Flickr-ings

When I run out of silly/longshot ideas on how to make Libraries more relevant and useful to the public I go to Flickrleech for a screen full of nudges to new ideas and avenues.

Flickr also would be useful to preview a city or town or country you were going to visit and check out the sights prior to landing.

I guess you can't post someone else's photo on your blog? They end up as spaceball.gif and are empty boxes.

Today is Recess at Work Day

link

Unfortunate rumor

The Scales and Tales program at Washington Street yesterday lead to a unsubstantiated rumor that I was unable to tell the difference between an owl and a turtle. Here is an Owl :


Below it is a turtle:

I hope this puts an end to this silliness, as I have cake to eat!

Green and Local @ your library

When you think about the burgeoning growth of going "green" and the next step of going "local" the library works wonderfully in both cases. How much more green can you be than buying one item and loaning it out and having it used by 5-10 end users? In the field of books, movies, and information, we are a shining example of recycling.

In the arena of going local, we also shine in 2 manners. First, as local production holds the promise of less pollution due to less transport, we shine since because of our recycling model mentioned above (get one, 10 end users). Second, we back our local communities by providing access to services, products, education that allow us to reach to the outside world while still retaining our sense of place.

See the Briefing (Still) Made Here from trendwatching.com

Can People Leave a Class Early?

Here is an interesting question posed by Elliot Masie of the Masie Center. (they are a training and learning consulting firm).

Can People Leave a Class Early? While I was in Israel, a colleague posed a challenging question for me and several other learning
professionals:

"If you are teaching a class and some of the people in the course "get it"
after a few hours, can they leave? In other words, if they are quick and contextual learners and master the content rapidly, can they leave or do they need to stay until the end of the course?"

This got a heated conversation going at our table in Tel Aviv. It challenged the idea that we all stay until the last lesson. This person related it to training in the Army, where people move on as soon as they can show mastery. In that model, the class gets smaller and smaller, until a few people are left with personalized instruction from the instructor to help they achieve the objective.

It is a different metaphor .. but interesting if you consider the use of technology to allow a learner to "test out" in mid-stream. Does it more effectively focus the energy of the instructor on those needing coaching?


Think about it in terms of how we offer lots of software and technology to the public so they can learn it on their own and then move on. We don't even have to limit it to software or tech, think about how we offer books and knowledge and the public picks it up and then moves on to their next challenge. Think about it in terms of how we offer training to library staff? I would be interested in your thoughts.

Transpose is the word of the day.

I have been bugged for along time about how to change the orientation of my data in Excel. Today, I fell across the word "Transpose." I use this when I want to take a table such as average user time on public computers and make it fit on one sheet of paper without making the font so small that only ants can read it. The branch names are the rows and the months are the columns. What happens is that for the 20 or so months we have been running sam, the data runs onto a several page wide print out. Transpose allows me to create a tall table rather than a wide table without having to re-type all those numbers.

Howto: Select the text to transpose, select copy, go to the destination cell, right click and check the transpose box at the bottom. Voila! Freedom Fries for everyone!

Fish Philosophy on Ice

While in Seattle, I attended PLA in Seattle in January Murphy came along as an early Birthday present We were up early Saturday morning and headed down to Pikes Place Fish Market to soak up some Fish Philosophy by icing down the dungenous crabs. Here is Murphy in action.