Thing #13 Easy ELM

I am loving this new password free ELM. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to have no username and password for ELM but it is. Right in to searching without the hassle of signing in. I am using it myself much more and my students will be using it much more come second semester. We gave up trying to use it for class previously because of the problems students had getting in. It will be reintroduced first day of second semester and now I actually look forward to it.

Celebrating the MERGER (#4 again!)

Finally the deed is done and the Minneapolis and Hennepin County Library Systems have merged into one. This has been a wonderful event for our family as our neighborhood library reopened Thursday, January 3rd. We had gone an entire year with our favorite neighborhood destination cold and dark and what a sad situation that was. What with two children that had loved getting over there and two adults who adored our Roosevelt Library as well. We had been among the last to leave when it closed and we were the first family bustling in the door when it reopened. The entire day felt like a celebration of sorts. Our daughter was captured in this photo in the Star Tribune as she explored a new book.

PathFinders

I have been mulling over starting several Pathfinders @ Wellstone but this seemed so out of date. I was surprised to Joyce Valenza blogging about them too.
I had not thought about putting a pathfinder in a wiki but the more I read and thought about it the more sense it made. I think this will give me a reason to give the wiki thing a whirl.
Joyce's always intriguing blog is now posted on the left sidebar.

Say what?

Karen mentioned mashups at the beginning of our class this week and my mind went off on a tangent. I don't remember hearing this word before but it made me think of two incongruent things: mashed potatoes and car crashes. I looked it up on Wikipededia (after all our class was on wikis!) and found out all sorts of interesting information on mashups. The term can mean different things but the most interesting had to do with music. Taking two totally different genres of music and syncopating them. Maybe classical and rap. Fascination abounds with this type of creativity. Now I am interested in listening to some of these mashups or downloading them. What'll people think up next?

I am also interested in incorporating pix with my blog as I have seen Banlang do with her wonderful blog.