MAME – Home via kwout
After being on the road for much of the past few weeks, it’s good to be home (or an hour or so from home, anyway).
Here are my slides and handout for today’s presentation on Librarians as Publishers and Aggregators of Content, a focus on eBook and eReader tools.
Well, you can get smartphone apps from Gale that are pretty amazing because they sense your location and then direct you to database content licensed by the nearest library (eerily fabulously helpful).
Buffy Hamilton tells you about the school library edition in this video (particularly useful to Michiganders because Gale supplies many databases to us via the Michigan eLibrary (or MeL):
But what about our core collections? I don’t know of folks who have figured out how to put their OPACs on mobile devices yet. (Oh, Follett, are you listening?) It would be awesome if we could easily do this — and my hunch is that it wouldn’t take very arduous programming work. Imagine if kids could access the collection — including links you may have been adding to your MARC records — from anywhere.
Our university library just announced a mobile interface, along with a rather, uh, cheeky ad campaign popping up all over campus:
What if we could start this 24/7 pocket access and build those habits with younger patrons?
Cult of Mac is reporting some great stories from the Consumer Electronics Show (CEO). One of their posts shows Griffin Technology’s partnership with Crayola.
Take a look at this video of the Crayola ColorStudio iPad app that will be coming out for $30 in Spring 2011.
Then ask yourself … is coloring inside the lines of the shark going to make our kids more creative and innovative? Or is this an example of an “educational” or “creative” tool that actually showcases not the kids but the software developers who created it?
Now ask the financial question … how many markers, colored pencils, crayons, and paper could you buy for that $30? Which investment do you see as having a greater possibility of getting students to create (to make something original that we’ve never seen before) or to innovate (create or problem-solve in new, unpredictable, or unexpected ways)?
(A key question for me in considering this: the iPad remains two-dimensional, whereas the paper can be folded, ripped, cut, stapled, taped, or glued into three-dimensional shapes)
This issue of students’ faux-creativity when using tech tools is a big one for me … what do you think?
Is this tool educational? Entertaining? Able to hold children’s interest for a sustained period of time?
