Dinosaur Stomp May 13, 2008
Dinosaur Stomp, originally uploaded by Lester Public Library.
The Lester Public Library continues to provide quality programming that draws in crowds. I hope to be as great as they are!
Happy 100th Anniversary May 11, 2008
I wish each mother a happy, restful day. Here is the history of Mother’s Day, as told by Wikipedia…
The United States celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother’s Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace.
Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers’ Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
When Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. In 1907, she passed out 500 white carnations at her mother’s church, St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia—one for each mother in the congregation. The first Mother’s Day service was celebrated on 10 May 1908, in the same church, where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Anna chose Sunday to be Mother’s Day to be a Sunday because she intended the day to be commemorated and treated as a Holy Day. Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mothers Day infuriated Anna and she made her criticisms explicitly known throughout her time [2].
Originally the Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the original Mother’s Day commemoration, where Anna handed out carnations, this building is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on—spreading eventually to 46 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912, beginning with West Virginia. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother’s Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother’s Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.
For example, according to IBISWorld, a publisher of business research, Americans will spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts — like spa treatments — and another $68 million on greeting cards [3].
Mother’s Day will generate about 7.8% of the US jewelry industry’s annual revenue in 2008. Americans are expected to spend close to $3.51 billion in 2008 on dining out for Mother’s Day, with brunch and dinner being the most popular dining out options [4].
Friend Connect May 11, 2008
Google does it all…
Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.”
Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.
Linkman May 6, 2008
I’m not sure if Linkman will replace del.cio.us but I’m willing to give it a try. It is an Internet bookmark management system. It uses a database to “store, organize, annotate, and check up to millions of links.”
http://linkman.outertech.com/index.php?_charisma_page=product&id=5
The Evidence-Based Manifesto for School Librarians May 6, 2008
This article shows the importance of the school library making a difference and being an important center. It also reinforces everything I learn at Dominican. Thank you, dear friend, for sending it my way.
Every fall, School Library Journal hosts a national Leadership Summit that brings together a mix of school librarians, administrators, other educators, researchers, and university professors, as well as policy makers and elected officials. While the topics change, the Summit always focuses on an issue of critical importance to school librarians. Our goal? To jump-start the conversation and create a ripple effect throughout the profession.
The 2007 Leadership Summit, “Where’s the Evidence? Understanding the Impact of School Libraries,” dove head first into evidence-based practice (EBP). (To learn more about last year’s Summit see “Peak Experience,” p. 41.) Evidence-based school librarianship, according to Ross Todd, director of Rutgers University’s Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL), “is an approach that systematically engages research-derived evidence, school librarian-observed evidence, and user-reported evidence in the ongoing processes of decision making, development, and continuous improvement to achieve the school’s mission and goals. These goals typically center on student achievement and quality teaching and learning.”
Much of what follows draws upon the Summit’s closing session, which Todd led. Here the 200 participants worked at small tables, capturing ideas on paper which they then shared with the larger group. They defined core beliefs about evidence-based practice, identified the challenges ahead, and determined the key actions that needed to be taken—Brian Kenney
Evidence-based practice in school libraries hasn’t emerged out of nowhere. In fact, it’s centered on several beliefs, which most school librarians already share.
- The fusion of learning, information, and technology presents dynamic challenges for teachers, school librarians, administrators, and students in 21st-century schools. Providing the best opportunities for children to learn and achieve in today’s educational environment, and knowing that they’ve done well, is at the heart of quality teaching and learning, and is the driving force behind evidence-based practice.
- School libraries as schools’ information and knowledge centers are essential for addressing curriculum standards, the complexities of learning, and quality teaching in information-intensive 21st-century schools.
- School librarianship derives its mandate from a diverse body of theoretical and empirical knowledge, and active engagement with this knowledge is what enables the profession to continuously transform and improve. Leading this transformation is the professional expertise of certified school librarians who possess expertise, insights, and skills based on the knowledge that they apply in practice.
- All students can learn through engagement with school libraries. School libraries play a transformative role in the lives of students—not only by helping them develop intellectually, as measured by standardized test scores—but by encouraging students’ intellectual, social, and cultural development.
- The transformation of information into knowledge, and the development of attitudes, values, and beliefs are enabled through carefully designed instructional interventions and reading literacy programs that guide and engage students.
- The value of a school library can be measured. Learning outcomes, as well as personal, social, and cultural growth, can be documented.
- Evidence of the school library’s crucial role in student achievement is not fully understood, nor seen, nor acknowledged by many stakeholders.
- Accountability is an essential component of sustainable development of the school library profession. Accountability, as a blueprint for professional integrity and significant outcome, is a commitment to growth through examining progress and practices. It brings alignment, innovation, collaboration, introspection, and effectiveness.
- Sustainable development through accountability requires a move from rhetoric to evidence, from a “tell me” framework to a “show me” framework, and from a process framework to an outcomes framework.
- If we do not show value, we will not have a future. Evidence-based practice is not about the survival of school librarians, it’s about the survival of our students. This is the social justice and ethical imperative for evidence-based practice.
Click here to view the rest.
Yay! April 30, 2008
I neglected Litandmore the past few days because of my Organization of Information final. I get my life back in about seven hours! W00t!
Lolcat is hiring April 26, 2008
I can haz dream Job? My rezumez! let me showz u thm”
That’s the subject line of a cover letter sent by a job applicant to I Can Has Cheezburger, one of the premier sites for so-called Lolcat pictures.
Don’t think the letter will be rejected out of hand — bad spelling is no obstacle to a job in Lolcat world. It may even be an asset.
Lolcats became an Internet craze last year. A typical example shows a picture of a fat and hopeful cat accompanied by a caption in a baby-talk-like dialect known as Lolspeak: “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?”
Apparently, looking at Lolcats all day is an appealing job. Ben Huh, founder of the site and chief executive of Seattle-based Pet Holdings Inc., has received 250 applications since the job was posted on Monday under the headline “Kittehs Want Moar Workerhumans.”
“I got a stack of resumes that I can’t even go through,” Huh said. “You know how they say, ‘Spell everything correctly because the people reading your resume will toss it out otherwise?’ Well, we can’t even do that. We won’t knock you out for spelling…. The traditional resume screening methods don’t apply here.”
The winning applicant will join three other people who moderate ICHC and a few related Pet Holdings sites (think dogs with funny captions). A big part of the job will be selecting from the 7,000 submissions the company receives every day of captioned photos, plus 2,000 uncaptioned ones.
Cat ownership is not required, just “a great sense of humor, a deep understanding and love of the Internets and a strong work ethic.”
http://www.icanhascheezburger.com
May 3rd is Free Comic Book Day April 23, 2008
May 3rd is Free Comic Book Day, originally uploaded by Litandmore.
Free Comic Book Day is a day when partcipating stores provide free issues of comic books.
http://www.freecomicbookday.com/
Ohdeedoh.com April 20, 2008
Ohdeedoh.com is a blog for “…people who care about good design but happen to have children.” There are tons of cools items, especially for those with children!
ALA 2008 State of America’s Libraries Report April 17, 2008
ALA President Loriene Roy and Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels discuss America’s Libraries
Mama Robot April 16, 2008
Title Mama Robot
Author: Davide Cali
Reading level: 2.0
Schu’s rating: 2 J out of four
A latchkey kid feels sad that he never sees his mother after school. He envisions a robotic mother who makes all of his favorite foods and never tells him to do chores or brush his teeth. The robot ends up looking like a huge vacuum, and the boy soon realizes that a robot does not give soft hugs or smell very good. In the end, he decides on a robot dog! J
Boolify April 15, 2008
Boolify.org is a real gem! Librarians and teachers now have a search engine designed to help students understand their search and truly understand Boolean functions. I’m showing it to my students first thing in the morning!
