The Ed Bott Report on Apple

My latest post about how exciting Apple iBooks for textbooks was posted pre-knowledge of this Ed Bott Report. Each day is an opportunity to learn and share something new.

Campus Technology

Great articles to help not only educators and students, but also an excellent source for any person interested in keeping up with what is new and important in the information technology arena. I personally liked the article entitled: "Strategies for Blog-Powered Instruction," by Jennifer Demski in the 21st Century Learning section of the magazine.

Apple iBooks textbooks for iPad

I am so excited about what our future of learning has in store for us. Click on the embedded video inside this link.

Read Anything

Chapter a Day
Library of Congress

SHU Library
NYT

SI
National Geographic
Cardinal Newman Meditations

The Economy and Job Forecasts

As my blog title suggests, "Don't Be Negative", is what I am standing by because for no other reason being positive is better. The economy and job forecasts are not as healthy as we would all like. People like myself have had to change careers and re-invent ourselves to provide for ourselves and our families. I changed careers and became a librarian and earned my Master of Library and Information Science degree while working 3 part time jobs. I delivered pizza for 2 years. And amazingly I still love pizza. But I am finally doing something I truly love doing. Maybe it had to get worse before it got better. Maybe in my case the recession was my saving grace. I am looking for a full time job as a librarian and I am currently working on a semester by semester contract basis at a community college library. I never thought work could be so much fun. I always thought that the people who told me they loved their jobs were pulling one over on me. But now I am living proof it can happen.

Check out The Patrick French Foundation

Hi to anyone following. The link http://www.thepatrickfrenchfoundation.blogspot.com/
will direct you to my sister's blog that she created to communicate to her friends and family Patrick's journey. Please read about Patrick's trip to Ecuador. It is an amazing story.

W3C Web Semantics & Internet2

I have linked the title of this blog to Ivan Herman's personal web site. Ivan is the Semantic Web Activity lead at the World Wide Web Consortium and This is fascinating work that is taking place on the web. In fact, I did not understand most of the terminology but understand now the concept. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is part of the language used in the W3C to create searches that are less work on part of the search and the machine thinking like that of the searcher. Let me clear that up. The RDF 'Triple' which means the search is going to look at the (S)ubject, and then it is predicated upon something (P)redicate, and then finally that returns a third piece of information, the (O)bject. Allow me to try and explain a little more. In Ivan's PPT presentation at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference his topic was entitled: T1 Introduction to the Semantic Web. In his presentation he gives a simple example of someone wanting to go on vacation to Budapest, Hungary. Instead of having to look up airlines, hotels, pictures, write-ups etc. Why not have the web link all of those searches together. For instance, the Subject is a vacation to Budapest, and the Predicate is that there will be a need for airlines and hotels, and the resulting Object will be the sites to all of those predicates associated with the subject. I hope I got this kind of correct. This is the kind of information I want to learn more about and think about when re-entering the workforce.

On the subject of Internet2 I believe that this is a completely new set of internet networks for people in education and research. I looked at a couple of example handout pieces of literature on their website that explain more in depth as to what the Internet2 project can do. Here is the link to the Information Kits http://www.internet2.edu/info/#informationsheets Here you will see examples of students at a mid-western college wanting to take a screenwriting course, but do not have access to the agents, writers, producers that the California State University at Los Angeles do. Now Bradley College in Peoria, Illinois has access to the screenwriting classes at CSLA and is able to benefit from the industry lecturers through using the internet for virtual classroom time. This is all great stuff and the network is using top of the line equipment that should not need any upgrading for at least the next 3-5 years.