The findingDulcinea Blog

As Libraries and Librarians Are Cut, We Need Them More Than Ever

Congress recently reintroduced the SKILLS (Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries) Act, a bill that aims to get at least one library media specialist in every public school by the 2010-2011 school year. By doing so, it sent a strong message: that leaving students in an unstaffed room with computers, books and other media, without guidance on how to use that media, is unacceptable.

Even as schools across the country continue to cut their library staff and book budgets, more and more schools are adding computers to the classroom. Now that students have more access to the Web than ever before, how are they suppose to make sense of all the digital information they encounter on a daily basis?

As findingDulcinea founder Mark Moran points out on his blog, founding Dulcinea, “As good as your kid may be on Facebook, she is not born with a digital M.L.S. These skills are learned, not instinctive, and the only way for students to learn them is for someone else to guide and teach them.”

This is where today’s school librarian comes in. Forget the “1950s bespectacled stereotype,” Moran writes. Today’s library media specialist is on the cutting edge of information literacy and poised to share expert digital research skills with students and teachers.

In support of educators looking for quality Web resources to share with colleagues and students, we launched Web Links, a collection of useful Web sites organized by school level and divided into student and teacher pages.

We also offer “10 Tips for Researching on the Web,” a list of quick suggestions that can help you find what you’re looking for faster, and help you make sure the source is reliable.

Colleen Brondou

Sweet Sites | Don't Know Much About Music?

In the research section of our Web Guide to Music we’ve touted allmusic, an underrated encyclopedic resource of artist biographies and album reviews. If you’re reading a review of an album on Answers.com or in the iTunes Music Store, it often originates at allmusic.

Stream through your favorites in dozens of genres with Lala, a site that lets you both stream and download music. In a companion piece to this blog post on findingDulcinea, “Enjoying Music on the Web—Legally,” we discussed Lala and a few comparable sites. Lala stands out because of its extensive archive of 7 million songs, including classical, country, classic rock, pop, jazz and indie rock. Artist pages on Lala often include bios, as well as links to similar artists and Lala users who streamed or bought the artist.

Essentials of Music is a classical music destination with composer biographies, MP3 samples of their work and articles on major eras in classical music. The site is based on the W. W. Norton book title, “Essential Classics.”

Parents, get your children educated about classical music with Cincinnati Public Radio’s Classics for Kids, a site with radio shows, audio samples, articles on periods and composers, special features and games.

Mainstream and indie music fans alike will appreciate the new Billboard. The site used to be a hard-to-access database of music charts and news. Now it’s a glossy, colorful, multimedia-filled publisher with interactive music charts, news, interviews, concert coverage and more.

If you like Billboard, be sure to check out “5 Must-Book Music Sites,” a must-read for indie music fans that are just getting their feet wet online. It features five top sites in five categories—concert listings, MP3 blog, music magazine, lyric database and video site—as well as five runners-up.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Getting Acquainted With Blake Harrison of Flocabulary

Remember watching “Sesame Street” and learning the alphabet and some basic math skills? How about “Schoolhouse Rock” and learning the difference between an interjection and a conjunction, or how a bill becomes law? Did you forget how much fun learning could be?

Blake Harrison didn’t forget. Harrison, along with Alex Rappaport, founded Flocabulary, a teaching curriculum that uses educational hip-hop music to teach reading, vocabulary, math, science and social studies. The duo has taken their music on the road, held teaching workshops and created a current events series called The Week in Rap.

FindingEducation, a new tool that helps teachers save and share their favorite Web sites and assignments, spoke with Harrison about his inspiration for Flocabulary, how music enhances education and why teachers are seeing value in this unique approach. Read the full interview with Blake Harrison at findingEducation’s blog, Digital Teachers’ Lounge.

Introducing the On This Day Challenge

Today marks the official launch of findingDulcinea's brand new tool, findingEducation. It's an online resource that allows teachers and students to save and share their favorite Web sites, as well as post and share assignments with the findingEducation community. It's up and running now in alpha mode, and we'd love for you to sign up and take a look around.

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more. Learn about the mission behind findingEducation and the On This Day Challenge by reading our founder Mark Moran's message to the findingEducation community.

We'll be working toward building a community of teachers and students (and a collection of amazing Web resources) on findingEducation over the coming weeks and months, and would appreciate it if you'd spread the word. Sign up and tell your friends, whether they're teachers or parents, or just need a reminder of how much fun learning can be!

The Internet Holds the Past, Too

Modern-day students live in a ‘now’ society, but now is constantly shifting. What’s ‘now’ right now—Kanye West’s rude interruption of country crossover Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards—has already begun sliding into the archives of our minds. It will appear in media outlets for days to come, and will be revived on end-of-year lists recapping the wackiest moments in pop culture, but it’s already passé to a lot of people, particularly young people.

A week is a long time in politics. It’s also a long time in a student’s life. My tenth grade history teacher once wisely told our Western Civ class, “Every year of your life will feel shorter.” Ten years later, I see he was right. For today’s students, the media—and particularly the Internet—is helping to stretch time even more. The number of events, exchanges, videos and emoticons that a young person experiences in a given week is far greater than it was for me ten years ago. But each digital transaction seems to hinge on the present, or better yet, the future. What about the past?

Beloit College publishes the Mindset List every fall. It’s an “effort to identify the worldview of 18 year-olds” entering their first year of college. The list is made up of cultural phenomena that have existed during these students’ lifetimes. For example, the class of 2013 has “never used a card catalog to find a book.”

As Time Magazine rightly notes in an article on the list, a lot has changed since 1991, the year most of this year’s college freshmen were born. “In 1991 the world watched a black motorist named Rodney King be beaten by L.A. cops, all of whom were acquitted; a majority of whites still disapproved of interracial marriage. Ask yourself, Would the people we were then have voted for a mixed-race President and a black First Lady?”

We can look back, and pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come. But to keep moving forward, we have to keep looking back—not only at last week, when outbursts by Rep. Joe Wilson, Serena Williams and Kanye West got us thinking about topics like race, sportsmanship, egotism, manners and musical talent—but farther back, decades and even centuries back.

The Internet has a reputation for showcasing the next big thing in an ever-refreshing browser page. But today’s young thinkers should remember that the Internet is a limitless store of information, and it has a very good memory.

Check out our article “Web Sites for Researching History” to delve deeper into the past online.

Stay tuned for our On This Day Challenge, launching next week, where students will improve their online research skills and general Web savvy by writing articles about historical events using online resources. Students will post their articles to findingEducation, our collaboration tool for teachers and students, and we'll be selecting the best for publication on findingDulcinea.

Sign up for findingEducation to get notified about the challenge launch!

Sweet Sites | Finding News in New Places

Part of my daily role at findingDulcinea is to find news stories that are provocative, educational and informative. We take these stories and try to answer other questions readers might have about the topic. For example, North and South Korea appear to have reached a new chapter in their relationship since the death of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in August. But what of the countries’ relationship with the U.S.? How have relations fared since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950?

We choose stories from a variety of sources, and in our own stories, include information from an even wider variety. But how do we find such a diverse collection of headlines? Below are five interesting sites that I recommend to Web newshounds new and seasoned.

Current has expanded from being an online television station of provocative, user-submitted content; it is also a social bookmarking tool. Users post stories from all over the Web, and the selections speak to the users’ inquisitive eye for quality, thought-provoking stories.

DailyMe syndicates news stories from newspapers around the country, and allows you to customize your own start page. This is a nice full-text alternative to an RSS reader. See the whole story, not just the headline, and see stories in only the topics that interest you.

Smithsonian Magazine isn’t about breaking news or sensational stories; it covers big ideas on a range of topics, loosely categorized into sections such as “People & Places” and “History & Archaeology.” Last week, the magazine’s article on micronations prompted us to profile a few eccentric and innovative micronations in a feature called “What is a Micronation?”

Bing News is Microsoft’s answer to Google News. At first glance, there are a lot of similarities, but Bing has a column off to the left that reads your IP address and brings you local news. The design of the site is cleaner and easier to read, there is a special section for news videos and I often see headlines here that I don’t see elsewhere.

The Slatest is Slate Magazine’s top 12 list of news stories from around the Web. It’s frequently updated, stored for archival perusal and includes the top stories from major news sources in a separate box to the left.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Sweet Sites | Refuge From the Apostrophe Apocalypse

Grammar vigilante and candidate for living definition of the word “cantankerous,” Stefan Gatward of Tunbridge Wells, England, has been vandalizing signs so that they display the proper use of an apostrophe. For Mr. Gatward, The Times of London reported, a sign on St John’s Close that reads “St Johns Close” is a symbol of a larger cultural problem.

As the recent findingDulcinea article “What’s Happening to Writing Skills?” reveals, Mr. Gatward is not alone in decrying the decline of language. If only he’d known about the blog Apostrophe Catastrophes, perhaps he’d have put down the pen, snapped a photo and reveled in the support of the syntactical community. Fortunately for language enthusiasts, the Web boasts several oases of grammatical correctness and linguistic love.

The fiercest syntactical debates tend to be transatlantic, but American grammarians can still find a home at World Wide Words, which considers “international English from a British viewpoint.” Michael Quinion, author of “Why Is Q Always Followed by U?” and former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, has collected over a decade’s worth of his own articles on individual words, turns of phrase and eclectic themes, such as “the vocabulary of British lotteries” and “tourism’s lexical legacy.” He also answers questions and reviews books about language, ranging from “The American Heritage Dictionary” to pop-grammar hit “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.” World Wide Words is basically a one-stop shop to satisfy any linguistic curiosity, but if you’re still not sated, his “Other Sites of Interest” provides an exhaustive index of the Web’s offerings.

Reading blogs and columns is one of the best ways to keep abreast of trends in the word world. Schott’s Vocab, a New York Times blog, “explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note.” If you’ve become written-word weary, tune in to actor Stephen Fry’s BBC radio show on language, “Fry’s English Delight,” which recently pondered the meaning of “hallo.”

For more of a community, join alt.usage.english, a large grammar newsgroup that rivals the Secret Service for seriousness of purpose. If you’re too intimidated to participate, take a look at their extensive archive, but beware: their FAQ section alone contains 220 topics.

Jill Marcellus
Senior Intern

Sweet Sites | A Eulogy to Kennedy and Obituaries

Photo: AP

Last night, Sen. Edward Kennedy passed away after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. Any newswire reveals this much, but only the obituary pages offer a comprehensive look at Senator Kennedy’s life and national importance. Technically an announcement of death, an obituary can also serve as an authoritative biography, and it is often written while its subject is still alive and continuously updated until its fatal debut. Before you tire of the phrase “lion in the Senate,” read the following thoughtful and detailed looks at Senator Kennedy’s life, and bookmark those newspapers’ obituary sections for some excellent biographical resources.

Declaring Sen. Kennedy “a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life,” the six-page New York Times obituary delves scrupulously behind the senator’s public image, offering a detailed, chronological account that balances the discipline of his public career with his private excesses and troubles. After an overview of the circumstances of Kennedy’s death and his recent role in the health care debate, reporter John M. Broder breaks down the phases of the senator’s life, from a youth overshadowed by more powerful brothers to his role as influential statesman. The Times supplements its written obituary with multimedia resources, including a 13-minute video tribute.

Focusing more on his legislative accomplishments and priorities, The Washington Post obituary provides a slightly different emphasis in its extensive coverage of Kennedy, but still wraps up with a thorough and interactive biographical timeline. Reporter Joe Holley also offers his personal reflection on the senator on the Post’s “Post Mortem” blog, which goes behind the day’s obituaries in regular features like “The Daily Goodbye.”

For an international perspective, including details on how he “annoyed several British administrations,” read Kennedy’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph. Interspersing its obit with illuminating quotes and anecdotes, The Telegraph offers a more personal and visceral account of the senator—and of its other obituary subjects—than the American papers do.

Finally, if you would like to research an older or more obscure death than Senator Kennedy’s, the Internet Public Library has written a helpful guide to finding obituaries.

Jill Marcellus
Senior Intern

Discover a Culture Through its Cuisine

Mollie Caselli writes for GulliverGo, a new study abroad and travel Web site.

When I studied in Paris I took courses in French language and history. Classes were challenging, but my experiences with the local cuisine introduced me to the real Parisian culture. Whether you’re at a food market, birthday dinner, or learning to cook homemade pasta, the local recipes will teach you about daily life.

You can mark the days, seasons, and holidays by what you eat. If you’re Greek, it’s sweet bread at Easter, Baklava at Christmas, and Greek Avgolemono (lemon and rice) soup on Sunday. My Italian family savors a pot of Crab Cioppino every Christmas Eve. Christmas in Paris: I overindulged in La Bûche de Noël (cake bread) and Stollen bread. You know it’s a hot day in Spain when locals spoil themselves with Gazpacho. Anyone can experience these cultural treats; you just have to be a little open-minded.

Visit Local Restaurants

Don’t just open a tourist guide and find the most popular restaurant. Check out those hole-in-the-wall joints. You know, the homely ones where people speak the native language. Carry your language dictionary and you’ll be able to translate what’s on the menu.

Learn to Cook

Take a cooking class abroad. Whether it’s a day or a week, learn how to create your favorite food. You will not only discover its history, but you’ll also take a piece of your host country home with you.

Live With a Family

It might sound daunting, but live with a local family. Maybe you already have family abroad. Get to know them. I lived with a host family in Paris. We shared conversations over dinner. I even helped cook for a birthday party. Some locals invite travelers for one night. You’ll enjoy great food, but you’ll also learn how families value their time together.

Go-Go Boots, Baby Boomers, Peace Movements and Pop Art: Minced Metaphors of the 1960s

AP
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair of 1969, perhaps one of the least dramatic events of the decade.

There’s a new line of thought being developed by many journalists. They’re making a plea for a fresh look at the protesters that have usurped town hall debates across the country, arguing that many civil rights activists in the 1960s didn’t always know what they were doing either, as Mitch Albom suggests.

Albom may be onto something. The 1960s may not be as rosy as second wavers and civil rights activists imagine. In the early 1960s, black people rose in rebellion all over the Deep South in response to the memory of slavery. Their deep and constant humiliation was found in poetry, music, occasional outbursts of anger and more frequent sullen silences as they pledged themselves again and again to passive resistance.

The 1960s also marks the decade when two buses left from Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, only to be burned, with riders beaten because of their affiliation with other Freedom Riders; when prisoners, instead of shattering rocks on a work gang in Georgia, smashed their own legs with sledgehammers to call attention to the daily brutality they suffered; and when civil rights workers go missing. Come to your own conclusions about Albom’s analogy. There are plenty of resources for mining the Internet for cultural and political historians of the 1960s. Here are a choice few of them:

PBS produced a timeline of the 1960s with resources for teachers and students.

The Seattle Times presents a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

Ron Jones’ famous social experiment, The Third Wave, was a proto-fascist movement among his high school students in 1967, and is a cultural artifact of the 1960s.

Ella Baker, who advocated for civic engagement in a participatory democracy, is one of the superstar civil right activists of the 1960s, and has a Web site dedicated to retelling her biography.

To sate the increasing interest in presidential private thoughts, catch up with John Quincy Adams on Twitter, read George Washington’s diaries or visit the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum to take a peek at Johnson’s diary. 

Joshua Goldberg