Here’s a nice summary review from the Wired Compiler blog. Includes comparison with Shelfari and LibraryThing features. First learned of it from Libraryman (thanks, Michael!).

I took a few hours away from weeding in the garden yesterday to attend the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, which will be heavily blogged, Flickred, and Twittered. (See Michelle Boule’s notes at Wandering Eyre.) Opening keynoter Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT’s Interactive Media Comparative Studies Program, spoke about games, media literacy, and participative culture.

Jenkins shared ideas that are in a MacArthur Foundation White Paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” He made the point that young “digital natives,” who we might regard as advance and adept beyond our help, in fact, badly need the guidance of adults—parents, teachers, librarians—in social skills and cultural competencies. Students need help with research and critical thinking skills, particularly those with least access to computers. If you only have 20 minutes on the computer in the library for your homework assignments, you’re more likely to take the top hits. Also, students need a nudge to transfer the knowledge or skills from a gaming environment to real life. Finally, young people need help developing ethics in their participative environments.

ALA Editions author Joyce Valenza has been exploring these issues for some time. I recall her concern years ago that students weren’t nearly as good with Google as they thought. Now social software raises new issues. For ideas on guiding digital natives, listen to the podcast of Joyce’s 2007 National Educational Computing Conference presentation with English teacher Ken Rodoff “Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0” (courtesy of the Apple Distinguished Educators series.) Joyce posted an accompanying wiki pathfinder here.

Jenkins mentioned a couple interesting projects for educators. Icue, a collaboration with NBC News, will use blogs, social networks, and games to connect kids to events in U.S. history. As an example of creative mixing, he described a theatrical adaptation of the Moby Dick story created by teens in Rhode Island. See more in the blog post here. Jenkins is looking for partner libraries who would explore new ways of teaching Moby Dick.

See the Project NML website for more ideas on new media literacies.

The iPhone doesn’t go on sale until 6 pm, but at noon the line in front of the Michigan Avenue Apple store here in Chicago is already a block long. And what does one do while waiting in line for an iPhone? Work on a MacBook while listening to an iPod, of course.

Or sleep.

I couldn’t find any librarians in the line, but this guy shouted out that he liked libraries, so that merited a shot!

A sign taped to the building above one of the early adopters’ heads said, “You wouldn’t understand.” Um, yes, we would.
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At Midwinter in Seattle, no fewer than three people sought me out, one even stopping me on the street, to tell me that “Michael Porter’s got an idea” for a book. Never one to be too slow on the uptake, I made sure to talk with him at a reception we were both attending. Several conversations and one contract later, I’m thrilled to say that Michael (aka Libraryman) will be writing for us.

Just what is this big idea, you say? Michael will be interviewing and gathering stories from individuals and institutions that have become leaders in successful electronic community engagement. He will use these stories as the basis for real-world lessons that libraries can use to more effectively engage the communities they serve. The work will be many things: part historical snapshot of this transition period in library service, part motivational storytelling, part benchmarking, and part practical handbook.

Michael himself is thoroughly immersed in this world of electronic community engagement, and I’m really looking forward to his tour.

After reading Karen Schneider’s post on the ALA TechSource blog and Tim Spalding’s post on the Thingology blog, I put David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous on my to-read list. This past weekend, I got a third take on the book from Amanda Chapel. See her review on her blog, Strumpette. (Fair warning: Strumpette, which targets the PR industry, is not a polite blog. Some readers will be amused by the attitude and language; some will not.)

You might also be interested in Weinberger’s guest post on Strumpette last August, on the topic of Internet transparency.

Those Parisians are just so hip. Residents have been asked to submit their own garden plans for Les Halles. The top five plans will be created on a Second Life island. The BBC News article doesn’t say what the island name is, but the sponsor of the island is a residents’ association named Accomplir. The submission deadline is June 1, so things should be looking lush by then.

This seems like a great way to get patron (especially student) feedback on a planned library renovation, or a way to create good PR for an ongoing project: Take a sneak peek at your future First Life through Second Life! I don’t know much about terraforming in Second Life, so I don’t know how literal the representation could be. Anyone more knowledgeable out there who can comment?