I had a lot of fun with this class, and really enjoyed reading everyone else's blogs, even when they didn't enjoy writing them. I liked the conversations that continued here on the blogs, though maybe a more centralized conversation (like a forum) would have been more comfortable for people than individual blogs. I don't always feel like I have anything interesting to say here until I read some of my classmates' postings and then I find I have a lot to say in response.

I haven't loved the commentpress layout, though. I think it's better for annotating a text, or maybe it would have been more exciting if I'd had more exciting things to say, to inspire more comments. The edublogs service is not my favorite either, though I think they might be good for a classroom setting. I find that the basic/free service is limited, and to do many things I'd have liked to do would have required becoming a "supporter" and paying to use the site. I'm not going to continue blogging here, but I think I will continue blogging elsewhere. I still have my 600 blogs, and updating the SILSSA blog has been taking up a fair amount of my time. I'd like to keep an old-fashioned blog, with reflections on some of the LIS-related stories and sites I come across online.

I've definitely gained some new areas of interest in this class, and learned a lot about how to use technology and teach with it, as well as teaching people how to use it. My favorite was learning how to podcast, and that's definitely something I'll carry forward. I even made a "podcast" for my Information Policy class presentation, so I'm off to a good start.

Thanks, everyone, for some good conversations and for sharing your loves/hates where new media are concerned. Good luck!

Someone cool sent me this fake syllabus today, though, knowing that I'm a geek for these things, so I will share that with you.

1) You can set your ad preferences in your Google account: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
(This means, however, that if you ever clear the cookies on your computer, which I do every now & then, you'll have to re-set that preference)

2) You can install an opt out plugin: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/
(only in Firefox & IE for now, but it's open source, so maybe other browsers will follow)

There's also a not-Google-specific Firefox add-on called "TACO" (it stands for "Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out"), which blocks advertising cookies from 37 different advertisers.

Then came the internet, and with it, a whole new idea of community. You may have been the only person in your town who was really really into that weird underground phenomenon, or that totally geeky sci-fi thing, or the totally cool edgy thing that everyone in your town was too conservative to get into, or you may have moved away from a culture that no one else in your new town shared, and thanks to the internet, that didn't matter anymore. You could find your people online, and share information with them, and talk about what was important to you, and they would understand. Someone else out there gets it. When I was in high school, I never found my people, never found the subculture that got what I was into, so I can really appreciate the internet's ability to take culture and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Podcasts are a great way to do that. Where but on the internet (and in the NY Metro area, thanks to my favorite all-time radio station WFMU) can you find a radio show dedicated to 60's garage rock or old Victrola records? Where can you find a talk radio show about libraries or surfing or knitting? And even though a show with two drunk girls talking about their drunken nights out might not have a wide audience, their 6 drunk friends can listen in and laugh along, even if they live across the country. I'm all for quality radio/podcasts, but if you already have an audience, why care about what anyone else thinks?

So I'm really excited to be doing the podcasting workshop. I have three or four ideas for regular podcasts already. It's kind of ridiculous. I'm geeking out.

On a note that's probably more interesting to everyone in class, my husband Pete works at the City & Country School over on 13th Street, pretty much right behind Pratt. He's into audio engineering, so his boss, the head of the Upper School (I think it's ~5th-8th grade?), asked if he would help out with a podcasting class with the oldest kids, who are 12 and 13. The project, as I understand it, was originally in conjunction with someone at MIT, but the kids are on their own now, and have three episodes up. You can find it in iTunes by searching for "Technical Difficulties." (There are two podcasts with this name--theirs is the one that is not explicit, naturally.) They're trying to widen their audience, so feel free to subscribe and give it a try.

They've also started a ning social network, where you can also listen to and comment on the podcasts. It's a great chance to hear what kids have to say about using new media, and to see it in action. They're talking about a lot of the same stuff we're talking about--safety and privacy online, what you make public on social networking sites, etc.--only from the standpoint of kids, which for many in our class is our intended audience. The first one, in which the kids talk about how adults can better learn to use technology, is kind of hilarious. "Corporations, help us out, make a parent-friendly phone."

On another podcasting note, the aforementioned WFMU spearheaded the creation of a new and really great resource for podsafe music which they recently unveiled, the Free Music Archive. That's "free" as in beer and "free" as in speech. All the songs have been cleared for sampling, downloading, and using in podcasts, etc. It's also really nice-looking and user friendly. Did I already mention how much I love WFMU? Seriously. I love it.

The Center for Social Media at American University's School of Communication has a whole page of best practices in media literacy education, and in teaching generally: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use_and_teaching/

Creative Commons has a Podcasting Legal Guide: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide

Fair use is in pretty serious danger, and as copyright holders become more bold in their claims for protection, it's important that educators and librarians know what their rights are. If we let ourselves be bullies by corporate "content providers" with deep pockets, we'll lose what little ground we have left in using copyrighted works. Librarians should lead the way in these issues wherever possible. For some reason, people think we're experts, and we should be. Or we should at least have enough knowledge (and know where to find more resources & information) to get started.

For my group project in Info Policy, I'm using Google Reader to track a number of information policy related blogs, and then saving and tagging them using Delicious, while my partner finds articles from the New York Times and slashdot online and adds them to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. We've been keeping tabs on each others' work using these tools, and started another Google Doc to start organizing our ideas for the paper. And yes, even with all of these tools, we get the most work done face-to-face, but I find the tracking of the articles and collaboration much simpler with all these tools, and the kinds of analysis we'll be able to do are more varied.

I'll know for sure how well these tools worked after we write the paper over the weekend, but my right now I'm feeling pretty good. I should note that my partner and I each chose tools that would work best for us, that we were most comfortable with, and that allowed for us to share our work as we do it. I think that having that choice makes the work a lot easier. Delicious is an intuitive way for me to track the articles and blog posts we're analyzing, and I can create an entire "bundle" of tags devoted to this project so that I can look at all of them (and the stats for each tag) in one place. Looking at my partner's spreadsheet, I can't pull out the information easily, but for her it makes perfect sense. We agreed to keep one Google Doc for the paper from the earliest drafting stages forward, to keep our original early work in mind by having it right there on the page with the work we're building on that initial foundation. I think this should be an interesting way to see the work evolve, but it will also make it easier for us build a consistent argument throughout the paper as we flesh it out.

I'm also starting to realize how many technological tools I use on a regular basis to keep myself organized (or at least to tell myself I am). I keep trying different kinds of citation tools (Zotero, CiteULike, Mendeley, EndNote) at work and for my own purposes, and I use Delicious, but I used to use Google Bookmarks (still in the process of migrating those), and I use Google Reader (and sometimes iGoogle) to track my favorite websites (too many to really read, but I catch up when I can). I used to think it was flaky of me to be spread thin across the technology, but more and more I think it's a smart career move to be familiar with so many different tools, and to know them well enough to know when they are appropriate and when they are not.

*The intense little snippet at the end is evidently from the "Real World" audition tape of someone who borrowed the camera. I am not sure if it makes the video better or worse. The fact that it's an audition tape for the Real World might make it better, but what the girl actually says makes it worse. But everything else about this video is fantastic and ridiculous.

"Twitter is electric/computerized and available at all times, except when sexual misconduct and murder are 'over capacity.' During these times, teen drug makers see a picture of a dead whale alerting them to bad energy."

Short version of the thesis for those of you with Carr's limited attention span: the nature of written works online is different from those in print, and tools for reading digital works should address this and be used to store short pieces we want to read again and again, instead of being a digital version of a book.

You should read the post, though, because it's not that long, and because it's better written than my attempt at summarizing it.