NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Friday morning after class, I prepared to take in the numerous records I had been keeping all year to finally get my taxes done. When I turned on my computer, an error message come up saying it could not find the hard drive. Now, I am not very good with hardware, but even I knew that that was not a good message. I took my computer in to a store and hoped for the best. I came back five hours later and they were only 25% into reading my hard drive to try to save my information. My computer had my tax information, digital pictures, music, and my homework. So after a long weekend without my computer, I went back to the store where I was told that they were unable to recover anything. It's all gone. GONE! Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking "you should have backed up your hard drive." Believe me, I have been told that a million times. In my defense, I tried to back up my photos on Kodak Gallery, but there was an error in downloading the program. Plus, I was getting ready to back-up my taxes when my hard drive crashed. On the upside, I now have a good reason to get a new laptop (yes, I have a gadget addiction.) Until then I have had to make due and it has been rough. One nighgt, I used my sister's desktop with a dial-up connecction and another evening I spent at the public library. My favorite part of that experience was the women at the computer next to me who were looking up prison inmates so they could try to make a love connection. I am currently using my roommate's computer which seems to have a "y" key that is about to give out. (I had no idea I typed so many y's.) I asked the guy who worked on my laptop if there were any clues. He listed a few like running slow, problems opening files, etc. Every problem I had in class and trying to do our usaility testing. So I have learned that I need to get busy on ordering a new computer, get an external hard drive, and use more words that do not have y's.

New Toy

I feel like a little kid on Christmas! I have a new toy. My cell phone's battery was pretty much burnt out and my car charger broke at the same time when I got a serendipitous offer from my wireless carrier to upgrade early to a Blackberry Pearl. At least, I took it as a sign. My roommate has a Blackberry and it just looked so cool! The little kid in me still cannot resist something so shiny with lots of buttons to push. When I ordered it over the phone, the salesman gave me the warning that it would take some getting used to. I will have to say that he was right. I have never had a phone that gave its own tutorial as soon as you turned it on for the first time. So far, I love the large screen and the roller ball for navigating around the screen. However, setting up the e-mail has not been easy. The phone will not accept my work or school address, so I had to create a Blackberry address. I really did not want another e-mail address to keep track of. I have not attempted (yet) to get my work and school accounts to forward to my Blackberry address. The other trial has been my contact list. I thought I was being proactive and I registered on my wireless carrier's website to get a back-up created of my contact list. Downloading that worked great, but my new phone does not support the software. Unless my laptop is with me, the online contact list just is not all that helpful. I can go to a store and have it transferred, but that will be taking away the convenience of having the phone mailed to my home in the first place. I suppose that ultimately the moral of the story is if you ever decide to make the leap from cell phone to smartphone, you'd be smart to go to the store in person and spend 15 minutes with a real person as apposed to a few hours with tech support and a manual at home. But it's okay. I am still excited about my new toy and it will be awesome once I get used to it! If not, I'm sure my wireless company will offer me an even more expensive upgrade in the future.

Dark side of Technology

Often it is hard to come up with a topic for this blog, but today it was easy. Unfortunately. Today my parapro confiscated a digital camera from a group of boys. They were watching a video and making some very telling comments. For the sake of decorum, I will not share what the boys were saying. When she figured out how to work the camera, we found that a girl in the middle school had made her own little amateur porn video. I did not view the video and I did not ask for details (I do not need the nightmares) so I do not know exactly what was on the video or how explicit it got. Now I realize that I was on the naive side as a child, but when I was in middle school I was incredibly embarrassed just to hold my boyfriend's hand in front of people. This young lady is passing her camera around to several boys to watch. I sincerely hope this is a very isolated incident, but I fear that it is not. Tools like digital cameras, cell phones with cameras, and the Internet allow people to do so much without having to go through a third party. For example, you do not have to go to a photo department to get film developed. How does posting explicit videos or pictures in a public forum fall under doing things anonymously? As I work with teens and many adults, even though they are posting on a public forum they do not seem to understand that anyone can see it. Maybe they are counting on the sheer size of the web to protect them from people they know seeing what they post? I am not sure if people feel more bold because of the sense of anonymity or if all the outrageous things available makes some think they have to do something bigger and bolder. I realize I am being a bit cynical, but what is it about human nature that makes us take new technology and one of the first things that happens is we figure out how to use it for porn? Think about it. When a new technology starts to catch on, people bulk at it because it starts being used in relation to sex. Social sites are dangerous because sexual predators are on them. The Internet must be filtered because of all the porn. Movies must be rated so minors cannot see anything with the wrong rating. Music and TV must be rated for the same reason. Geez, it makes me understand why the Amish think technology corrupts. However, even with all the problems I am still willing to take my chances, I will just make sure that I never borrow someone else's digital camera.

Random observations

Technology has been pretty good to me these last couple of weeks, so I will be making a few short observations as opposed to one long blog on a single subject.

I took on the part of the wiki where we are posting the reference librarians' favorite resources. The purpose of this part of the wiki is to provide the student workers a quick list of ready reference sources. I assumed that since we were approaching the full-time academic reference librarians for suggestions that I would get back mainly print sources. Lo and behold, so far they have all only given me websites. I am totally surprised! Maybe it is because I am currently taking my reference course, but I thought I would get answers like World Almanac or assorted encyclopedia sets, maybe a few odd books that Notre Dame students often need. I feel so mislead now in my reference prof.

Last week, I taught a unit with one of the English teachers. We decided to write obituaries. Seriously. To introduce the kids to authors, we had them pick one from a list or they could get one approved. Then they researched the author's life and works using the Biography Resource Center through Inspire. Once they were finished with their research, then they used the timeline template in the Inspiration program to create a pre-writing graphic organizer. The hook and the impetus for this project was the story that the AP has written Britany Spears' obituary just in case. I really thought that the teacher and I did a nice job of incorporating technology into a lesson in an authentic way. The students did a better job using a database and navigating Inspiration then what I have seen them do with other lessons.

Speaking of other lessons, a project that is a staple around here is the disease brochure. In this lesson, the students research a disease and make a brochure about it with pictures. So far, in the many times I have witnessed the health teachers doing this project, the main goal of many of the students seems to be "how can I get a really disgusting or naked picture around the filter." Breast cancer and elphantitus are both very popular with the male students for those reasons.

Cobbling technology

As I have discussed before, I work in a high school with some old technology. As far as I can tell, the school won a technology grant in 1999. Most of our laptops, digital cameras, data projectors, and other various pieces of equipment are from that year. This means I often find myself cobbling together different pieces to make one usable unit. For example, one DVD player stopped working. I used the cables on another DVD player and the remote went to another unit. Then I took the TV it had been hooked up to and traded it out with another TV whose sound had started to go. When teachers need a laptop with a projector, we have a session of twenty questions. I have one laptop that can be hooked up to the Internet. Another that has a USB port and another that can only take floppies. Then there are two more that are newer and are tablets. One is missing the stylus pen and while both of them can hook up to the Internet, both of them have broken ports where a data projector would be hooked into. It becomes very frustrating trying to meet the needs of teachers and students. Also, it can be a bit embarrassing. Sometimes I do not ask all the right questions or the teacher comes in and signs-up for the projector themselves. If they sign-up for a projector that does not meet their needs, then I am called in to fix the un-fixable. It is hard to constantly have to apologize for it and then the teachers are frustrated because they have to change their plans on the fly. On the bright side, I have found that I can be pretty creative on finding my way around these problems. Before you know it, I may be the MacGyver of LHS.

The Wonderful World of Wikis

For our service learning project, we decided to look at some other wikis to get an idea of what is out there. I have to say, that I saw some really impressive things. I like working with wikis. We learned how to write in html code in 401 and I have attended a few workshops for using various webpage building software, but I had never even felt remotely comfortable creating webpages. Wikis are different. They are so easy to use! However, I thought the the trade-off was a very "plain jane" looking site. Now I now know that this is not so. There are some excellent, very visually appealing wikis out there. What I find truly amazing is that I first worked with a wiki just three years ago. The level of sophistication was much lower and that is where I developed my opinion that wikis cannot be pretty. I know technology is moving along at a nice clip, but the rapid pace that improvements are being made in the realm of social networking technology still manages to astound me. The examples I have seen have shown me for one that the page formatting possiblities are much broader than I had imagined. Plus, to reference an earlier post: the widget possibilities are amazing and several are offered for free. The free part just blows my mind! We have spent so much time being constantly warned about the dangers and depravity of the Internet, that it is hard to believe that some are creating this cool tools and then just giving them away for the good of everyone. It's nice to see a creative endeavor that was made to help, not just for a profit. Some of the more tradtional arts have lost that spirit. Now I find myself wandering into the area of copyright, so I will end this here before things get ugly.

Follett Destiny

My library is currently operating on Follett Circulation Plus system and we have not updated in a few years. I have been trying to persuade our tech guy that we needed to update our system and move our OPAC to the Internet. So, I was very happy when our tech guy sent me an invitation to a webinar on the Follett Destiny system. One, I am excited that the upgrade I have been pushing for is being seriously considered, and two, I have never been to a webinar. As with a lot of things technology-based, the webinar did not go on without a hitch. The e-mail with the address we needed to go to was captured by the spam-filter. Then, the sound did not work. Luckily, the Follett people were prepared. They had it set-up so we could listen over speakerphone. The webinar itself was rather bland. It was a Powerpoint with someone reading a script. Some features that I would love to have are mainly in the OPAC. One, we have some of the Web 2.0 features. The OPAC would have pictures of the book covers and students could write reviews with star ratings (the reviews are approved by the media specialist before being posted.) I think this would be a great tool for teaching the students about the OPAC while giving me a great tool for collaboration with the teachers. Another thing I really liked was that the OPAC would be on the Internet. I think this would ultimately help out our three elementary schools. They are small schools staffed by paraprofessionals. By making all the collections searchable by all the schools, my hope is that they would use that feature to start doing loans between buildings. The final feature that I was excited about is that they will enhance our MARC records. As I pointed out, out of our five schools three are staffed solely by parapros and another has a media specialist, but her parapro does the cataloging. I took over the cataloging from my own parapro when I came to the high school. While these ladies have done an outstanding job (with no training), the catalog has definitely suffered. I would much rather have Follett clean up the records then have to do it myself. I am one of those weirdos who likes cataloging, but that would be too much of a good thing.