INFORMATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE (ISC) ISSN 1364-694X CALL FOR PAPERS (Feel free to foreword this message to friends and colleagues.) The summer 2007 issue of the online journal Information for Social Change (ISC) will focus on the urgent theme of library and information workers as political actors in times of war, civil war, military occupation, … Read more Call for Papers: Information for Social Change
Here is a bit of depressing but not surprising news. Kathleen de la Peña McCook was thrown off of the Higher Education Service Learning discussion list for addressing a bit of Bush administration disinformation. Dr. McCook is not some unhinged anarchist who goes around trying to stir up trouble on discussion lists. She is a … Read more Kathleen McCook thrown off HE-SL discussion list for addressing disinformation
I’ve put three articles from the latest issue of Progressive Librarian, issue 26, up on the web. They are: Towards Self-reflection in Librarianship: What is Praxis? by John J. Doherty The Context of the Information Behavior of Prison Inmates, by Diane K. Campbell REVIEW ESSAY: Adult Literacy Practice and Theories ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù the writings of George … Read more Three from Progressive Librarian 26
Steve Lawson at See Also, which is an interesting blog, has created an informative Reading list for Library 2.0 skeptics.
“The ‘IPPY’ Awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers. Established as the first awards program open exclusively to independents, over 1500 ‘IPPYs’ have been awarded to authors and publishers from throughout North America and around the world. This year’s … Read more 2006 IPPY Awards
Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center for Justice has just released a major public policy report on internet filtering that “explains the effects of CIPA and then analyzes nearly 100 tests and studies that demonstrate how filters operate as censorship tools.” It is interesting that this think tank produced such a major report … Read more Free Expression Policy Project Report on Filtering
The Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force of ALA/SRRT has a new web page collecting resources for libraries in providing service to poor people. We could all do a better job serving poor people, couldn’t we?
Library 2.0 is a powerful idea that finds itself in an awkward predicament. It is an idea that has emerged out of what amounts to a separate discourse within librarianship, that of younger, web-centric librarians who have often have a sense that they are remaking the profession from the ground up for the digital future … Read more The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy
Danielle Dennie found new hands to take over the LibrarianActivist blog. They’re also Canadian – recent grads of the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. Here is the announcement. Congratulations all around and best wishes to the reborn blog.
Here’s a riddle: What does the musical interval of a fifth have to do with discussions of multiple literacies, the millenials, and Marshall McLuhan’s predicted decline of print literacy and the corresponding rise of a more multi-sensory way of being, thinking, and judging? Answer: play the high note and followed by the low note of … Read more Print virtue and the ontology of the Bo-ring
“Critical thinkers can be parodied either as disgruntled and bitter subversives, or as elitist mockers of others’ well-meant efforts. The pejorative associations surrounding the word critical have meant that advocating critical thinking is a form of social and educational bad taste.” – STEPHEN D. BROOKFIELD; Developing Critical Thinkers, 1987. Quotation from International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia, … Read more CRITICAL THINKING
This open letter has been circulating elsewhere, but deserves the widest circulation possible, in my opinion…. “I’m sharing this open letter from Patricia Polacco because it raises chilling questions about intellectual freedom. Many of you heard Polocco speak at the ALSC preconference last year and will recall that she was very critical of NCLB.” Kathleen … Read more Open letter from Patricia Polacco RE: International Reading Association Conference
Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of academic and public interest groups formed in response to David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” initiative campaign, has just released a major report refuting Horowitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. The coalition’s researchers introduce the report… After conducting interviews with the professors in … Read more “Facts Count”: Examination of David Horowitz’s Dangerous Academics book
Christopher Phelps, a history professor at Ohio State University, Mansfield, asked me to post his letter to the Dispatch in response to their coverage of the situation involving the anti-gay book selection for the freshman “unifying reading experience” and the subsequent harrassment charge. Here it is: THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH “Newspaper off base in criticism of … Read more More on the Mansfield situation, from a Mansfield professor
I decided to do something a little different with the blog. Let me know if you have seen this elsewhere. In my right-hand sidebar I’ve added a section of book authors, which links to searches for their books on Red Light Green. I read books, so why should I link only to blogs and online … Read more Book Authors in the Sidebar
Here’s an article in Wired Magazine about RFID hacking, which means using your own equipment in place of the official equipment to send and receive data connected with RFID tags. Hackers can do things like steal the code off a key card in someone’s pocket and then use it to get through a door, or … Read more RFID Hacking
Interesting story behind Harvard student-author Kaavya Viswanathan, the one whose hit novel turned out to be somewhat plagiarized… She was working for (or with?) a company called Alloy Entertainment, which does “book packaging” for the YA book world, handling authors and book concepts and working with publishing companies. It seems that Alloy’s postmodern-capitalist way of … Read more The Death of the Author, as a Business Model
I would like to turn your attention to a thoughtful post by Argentinian librarian Edgardo Civallero on Cuba and the debate surrounding the “independent library movement.” Edgardo blogs mostly in Spanish, but also in English, for our benefit. Though he is a self-identified anarchist and anti-authoritarian he’s sympathetic toward Cuba and sees that society from … Read more Argentinian library blogger on Cuba
“Why Kent State is important today,” an editorial by journalism student Michael Corcoran in today’s Boston Globe.
A preprint of a paper by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., to be published in Information Technology and Libraries 25, no. 3 (2006): “Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?” (pdf) The title kind of says it.