PowerSet thinks they have what it takes to change the way we search. Based on the (admittedly limited) capabilities of their test environment, they might just be right.  The search engine is doing some really interesting things with natural language queries to try and determine the desired meaning of a search as opposed to just looking at the words used. For now, the results are only coming from Wikipedia and Freebase, but the test site still provides a nice demonstration of the capabilities.

For example, ask PowerSet "What did Tamora Pierce write?" and it will return a page filled with relevant and detailed informatio...Read More

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A big thank you to the IT team at Reed for hooking us up with new, shorter URLs for the blogs. You can now find all the goodness at http://schoollibraryjournal.com/digitalreshift.  Don't forget that you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog for easy updates with every post using http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalReshift.

Thanks for reading!

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A followup to a post about the Phun physics software - a new version of this free software is available for download for Macs.  Phun, a simple drawing program that then applies complex physics to your work, is also available for Windows and Linux. As you can see from this screenshot, a great deal of fun can be had in the program. It's almost as if it were a . . . game!


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Web browsing got a lot more interesting after PMOG - the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. All of a sudden, simple tasks like checking my mail or seeing what was up for sale at Woot! became dangerous treks into potentially hostile territory. Would there be a mine waiting on the Google home page? Should I try to follow that tempting portal? When the web becomes a game, online interactions take on entirely new meanings. Though I tried to capture the steampunk goodness of PMOG in my article, I am totally overwhelmed by the coolness that is Irwin the Destroyer, a graphic novel review of PMOG by Mark Tuchman and Marty Baumann!

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Author Cory Doctorow wrote a great post on BoingBoing (which, you must realize is pretty much blog number one in the world) giving lots of love to YA sections in bookstores. As he notes, many adult readers are of an age that they never had YA sections growing up and so may not be aware of the gems located there. In this case, readers were having a hard time finding Doctorow's new YA book, Little Brother.

"Many of us grew up in an era before the young adult section -- when the kids' section in the store was just picture books and some 400-volume sharecropped series like Sweet Valley High. No longer -- practically every bookstore now sports a large (and gro...Read More

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Here are the two presentations I delivered today at the New York School Library Media Section conference. I have discussed ProfCast before, but I really have to stress just how nice it is to be able to record a presentation and have it posted online within about an hour (ugh...slow uploads).

• Gaming4Learning
• 60 Sites in 60 Minutes

Robert Lackie gave a very nice keynote this morning about Web 2.0 as well. This evening is an awards banquet with author Richard Peck!

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If you have any lingering hopes in your mind that what you do online as librarians at home will somehow remain private and disconnected with your work, get over it. As I noted in a School Library Journal column last year, there is no privacy in this interconnected social web we are using. This means there are really great reasons not to blog! Even if you try and keep your activities anonymous, there is a really good chance that your Facebook profile, MySpace page, blog, and other online activities will be connected back to you.

Of course, the chance of less well-reasoned online behavior being connected back to you as a teacher becomes absurdly close to certain if you actually publish your full name and school where you work on your profile. As some teachers in the Washington, DC metro area recently ...Read More

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About a year ago I switched from Windows to Mac at work. This weekend, I completed the switch at home. We are now a Mac-based household, but don't think for a second that we are Windowless.

Looking back about a year, I needed to buy a new computer for my office at work. Vista was just appearing, but I really didn't want to deal with the headaches that it seemed to be bringing at the time. Plus, most of our districts were still XP though some have since gone to Vista as we knew they would. To further complicate matters, increased web development meant more time spent on remote access to our Linux-based web server. So what platform would provide the greatest amount of freedom?

Mac OS X was the obvious answer. With Intel processors, Apple computers are a zippy new breed of machines that bear little resemblance to the ...Read More

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Read the more obvious reasons why your library needs a Wii, but still not convinced? Let's dig a bit deeper and see what we can come up with as the super-challenge bonus reasons for taking a hard look at a Nintendo Wii in your library.

6) The physical nature of the Wii's interactivity makes it a great candidate for PE classes. Like libraries who work towards crafting lifelong learners and readers, PE programs are working to motivate students to be active throughout their lives. The Wii, while certainly not a replacement for real physical activity or involvement in sports, does provide a nice gateway for getting students interested. And what was our collection development po...Read More

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Your library needs a Nintendo Wii, though not for the reasons you might initially think. Here are the 10 real reasons why your library should be looking at the Wii.

First, the easy ones:
1) Gaming consoles are the computers that our students are using the most. Though we think of students as being the net generation, perhaps the term screenagers is closer to reality. A recent study confirmed that while most teens spend somewhere between 20 and 40 hours in front of screens a week, 85% of the teens reported spending less than 10 hours a week online.

2) Gaming consoles go well beyond gaming. Did you know that the Wii has built in WiFi? That you can buy an Internet bro...Read More

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Is interlibrary loan something you do, or something you can't wait to do? What if the task were more social? What if, and pardon me for going way out here, interlibrary loan were a game?
Amazing things happen to ordinary tasks when we imbue them with extraordinary significance. As Seth Godin noted recently, New York and DC were all in a twitter over the Pope's visit. Extraordinary measures were taken and people went a bit further because of the potential for a pontifical visit. As Liz Lawley pointed out in a recent talk, Mary Poppins does a nice job of highlighting this point as well; a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down. But what if that spoonful of sugar is delivered in the form of a game?

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What do Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the often violent first person shooter video game genre have in common? Quite a bit more than you might think! The Pigeon series of books has been an instant success starting with the Caldecott Honor for Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. I would argue, however, that what makes these books so popular with children are the same aspects that make first person shooters so appealing as games.

The common factor here is that the Pigeon books are actually first person reader books. Well, that may not be exactly the right term, and I am not sure if there even is a word for this concept, but if not then the literature people need to get busy and find one. Our traditional terms of first person and...Read More

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