Thing #18 - I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube

This was too much fun! I found two animation shorts that I haven't seen in YEARS! One is The Cat Came Back - the song will get stuck in your head. The other is Vincent by Tim Burton, my all-time favorite director. I put that one on my blog so all can view it. I can't believe it's there!

I'm so grateful and yet, I feel a bit guilty about it. I didn't purchase it. I didn't get permission from Mr. Burton to post it on my blog and yet, simple as pie, it's there. We are getting farther and farther away from definitive copyright. I have had numerous discussions with students, friends and even family members about the need to purchase music and movies, etc. - not steal them off the internet. The artists, musicians, and film makers do this as their living so we need to legally, legitimately purchase their works in order to encourage them to continue making more.

One family member, a teen, said that she never paid for the music she downloaded off the internet because first, if they didn't want it available, they would protect it better; second, the music industry is corrupted anyway so it served them right if people took the music; and third, they make way more money from concerts then music sales so who was it hurting. I told her that what she was doing was the same as shoplifting but that fell on deaf ears.

I have loaded all of my CDs into my iTunes and am using Handbrake to load my DVDs (something I wish iTunes would have as a feature). I do not view this in the same venue as this is material that I legally purchased and am simply converting it to a different format for viewing. Just like I believe that I can legally convert all of my VHS purchases to DVD. Am I wrong?

Thing #17 Searching for . . . answers

I had a lot of difficulty with doing the tasks for this Thing. I couldn't get the quicktime movies to work. I couldn't get the RSS feed to work. I couldn't figure out how to do the tasks we were asked to do. I'm pretty techno-savy but maybe I just didn't explore enough. I have some experience in this area though so don't feel too bad about just pushing ahead. I have used a number of tools like this for my masters classes and have taught my students how to use these search tools. We have many of them linked on our school media center webpage and encourage the use of ELM versus "googling" everything. I haven't connected searches to bloglines before since I hadn't used bloglines or other RSS feeds before so that was one thing I was looking forward to getting more experience with. I may go back and revisit that at a later date but for today, I'm calling this Thing done.

Thing #16 Research Tools

This is the answer to a prayer! I have been working with another teacher about teaching researching in the digital age. She and I have been struggling with how to explain why it is necessary to check your sources to make sure they are legitimate, how to use search engines, plus the general mechanics of organizing a research paper. This is a whole new ballgame for us. This is not the way we wrote papers when we were in school and I'm not that old! :-)

As I was typing this, I got a phone call from a friend (also a teacher) and coincidentally, she was wondering about this exact thing! So, I told her about the whole 23 Things project and emailed the website to her. She was going to check it out this afternoon. Talk about timely information!
Thanks 23 Things Organizers!!

Thing #15 Get a Second Life

I spent some time exploring Second Life. I can see where it would appeal to some people. I read through all of the FAQs and was absolutely astonished to read about the millions of people and millions of dollars, real dollars, being spent in a virtual world. Crazy! I have no frame of reference for that. I have friend who spend hours on My Space and Facebook so can believe that people really do immerse themselves in an online world. Therefore the need for different services would be apparent - like virtual libraries. As with most of the other Things I've been experimenting with, it won't be something our school will be taking advantage of do to our filtering, monitoring, etc. of student activities. Our students aren't even allowed to access their email at school so I really don't think they'll be establishing second lives at school. Most have a hard enough time dealing with their actual lives. Isn't there a line in a song about being much cooler online? I think we're heading down a slippery slope of not being able to conduct ourselves in actual real settings. It's much easier to be the person you'd like to be in the semi-anonymous online world.

Thing #14 LibraryThing

We recently upgraded our Alexandria system to allow us to include accessing the system through our school website. This will allow our patrons to search and reserve what they want to read. I don't think that LibraryThing is right for our library. I create bulletin boards of "Did you like [insert book title here] - then you'll love ...." lists. Once they come off the bulletin board, they are posted around the library. Master lists are kept behind the desk, available for request by patrons. I also plan to add those lists to our school website.

I did create an account and started to add some books but realized that it would be a HUGE time commitment for me to do all of the books I own. We have a veritable library in our home. I don't think this is a Thing that I'm going to use right now.