I can read without moving my eyes!

Oh man, wait til the people who hate ebooks hear about this! They're all upset that we're dispensing with physical pages, the smell of new bindings, and the varieties of type face. Wait til they hear that we're dispensing with paragraphs and page layouts!

I just finished the third article in the Boston Globe's series about reading. There were three articles--the past, present, and future of reading--and the third one was by far the most interesting. Reporting on current reading research, the author proposed a way to deliver large amounts of text through small screens: Rapid Serial Visual Presentation or RSVP.

Basically, the words appear on the screen one after another and you just read them before they disappear. Sounds stressful, right? But there are some popular RSVP apps and extensions on the web, and their creators emphasize that you can read much faster this way.

I had to try it, so I downloaded this Firefox add-on. The tutorial gives you a pretty good idea of how it works.



I have to try it more, but what I immediate notice is that I don't like seeing the first half of some punctuation, like quotation marks or parenthesis, without seeing the other half. Also, I'm so used to line breaks being meaningful, like in poetry, that when I'm reading two or three words at once, I keep looking for significance in the groupings. But I'm intrigued!

Also, I've decided that I would like the next generation of ebook readers to work like snap bracelets: I want them to be flexible, so I can roll them up, but I also want to be able to hold them above my head with one hand while reading in bed, so then they would have to be rigid.

The Boston Globe article mentions some other interesting possibilities. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety.

Social Networking Sites for Kids

>>For a more recent post on this topic see: Online Tools: Biblionasium (1/21/13)<<

Inspired by NYPL's summer reading site, I've been checking out different social networking sites for kids. I'd like to teach my students how to "social network" safely, and of course, developing my own online playground seems like the most awesome way, so I was curious about what the standards were for developing safe sites.

I like how the NYPL and Scholastic "Stacks" site have username generators that let kids pick an animal, color, or adjective, but don't let kids put any of their personal information in their username. I also appreciate that they don't require an email address, which kids are practically discouraged from having in public elementary schools (not that I agree with that).


I noticed that other sites have controlled vocabularies kids can use in their posts--and sometimes even prefab statements they can use, like those comments teachers put on report cards. So kids can't really chat freely, but they can respond to other people's, you know, stuff.

With a lot of these SVEs*, the emphasis really isn't on communicating with other kids, as far as I can tell. On sites like WebKinz and StarDoll, you're creating and maintaining an online creature--it might be an avatar, but it's not necessarily a representation of you--it's more a representation of a pet or toy you wish you had.

I haven't spent a lot of time playing around these sites yet, but I did explore StarDoll's Mortal Kiss site--apparently the publisher collaborated with an existing kids' social networking site to promote a particular title. Is this a model for libraries?


I'm cautious about partnering with commercial sites, but I wonder how many libraries have the capacity to develop and maintain their own social networking sites. On the other hand, I know very little about programming. I just know that when I tried out BuddyPress on my other site, I got malware the first week, so I just deleted the whole thing. I think it happened because I removed the email validation.

I also noticed that Follett offers something like social networking as part of its Destiny Quest--not that it's turned on for my library's catalog. This makes the most sense to me: have social networking be part of the online catalog, a database which already includes peoples' personal information as well as access to the collection. Now that RI public libraries have Encore, you can tag books and see a Google preview. Soon, can we write reviews? And will any aspect of this be designed with kids in mind?

Other sites to check out:

KidzRocket
The Doll Palace
Quizilla
Club Penguin

*Like how I threw that in there? It stands for "Shared Virtual Environments" and I got it from "Tip of the Iceberg: Meaning, Identity, and Literacy in Preteen Virtual Worlds," by Eric M. Myers. This article was published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 50, No. 4--Fall 2009. I got it through URI's access to Ebsco's Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts.