Joyce Valenza Ph.D

Shmoop: just one LII scoop

While I love so many of the feeds in my RSS aggregator, I always look forward to my weekly LII updates. They are fertilizer for my pathfinders.

Librarians' Index to the Internet keeps on ticking after all these many years, offering several access options:

• Read it online

• Subscribe to the RSS feed

• Subscribe via email
  

• Browse the New This Week archive

Among this week's LII gems is Shmoop.

Your teachers are going to either love it or hate this one. The more I explored, the more impressed I became.

Currently in Beta (with miles to go before we sleep), the site's goal is to make you:

become a better lover (of literature and history).  See many sides to the argument.  Find your writing groove. Understand how lit and history are relevant today.  We want to show your brain a good time.  Our mission: To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age.

Shmoop now covers literature,US history, and poetry with study guides, research content, and links,

written primarily by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities, like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. We source our work (see "Citations") and set rigorous academic standards. Teachers and students should feel confident to cite Shmoop as a source in essays and papers.

The language is totally student-friendly. Content is provided in a way that will engage high school and college students. Display options include: thumbnail lists, coverflow, and surprise me. Search options include a tag cloud. The site can be added to the Firefox toolbar and shared on Facebook.

Shmoop will make a handy starting point for developing background knowledge, for topic, question, and thesis development, and for test prep. Some teachers will appreciate its value for preparing lessons.

Registered users can make use of writing tools--an outliner, sticky notes, clippings, folders, a dictionary, brainstorming prompts, advice for citing Shmoop and avoiding for plagiarism in general. And they may ask questions in the discussion areas.

For literary topics, the site includes: nutshell descriptions, why should I care?, summaries, examinations of literary devices, plot and character analyses, big picture study questions and questions by theme' links to media, and when available, a slide show. Brain Snacks are tasty tidbits of knowledge. Some teachers and librarians might be put off by the Sex Rating for literature--exactly how steamy is this story?  On the other hand, some might find it fascinating.

For historical topics, Shmoop also includes: analytic lenses, quotes, statistics, acronyms, key people, timelines, glossaries, links to primary sources.

A Coming Soon page lists content in preparation and solicits ideas for new content.

It's a very cool site that should, of course, be supplemented by other sources for student researchers.

Thanks again, LII! 

BTW, back in October, the iSchool at Drexel began hosting LII, with the intention of merging it with the Internet Public Library, two of the most widely used library-based technological resources connecting individuals, businesses and society with information.

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on December 11, 2008 | Comments (5)