Thing 20 - Books 2.0

"confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books. " (because he is reading too much on line) Interesting... I feel that way sometimes, especially when I can't finish a book. Used to be I read from cover to cover. Now if the book doesn't grab me in the first two chapters, chances are it will not be read.
"One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.” More power to them, I say!
I have looked at the Kindle, but I feel it's too much to pay for a book reader. My iPhone downloads books on demand (even Kindle formatted books) but I have yet to read any of them - screen too small, time not just there to squint. I checked ebay for the first Kindle - still at $250 or so, so no go there either. I will wait and see if it takes off. I'd love to be able to try it out and, perhaps, I'll purchase one for my library just to have accesses? I see Amazon allows libraries to lend these out to patrons. Perhaps a grant or a SAC request will provide access - of course, the issue of book purchases still remains since I lack the required institutional credit card for purchases like this. Hurray for red tape!
http://www.tx2ph.com offers books online that can be downloaded a bit at a time - really backwards technology if you ask me. I have downloaded a few books to my iPhone, like I said before, using some of the iPhone apps. This works a lot better.

Thing 19 - Other Social Networks

WebJunction has grown leaps and bounds since the last time I visited. Back then it was just a skeleton of a social network; right now it is overwhelming in variety and professional offerings. I found the 31 things to do with Flicker in your library and may actually implement one of those; watched a couple of videos about the new spaces in libraries. I was disappointed that there is little for high school media specialists, though. I guess I need to start a thread.
A while back somebody invited me to register at https://www.linkedin.com/, but, honestly, I am having a hard time keeping up with Facebook alone, so I am not signing up for anything else. At some point some of this clutter will disappear and it will hopefully be easier to keep up.
Social networks are what bulletin boards used to be when the web first started. At the time I belonged to a few groups (now Google bought out the archives and calls them groups) and my posts are still out there in cyberspace someplace. So I am going to decline the offer to join any of the new social groups, mostly because having to GO to the site is much less convenient than having the messages delivered to my mailbox. Yes, I could turn the feeds on, but then my already cluttered mailbox will be impossible to read.
I have bookmarked the TeacherLibrarian Ning. I feel that, like a lot of these social experiments, these will be swallowed by groups in Facebook or MySpace since these sites get a lot more traffic. But it will be interesting to go back in a month or so, just to see if things have changed.
I think Jim Louderback sums up my opinion of these networks :-)