarians
Google apps for Health Sciences Librarians
VOIP options and applications
Online project management software - Such as Teamworkpm http://www.teamworkpm.net/ <http://www.teamworkpm.net/>

Your own topic suggestions are, of course, welcome as well. Please be sure your suggestion is a new topic.

Please request past columns or instructions to authors from Lynne if you would like to review them before making your decision to author a column. Please include a short writing sample (or link to the sample) with your reply if you've never authored a Technology column before.

If you are interested please contact:
Lynne M. Fox, AMLS, MA, AHIP, Education Librarian,
Health Sciences Library, Anschutz Medical Campus, University of Colorado Denver
Mailing address: Mail Stop A003, 12950 E. Montview Blvd., Aurora, CO 80045
303-724-2121, 303-724-2166 (fax), lynne.fox@ucdenver.edu, http://hslibrary.ucdenver.edu/

Additional MLA guidelines for authors are available on the MLA web page.

UIUC strike over

In a news release today, the members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have voted to ratify the tentative contract agreement reached between the GEO and University of Illinois (UI) Board of Trustees bargaining teams in Urbana on November 17. The contract has been forwarded to the Board of Trustees.

UIUC Strike

After months of negotiation, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at UIUC has gone on strike. The GEO, a part of the American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, represents teaching assistants and graduate assistants on the UIUC campus. They estimate that approximately 23% of undergraduate classes at UIUC are taught by TAs or GAs, yet their salaries draw only 6.5% of state funding. Details about the strike appear in Inside Higher Ed BlogU's, The Education of Oronte Churm.

Blended Librarians podcast

I just attended a Blended Librarian webcast hosted by LearningTimes. Ellysa Stern Cahoy and Anu Vedantham, presented, “Digital Literacy, Digital Storytelling and the Role of the Academic Librarian” and it was a great overview about the use of multimedia on campuses. Ellysa stated that approximately 42% of class assignments at Penn State now require a multimedia presentation. Ellysa shared her research on student acquisitions of digital literacies while Anu, discussed her experiences in the Information Commons at the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Much of what they said reinforced my own perceptions of Web 2.0 technologies. In fact, Anu’s belief that it is essential for librarians to be able to comfortably use Web 2.0 technologies in order to meet the evolving needs of their communities mirrors my own. Both have created resources online (link to Ellysa’s and Anu’s) for their presentations and the session was recorded and should be on the Blended Librarian website shortly.