Support Teen Literature Day

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the fastest growing division of the American Library Association (ALA), is celebrating the first ever Support Teen Literature Day tomorrow, April 19. Support Teen Literature Day is celebrated in conjunction with ALA’s National Library Week (April 15-21, 2007).

The purpose of this new celebration is to raise awareness among the general public that young adult literature is a vibrant, growing genre with much to offer today’s teens. Support Teen Literature Day also seeks to showcase some award-winning authors and books in the genre as well as highlight librarians’ expertise in connecting teens with books and other reading materials. I will mention those tomorrow.

Today I recommend two books for teachers of teens or relatives of teens. You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents by Jeffrey Wilhelm. Wilhelm argues that literary reading depends on a reader's entering and becoming involved in a story-world. He develops this theory through his study of three of the most engaged seventh grade readers that he taught the year he collected data. The other book, Going With the Flow: How to Engage Boys (and Girls) in Their Literacy Learning by Michael Smith and Wilhelm, shares powerful ways to build strong literacy habits in adolescent boys and girls.

Open Culture Podcasts

Open Culture explores cultural and educational media (podcasts, videos, online courses, etc.) that's freely available on the web, and that makes learning dynamic, productive, and fun.
They sift through all the media, highlight the good and jettison the bad, and centralize it in one place. You'll find engaging content here that will keep you learning and sharp. And you will find it much more efficiently than if you spend your time searching with Google, Yahoo or iTunes. This is a dynamite site! I particularly like the educational web resources and the university online courses., but there's much more. IT IS ALL FREE and terrific listening for treadmill, elliptical, walking, and long drives.

Almost Human

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Almost human, and sometimes smarter is the headline of one of today's science articles in the New York Times. Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. Chimps even outperform humans in some memory tasks.

Source: New York Times Tuesday Science Section

Free Course Management System

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, open source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

Moodle is designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.

This is National Library Week

National Library Week is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries, librarians and library workers and to promote library use and support.

Get to know your library and library staff by visiting the library during National Library Week. The library staff works to make the library a friendly place where members of the Goodwin community want to study, research, and relax. So please stop by and say hello to us. Tell us what you like that we are doing and offer suggestions to change what you may not like. Thanks to the Board of Trustees and the administration who support us. Thanks to all of you who use the library services.

Deepest Sympathy

The library staff extend their deepest sympathy and prayers for each person touched by the tragedy at Virginia Tech University yesterday.

Did You Know?

Did you know that you can view The Chronicle' of Higher Education database of new campus architecture or submit information on our institution? The picture here is the 7000 square foot interior of the recently finished information commons at the University of Pennsylvania. A Modernist brick-and-concrete structure, the new Information Commons offers seating for close to 200 students. Group-study settings include private study rooms, cafe-like booths, and flexible open spaces. A digital-media lab and a 25-seat seminar room were part of the project, as are spaces for a writing center, oral-presentation coaching, and other kinds of academic assistance. (This is only one floor of the library. Yes they do have books.)

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Week of the Young Child is Coming

This is an advance notice that the The Week of the Young Child 2007 will be celebrated on the Goodwin campus April 22-29. This year's theme is "Building Better Futures for All Children". The Week of the Young Child is a national event week sponsored by the National Association for the Education of the Young Child (NAEYC).

Of course the library is a member of NAEYC. In support of the early childhoold program, the library will be displaying many new and classic children's books. Other events for that week will be posted on the blog. Please remember to stop by the library during that week.

If you hadn't noticed, you can comment on blog entries. The library staff would like to hear from you about some of your favorite children's book. Comments, please! Just click on COMMENTS at the bottom of this post and send us a comment--very easy. You will feel so good afterwards.

Internet Seminar on Airport Security

Join a complimentary internet seminar on airport security April 26 from 2-3 p.m. presented by the San Francisco International Airport. REGISTER NOW.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is recognized as a leader in airport security. John Payne, the airport's CIO, will discuss how SFO meets tight security requirements and maintains support for tenants in an extremely competitive business environment. You will hear about real-world deployments that have utilized a centralized blade approach to improve control, security, and continuity of operations to allow a greater focus on the mission at hand vs. management of technology. This information was provided by the State-of-the-Art IT for Emergency Management Centers

This event will provide emergency management IT professionals (and students) with important information on how to take operations to what is being deemed the "next generation of Public Sector IT environments" through blade workstation technology. The experts will discuss:

• Pandemic outbreak critical operations support
• Removing the risks associated with "desk-side deployment"
• Improving control, security and management of IT operations
• Achieving state-of-the art high availability, asset utilization and redundancy
• Enhancing coordination with real-time access to shared workstations
• Ensuring continuity of operations through remote location and multi-site access

Should Museums Return Relics?

An ancient vase at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is fueling an intensifying ethical and legal debate about some of the world's most celebrated works of art. Two years ago, Italian authorities produced evidence the ancient vessel had been smuggled from Italy and demanded its return. Such prized artifacts have raised thorny questions about the ownership of cultural treasures in private collections and museums around the world. The controversy — and attendant criminal trials of alleged smugglers — is also shedding new light on the secretive world of antiquities collecting — a realm populated by tomb robbers, wealthy connoisseurs and aggressive dealers and curators. Some experts estimate that up to $4 billion worth of precious art is being illegally traded. Whatever their worth, ancient artworks are priceless to Italy, Egypt and other nations increasingly using cultural artifacts to exert political leverage and stoke national pride. See the entire article in this week's CQ Researcher.

Source: CQ Researcher

Virtual Travel

Virtual Tourism is a mashup of YouTube travel videos of individual sites, their aerial location via Google Maps and text from Wikipedia. It's Web 2.0-licious!

Source: MetaFilter Community Weblog

Database for Homeland Security Students

I previewed Praeger Security Interational online database at the ACRL conference and now have set up a free trial.

To access please go to http://psi.praeger.com and enter "GoodwinCollege" for the username and "library" for the password.

Kurt Vonnegut Dies

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the acclaimed American author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays, died last night in New York city at the age of 84. His most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five, is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned in Dresden. He survived the U.S. fire bombing of Dresden that destroyed the whole city by hiding in an underground slaughterhouse, thus the title.

Vonnegut's last work was a collection of essays called A Man Without a Country. In it, he suggested the way that music helped him through tragic times. Other works include Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Mother Night. Here is an excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five:

“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'”

Rest in peace, Kurt. We will miss you. So it goes.

Applachian Trail Thru-Hike

I know some of you are planning to hike the entire Applachian trail some day. Maybe you have already started making plans. Just for your information, the average thru-hike takes 5-7 months and that's at a 13-15 mile per day average, but only 20% of the people who start the hike actually finish. As of 2005, only 8,425 people have completed the whole trail. I know some of your names will be added to that list.

For those of you who don't know about this, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail is a 2,174-mile footpath along the ridgecrests and across the major valleys of the Appalachian Mountains from Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to Katahdin in Maine. The trail traverses Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia. Doing it all at once is very difficult!

Just for fun, you can follow two people from Connecticut who did the northerly hike of the entire trail last year. Carrie and Derrick Ellis have a web site with pictures, movies, a well-
researched gear list, and more. Keep hiking!
The web site: www.ellishiking.com

Environmental-Health Journal

Plan to privatize Environmental-Health Journal is on hold amid congressional inquiry.
The plans to turn a well-respected public-health journal, published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, over to a private publisher should be put on hold, says a Congressional oversight committee that is investigating the matter.

The journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, consistently ranks among the top journals in environmental science and public health. It has been slated for privatization since September 2005, but that process has been marred by ethics concerns. The entire journal, including the student edition, is now freely available online. News, feature articles, and commentary, which account for about half of the printed edition, will also be curtailed if it is privatized.Reports of peer-reviewed original research are not slated for cuts at this time.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

New Books for Hospitality

These are new books in the library for the hospitality program:

Hospitality 2010 by Cetron, DeMocio, and Davies
At Your Service by the Culinary Institute of America
Art of the Event by James C. Monroe
I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence by Amy Sedaris
Hospitality Financial Accounting by Weygandt, Kieso, Kimmel & DeFranco

Partnership for Global Security Website

The Partnership for Global Security mounts a global effort to decrease the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction by working for a world in which all such weapons are secured and the threat of their use is eliminated. The website offers Nuclear News; U.S., Russian, and United Nations documents; the partnership’s own reports; and news links.

Source: Weekly Homeland Security Newsletter

All Dogs Great and Small

A new study conducted by an international team of scientists led by researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has identified the gene responsible for this great range of dog sizes. The answer, it seems involve a number of different versions of the gene that encodes for insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1). The gene, IGF1, was identified following genetic analysis that began with screening 463 Portuguese water dogs, a breed that has a lot of diversity in size. The researchers measured the dogs, took X-rays, and then sequenced their DNA and looked for different regions of interest. This research team will plans on turning their attention to identifying genetic markers that control other aspects of canine appearance. Whether they find the gene for adorable remains to be seen. The study was published in Science today.

Measuring UP 2006

Measuring Up 2006 consists of the national report card for higher education and fifty state report cards. Its purpose is to provide the public and policymakers with information to assess and improve postsecondary education in each state. Measuring Up 2006 is the fourth in a series of biennial report cards.
This Web site provides state leaders, policymakers, researchers and others with access to the national report card as well as access to all fifty state report cards. In addition, the site can compare any state with the best-performing states in each performance category, compare indicator scores and state grades for any performance category, obtain source and technical information for indicators and weights, and allow visitors to download the reports. Further, the Measuring Up Web site has the capacity to view previous report cards from 2000, 2002, and 2004.
Source: Marylaine Block's Neat New Stuff

Homeland Security Information

The Homeland Security Information Center at NTIS (National Technical Information Service) is an invaluable resource for scientific and technical information from the U.S. government, its contractors, and complementary material from international sources. The site is divided into five major categories with subcategory listings of recent reports: health and medicine; food and agriculture; biological and chemical warfare; preparedness and response; and safety training.
Source: http://www.ntis.gov/hs