VALISblog |
|
|
|
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Arizona School Will Not Use Textbooks - Yahoo! News
Via Techdirt comes this story, wherein an Arizona school has given up textbooks and will instead supply children with laptops and "use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans". Great way to give kids the (incorrect) idea that everything is available online, I guess. I'm not filled with confidence at their prospects for success, given that even the superintendent of the School District is unsure of how the switch will work. I'd also question the technological determinism of the claim that "we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools". That's a correlation. It's not causality. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one other explanation for the difference - kids who have access to laptops at school are probably attending school in a wealthy district, and have other advantages at home. The presence of the laptops, and the engagement of the students, could be explained by their background, rather than the laptops themselves causing greater engagement. | Friday, July 01, 2005
More on Innovative & RSS in the OPAC
LibrarianInBlack has an update on the use of RSS in Innovative's 2006 release of Millennium: " Library staff can insert customized RSS feeds into catalog pages (for library events, booklists, etc.) Any search run using Boolean can be turned into an RSS feed. This means that new items that fall into the search parameters of a patron's choosing can be fed to them (kind of like Preferred Searches)" I may be reading the press release wrong, but it seems to me that only librarians can create feeds from Boolean searches. Which is good, as far as it goes. But, thinking as a user, I don't want librarian-generated feeds - I want to create my own! Maybe in the 2007 release... | |
