testing from my itouch

curious to see if this works!

are you a tigger or an eeyore?

Randy Pausch died today.
i stumbled upon his “last lecture” on youtube a few months back, and i just rewatched it.
sure he’s famous for being a comp sci whiz, and developed a wicked-friendly way to teach programming to kids – Alice - but you should watch the whole video (ya ya it’s over an hour long…) because he will make you want to DO SOMETHING like follow a childhood dream. or, at the very least, write a blog post.

fun thing: wordle (aka as “amy likes bandwagons”)

since a whole whack o’folks are Wordle-ing their del.icio.us tags or blogs or CVs or books (see Meredith, John, Walt, Sarah, and Amanda), i thought i would too.

i really don’t use that many del.icio.us tags for my sites. hmmm. think this stems from my poor grades in cataloguing class?

day 1 with mlis

rockin’.

(more thoughts on being done with school – until i cave and do a phd – coming up soon.)

this is how i feel these days

a wee bit outta control
a wee bit excited
and definitely supported by some good folks that won’t let me fly away

(thanks to jan, one great supporter, for sending me the pic.)

subscribe to LISWire now!

since we all read LISNews (and if you don’t – wtf?) and since Blake rocks all things LISHost (if you need a site hosted – check it out!), we should all subscribe to LISWire, which is:

a brand new idea from the guy behind LISNews & LISHost, Blake Carver. The plan is to allow member companies and organizations to use LISWire to send their full-text news releases and multimedia content to librarians, journalists, library professionals and the general public. We’re going to build a network to distribute this information world wide.

love it.

passion quilt meme

there’s a great meme making the rounds and i thought i’d jump on the bandwagon since some pretty rockin’ folk have uploaded their pix.

here’s what to do:

Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title. And link back to this post.

i’m going to tag a bunch of new/soon to be librarians on this

• Jan over at 7.9/8 librarian
• Karin, who blogs many places, but I’ll tag her at Musings of an LIS student
• Jason of Jason Puckett.net
• another Jason (this one’s a Canuck) at Head Tale
• Timothy who blogs at TimothyGreig.com

holy cow that was easy!

upgrading to WP 2.5 was totally painless. but the photo dropper plugin no longer seems happy. hmmm.

pecha kucha FTW!

pecha kucha (pronounced “hootchie kootchie” by those of us who were tired of sounding like idiots) is a rockin’ great way to present at a conferences.

here’s the dirt: you get 20 seconds to talk about your slides, and 20 slides for your presentation. the slides advance automatically (well they’re supposed to – aaron was taking care of this for everyone but then started cheating during his own presentation so greg took over) so you really only have 20 seconds to get your message across.

it rocks.

you have to be creative with both the visual and the aural presentation, and the time constraints gives the whole thing a sense of urgency which the audience picks up on and it really increases engagement.

the presenters at this hootchie kootchie were all rock stars:

• amanda – IM
• greg – podcasting
• david – videocasting
• meredith – wikis
• aaron – facebook
• greg n. – skeptic

i really think this format would be great for students – it allows you to practice a presentation, using tech, where you have to be succinct and entertaining at the same time. you could hold monthly hootchie kootchies over a lunch hour. you could choose a theme, or even better, turn them into skill-shares/unconferences where people would present on a topic which they know particularly well.

so much fun!

UPDATE

check out the hootchie kootchie for yourself. 

rockin’ out with the SLA prez

Stephen Abram came to speak at McGill and the SLA Eastern Canada Chapter and rocked the house.
he wore an awesome tie.

key points from his chats:

• reciprocal mentoring: the concept that newer librarians have skills to share with established librarians. love this concept. share share share people!
• the concepts of victimization and risk aversion have become part of library culture. this is bad.
• it’s very important for librarians to play with new technologies. (hence the creation of SLA’s Innovation Lab – to be launched very shortly.) you don’t have to love it, or even use it, but you need to play with it to have an informed opinion.
• the internet is terrible at answering “how?” and “why?” questions, which is why librarians rock.

it was a great day and i always laugh a lot when i’m hanging out with Stephen.