Spanish Class and "Digital Nation"

I recently signed up for a class at the local Jr College: "Speedy Spanish." It's so frustrating understanding some Spanish and speaking a little but being unable to make it useful on the job. We are always scrambling to locate the person-who-speaks-Spanish for a customer. I always feel guilty when that person is not me, and think it should be. (Alas for all the French I took in College.) The class has no prerequisites, so I was hoping to revive and build on what I know. Several years of highschool Spanish and more decades of limping along beside the ambient Latino culture have kept me interested but not very effective.

Last Tuesday was our first class. The instructor greeted each person politely in Spanish as they entered the room. He introduced himself and explained that it would be mostly non-English and that it would be OK. After a short dictation - five sentences we were to write in Spanish as best we could - he spent the remainder of the class using the white board and we the students to demonstrate how one can learn (or re-learn) a language as children do; by paying attention and coming to understand what the teacher means. He wrote, gestured, laughed, nodded, illustrated, demonstrated, acted out, and occasionally explained in English. He invited us to talk to each other. This turned out to be possible. Everyone seemed to enjoy the class and warm up to the style of teaching being used. I was fascinated by how elegantly and painlessly the tools of learning a language can be picked up again.

I can't think of a way to tie this story to learning 2.0 or Emerging Technologies. However, I do have to hurry home from this Tuesday's Spanish class to catch the latest Front Line entitled "Digital Nation."

Welcome to Your e-Reading Place

One of my colleagues over at the Staff Information Hub posted interestingly about setting up an area or room in one of the libraries dedicated to promoting e-resources and teaching the public how to use them. I remember the days of the old Periodicals Room, a ponderous and serious place full of stacks of newspapers and magazines securely held behind a counter. Staff asked people for their drivers licenses or library cards as collateral when surrendering to them a copy of Barron's or the Wall Street Journal. Other staff policed the public computers with clipboard in hand, making sure people did not abuse their time limits. It was a different world back then!

These days all the periodicals are loose on the shelf, and sometimes issues cannot be found. Sometimes the publisher is less than diligent in getting our copy to us. Or it may be misplaced or even, (heaven forbid) taken from the library. These things happen. With back issues available online and the advent of downloadable materials of all sorts, a location in the library for teaching about their use is just common sense. Lots of people are comfortable with the internet but not so comfortable navigating to specific resources, or checking out a Netbook. With the plethora of devices out there, downloading books can be daunting too. At least the delivery side of the process, (The Greater Phoenix Digital Library) can be made easier to do with a little encouragement.

In that spirit, I located a stock photo and doctored it up a bit in Photoshop. Imagine this on the wall of an e-Reading Room in your local library. Instead of sending the message of the old days, "we don't trust you with our stuff" it welcomes people in to take a look and get comfortable.

Hybrid Reading Experience

I have been using a hybrid form of reading without realizing it! Hooked on the West Wing series, I watch chunks (chapters) at a sitting, the audio turned low and the English subtitles turned on. I could hear it just fine, but found the technique very relaxing, allowing me to read (and re-read) the dense, well-written dialogue and explore the complicated political, international and personal dynamics. My husband laughed at me, saying he had never seen someone watch TV like that. The fact is, I would probably not have read a book entitled The West Wing. But the story is so well told, so filled with layers of meaning and blends of music, video, and scene transitions, it is excellent storytelling. Library Journal published an article last fall in which Tom Peters said. "Reading is one human activity that is at once both intensely cerebral and lusciously sensory." The article discusses the future of reading in the light of genuine reading hybrids like "Vooks."

Vooks (video books) blend print and video content. Vook.com partnered with Simon & Schuster last fall in this experiment: titles combining text and a dozen or more embedded videos in the text layout . Cost: around $7. The guy who introduced this is Bradley J. Inman, a Silicon Valley entepreneur. The NY Times and Publishers Weekly have informative articles on the print-media hybrid. And were vooks go, Twitter and online communities will surely follow.

Critics say human reading involves “immersion” or “flow”, which is by nature solitary. Also, when a story is augmented with video the imagination is diverted from making its own images. I agree to some extent. Should anyone else decide which "lusciously sensory" imagery is evoked when you or I read? Fiction reading is transportive, and half the fun is letting your mind freewheel and make associations on its own. Maybe hybrid fiction isn’t for everyone. Nonfiction could be pretty interesting though –a biography supplemented with embedded video or speeches? A nonfiction Vook would do the running around for you, mashing together various sources and enriching the content so you don’t have to. There is a certain appeal.

Meanwhile, I still like curling up to read a nice West Wing episode. And if some political or legislative story line confounds me, I hit pause, run to my computer (still no mobile device) and google for background insight into the topic. Am I being weird, or just finally starting to catch up?

"In Mongolia When a Dog Dies...

...he is buried high in the hills so people will not walk on his grave. The dog's master whispers into his ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life..." So begins "The Art of Racing in the Rain." Below is a video trailer for the book. I don't believe there is a movie (yet). I actually had to fiddle with HTML a tiny bit, and I don't really speak the language. But I got the video clip embedded, and that's what counts. Voila!



In this book the dog (and author) is Enzo. Don't be mistaken, it's no ordinary cute book pretending to be written by a dog about its master. But be warned, it may make you ponder your existence, yearn for lost love, and even cry. I checked it out on Amazon, and discovered it has 670 customer reviews.

Learning for Learning's Sake

I'm taking the lead from a post on the "2.1" site and from a coworker's blog to learn something new, if not "every day" than regularly as a matter of life stance. That seems less daunting than "every day" and has a permanent sort of ring to it besides. Today I investigated more places to find full text articles on the open web and snooped around on Magportal.com. I did a search for "Polling companies" from a sample query given in the book I am currently reading: "Conducting the Reference Interview" a 2009 edition of a "How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians". I checked it out a while back and ended by purchasing it because I could not bear to part with it.

Meanwhile, back to Magportal... my search for polling companies was yielding discouraging results until I narrowed the query to either political, commerical, academic, or some other category of polling. That helped but was still focusing on the results of polls. Let's see...the customer query cited in the Reference Interview book was "Do you have anything on polling companies?" Oh - so maybe it's really a question for Refence USA, for just the names of companies who do polls. See, you really do have to ask people to clarify what they really want. I have to remember that. No customer to ask this time though.

I went over to SPL's site for Ref USA but they're doing site maintenance this week so it will have to wait until later.

Concept: The Virtual Book Display

Still smitten by Hugo Cabret, I got this book for my daughter in law, an elementary school teacher. She saw possibilites for class read-alouds using a projector to show each page as she read. And I, imagining display possiblities for my library, assembled a variety of stuff from around the house. (Click picture for closer look)...a set of keys from an old jewelry box. A wooden artist's hand model. An old pocket watch. The pendulum from a family heirloom clock ... and the back view of the clock itself. Stories enter our minds and stir up all sorts of things, and this book is dandy for stimulating the subconscious and letting you dream. Like sitting in a theater watching a soundless movie, you enter the story. What if you were alone like Hugo? What about the old man and his mysterious past? The reader wants to walk invisibly through this story, seeing it all. Thankfully the reader can. I love this book.

Maybe our library will do virtual displays like this on our website: illustrated book reviews with a bit of whimsey to convey the enjoyment (hopefully contagious) we found in a particular book,