Serendipity

According to Wikipedia, serendipity is when someone finds something that they weren't expecting to find. It's one of those small pleasures that can just make your day a little brighter.

My serendipitous moment this week came in the form of an article in my Facebook news feed titled "Margaret Atwood on Knitting a Great Auk in the Arctic." As an English major, librarian, birdwatcher, and knitter, you know I had to read the article just because of the juxtaposition of such unlikely terms.

It turns out that Margaret Atwood is an avid believer in the preservation of bird species and had been asked to contribute an artwork to an exhibit highlighting birds that have become extinct. Most of the hundred plus artists contributing to the exhibit did their art in paintings, drawings, and prints. Since she is also an avid knitter, she wanted to use wool as her art medium. And there, buried in the middle of the article was the method she used to get a graph of the auk she needed to craft her knitted piece. Just a tiny little mention of a tiny little program available free online to turn your image into a graph suitable for knitting or cross stitching. Whoa! That snapped me to attention!

And here's why:

I'd knit a table runner or wall hanging canvas (I hadn't yet decided which) a couple of years ago. A friend had provided me with a photograph of a lighthouse that I wanted to turn into a graph and stitch onto the canvas I'd knit. But I needed to find a good way to do that. I didn't want to buy an expensive program to do it. I tried various options that seemed possibilities but none really did the job I wanted it to do, so I put the project aside and moved on to other things.

The free online Web2.0 app she used for her graph is Knitpro and I found it with a simple Google search. There are a few easily adjustable settings for you to get the size and direction you want for your graph.

This is the lighthouse I needed to get a graph of for my planned project:




This is a screenshot of the graph generated by Knitpro that I saved as a jpeg and cropped so I could show you what Knitpro did with the image. What Knitpro generates for your use is a pdf that you can then print. What's great about it is that the lines on the graph are numbered to make it easy to follow.



And this is the blank canvas I knit with the plan to stitch a lighthouse on it, painted with stitches, so to speak.




Now thanks to the serendipitous discovery of this little gem of a program, I am now prepared to finish my own artwork using cotton yarn on my knitted canvas.

Follow the Owls

Intriguing! as well as another example of effective marketing. Interactive and participatory rather than the passive TV/movie viewing experience.

Reading Rewards

"It's summertime and the living is easy" , oh too easy for children to forget those reading skills they honed during the school year. Now that summer is upon us, we as parents, librarians and educators fret about how to prevent "summer learning loss". After spending the school year advancing reading and study skills, how can we get kids to keep reading and engaged in pursuits to retain their literacy? Libraries offer summer reading programs, but not all children are able to get to the library regularly. What to do? Michelle Skamene, a Montreal, Canada mother who is a web designer by trade, took a pro-active approach and decided to challenge her children to match the amount of time they spent in front of TV and computer screens with time reading books. Her husband suggested that a web site for tracking time spent reading might be helpful to her challenge. And so Reading Rewards and its French language counterpart were born. And thanks to the social web, we can all use it.



The Reading Rewards website is very easy to use. Kids set up a free, private account which must be approved by a parent. Families determine together what rewards should be for a set amount of reading. Kids log in periodically to record their time spent reading and earn RR Miles for their reading (RR miles-- think similar to airline miles) which must be validated by a parent. But the site goes far beyond tracking reading time. They can also see what other kids their age are reading, write their own reviews, and get reading recommendations by age from a variety of sources, including the National Education Association, Coretta Scott King Book Awards, recommended by Parenthood.com,Parents Choice Foundation, Cybils, recommended by readkiddoread.com, Publisher's Weekly Books of the Year, Newbery Medals and Honors, Caldecott, and American Library Association.

Reading Rewards can be used on an individual basis, of course, but has the ability to create groups, making it suitable for use by teachers to manage a group from a single account.



Creating a group couldn't be easier. From the 'Groups' tab, click on create to set up a new group. Give your group a specific name that your kids will be able to find. Put in the start and end dates. Click on 'Create' and you will then be able to add the details for your group and put in a description and rules, if any. If you have a reading target (in minutes), you can enter it as well. Click on 'Apply changes'. You can also set up a default reward for the kids in the group (optional). When you are ready, click 'Publish'.

Once your group is published, just let your kids know how to find it. Tell them to register on Reading Rewards, and find your group in the 'Groups' tab. Once they've found it, all they need do is click on 'Join' to become a member and start tracking their reading.

Rewards can be set up as a group, or individually since some kids need more encouragement than others. You can click on 'Change reward' next to each child's name and modify their reading targets. By clicking on the smiley face next to each child's name in your group, you can send little messages to encourage them. These message appear in their news feed, on their public page.





If you want to have a list of 'Books I Recommend' appear on your group's page, simply click on the 'Add book' button and find the books on their Amazon-driven website. More about this can be found in the slide show.


Think about how you and those you know might use Reading Rewards to keep those kids reading skills in tip top shape over the long hot summer or anytime for that matter. And for those folk on Facebook, you can search an like their page on Facebook: Reading-Rewards.com.

Reading Utilities: Readability and Instapaper

Reading on the web can sometimes be challenging. Text blocks are broken up, advertisements are flashing relentlessly, type can be tiny. What is a person to do to make reading on a web page more pleasant? Enter Readability , a nifty utility that removes the clutter around what you’re reading. Readability works with most major modern browsers and has been tested on many news sites and blogs. It isn’t 100% effective but works surprisingly well.

First you can choose your preferred style from among newspaper, novel, ebook, inverse (light on dark) or Athelas (graceful using white space to advantage). Then choose your font size from a range of five from extra small to extra large. Finally choose your margin width ranging from extra narrow to extra wide. All of these selection choices can be viewed for effect at the bottom of the page as you choose so you can immediately see their effects and fiddle until you're happy with your selections.

You have an option to convert hyperlinks to footnotes by checking the box at the bottom of your setting choices. What will this do? Articles are often strewn with links — distracting you from the content — and pulling your attention elsewhere. Selecting the "Convert hyperlinks to footnotes" checkbox will pull the links out of your articles and format them as footnotes. Originally linked text will be marked with a simple reference mark so that you know exactly where footnotes correspond to your documents.

Once you have selected your settings, you simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. When you find an article that you want to read, click on the bookmarklet and presto, you will be able to read it in the format that you have chosen.

Readability - Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

Install Readability and enjoy some quiet reading without distraction thanks to the folks at Arc90 and their laboratory experiment. And if you like their little experiment, don’t forget to follow their RSS feed or Twitter while you’re there.

Instapaper

Now that you’ve used Readability to declutter your reading space, you might want to check out another utility that allows you to save web pages or articles for reading later. Instapaper is an app that will bookmark web pages, but rather than saving them to your PC or Mac, Instapaper allows you to access archived articles from any computer you own, even smartphones and Kindle e-book readers.

Instapaper works the same way as Readability by creating a button in your browser toolbar. Go to Instapaper and click on “register for a free account”.


When you’ve registered, this is what you’ll see:



Simply drag the “Read Later” bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. (If you have trouble with installation, check to be sure that Ad Aware or another pop-up blocker isn’t blocking you from adding the bookmarklet.) Once installed, all you need do is click the “Read Later” bookmarklet on a page you want to read later.

Be sure to check out the “Extras” tab at the top of the page to see what other tools, toys, features and applications are available to get content into and out of Instapaper. There are so many ways which you can use Instapaper, it will make your head spin. Check out the many ways from bookmark to e-mail to ebook readers to mobile devices and RSS feeds that you can save content to read later. There’s even an app similar to Readability but using a different technical approach called “Instapaper Text” which you might wish to try. And you can export your list of saved articles, up to the most recent 2000 articles you've saved.

Play outdoors while the sun shines but stock up your reading for a rainy summer day using Instapaper.

Happy reading with Readability and Instapaper!

School Librarians Are Teachers

21st Century Literacy

Literacy doesn't necessarily have the same meaning today as it has in the past. A newly coined word for today's understanding of literacy is "transliteracy".

Nailed 'Em -- Library Crime

Think this kid will understand why he was banned from the library? I wonder if they kick out tourists who come to read the newspaper too?

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Snowglobes

Remember the fascination of snowglobes when you were a child? I do. My grandmother had one we loved to shake and watch the flakes drift gently down. It always seemed to finish too fast.

I bumped into a web site that allows you to make a snow globe with your own photo so that I'd try it with that favorite picture of my grandson.



It's missing the drifting snowflakes, but it brings back the memory of that childhood fascination.

Superior Reading

It seems like I have been reading Nevada Barr's Winter Study for a long time now. This is the second book she's set in Isle Royal National Park. I picked it up because it incorporates information about Rolf Peterson's ongoing study of the wolves on the island and as a Yooper, I've read many newspaper accounts of the wolf study in the Houghton Daily Mining Gazette over the years. While the book is as good a story as her others, I guess I'm not really wanting to be reminded of the winter conditions at the end of summer. It's all too soon that the landscape will resemble frozen tundra and we'll all be exhausted just getting bundled up in our winter wear before we can head outside. I have strong recollections of reading another of her books during an outbreak of temperatures ranging down to forty below zero. Her all to vivid descriptions of spelunking in narrow passageways below ground gripped me with a panicky claustrophobia. The tiny house where we stay in Minnesota suddenly seemed the size of a matchbox and I needed space and air. I don't recommend standing outdoors in pj's and robe at midnight when it's forty below..but I had to gulp in huge breaths of fresh cold air and not feel so confined. Now that's GOOD writing!

Finally ALA on the Image Generation Bandwagon

As I've been playing with easy to use image generators online, not to mention free, the thought had often crossed my mind that ALA was missing out on a great opportunity by only offering their READ cd for sale. Since it also required some expensive Photoshop software to create the READ posters in addition to the READ cd , which was not inexpensive itself, the average librarian, operating on a shoestring library budget, would have to think twice about making a major investment for PR.

Imagine my surprise when I came back from vacation to find that they had finally hopped on the bandwagon and placed the ability to generate READ mini-posters online.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, you can do it here.

More Image Play With My Favorite Photograph

(Click on the picture for a better, bigger view of the textorize effect in the photo.)

I bumped into an application called Textorize while looking for more "things" for the more 23 things project being planned by the multitype directors. It looked intriguing (reminded me of a graphics project we had to do in a business class in high school that involved a lot of counting and typewriters) and I thought I wanted to try it out. Textorizer is a tool that transforms a picture into another picture made up of chosen words.

There are actually two versions of Textorize. I used the web version of Textorize II to create this effect of a favorite picture of my grandson reading. I got the image link (the second box with the url from Flickr when you look at the photo and select size) from my Flickr photostream. I pasted that url into the appropriate box in Textorize II, and added the text I wanted used: DJ reading picturebook fun Flotsam by David Wiesner. I adjusted one setting (how many lines of text to use) to increase it, and hit the button at the bottom of the page. Shortly afterwards the image you see, but larger and in a svg format appeared on my Firefox browser screen. The tricky part was trying to grab the image, save it in an image format usable for my blog, and sharable. I spent way too much time last night fiddling around with that, and not very successfully. However, I finally found that I could print the image in a large size and did so. Then I scanned it to a jpg file and saved it that way, then resized it. I know, cheating, but I just couldn't get the screen capture add on to Firefox to work for me, wasn't satisfied with printscreen in Windows. I'll go back to it later to resolve at another time when the frustration has faded. In the meantime I have yet another version of the photo that warms my heart every time that I see it, this time composed of letters and words, rather appropriate for a photograph of a child reading.