Visual Literacy Ain’t Just Watching Ads: Decoders, fluent readers and finally expressive readers and writers — these stages apply to visual literacy as well as to reading print. In an image-drenched world, we’ll look at the rhetorical situation of an image, examine some signs and symbols, and see how point of view is created by interaction of the reader, audience, and medium. We’ll consider some emerging issues and teaching strategies for various types of images.

Ethics in the Age of Web 2.0: The ALA Code of Ethics for Librarians has served school and youth services librarians for almost 70 years. How has it supported the intellectual freedom of school and public library youthful users? Does it continue to offer us the guidance we need to face the new challenges and new roles we face in a socially networked, repaidly changing digital world? What needs updating? What’s missing? What has aged well? A panel of experts, library educators, and practitioners will discuss ethical issues associated with social technologies, privacy, intellectual property, cesorship, access to information, leveling and labeling a collection, and selection.

To suggest additions, we encourage you to write to debbie[at]noodletools.com.

The changes introduced in the MLA Style Manual need to be implemented in NoodleBib, of course. There are some changes (like the absence of URLs for most Web citations) that we need to give some thought to and discuss with MLA, given that K-12 teachers are going to still want to see specific URLs for sources used by their students. We’ll need to verify with MLA that the changes in the MLA Style Manual will also end up in the MLA Handbook, since the intended audiences of these two style guides are different. The next edition of the MLA Handbook will not be coming for a while (Spring 2009?), so we also need to figure out the best timing for making these changes in NoodleBib. We’ll keep you posted on these decisions.

• Spell-checking on the “annotation” fields.
• Interactive parenthetical reference help (now allows you to fill in page and volume numbers to customize the parenthetical reference example for your citation)
• Revised MLA forms to handle podcasts, blogs, audioblogs, videoblogs, and online video clips (based on input from the MLA editorial staff).
• Added ability to cite a personal photograph (MLA).
• Revised APA “Web site” citation form to handle various types of “gray literature” (Powerpoint slides, white paper, fact sheet, press release, etc.) as described in the APA Style Guide to Electronic References.
• For teacher/librarian folders, “Lists Shared With Me” now displays a “status” indicator showing if a source list has been viewed/commented yet. In addition, a 30-day history of the source list can be viewed (there is a link to the log when you mouse-over the status). Finally, the number of lists shared with each class name is now displayed beside the class name.

We hope you find these changes useful!

1. For students who are registering a new personal folder under a school/district subscription, Personal IDs are no longer required to be unique to the entire NoodleTools community. They need only be unique to that subscriber (the school/district). This should make it a lot easier to create a personal folder with an ID that the student will remember. And administrators creating batches of student folders via the administrative interface shouldn’t run into the problem of student ID numbers that overlap with other schools.
2. In the administrative interface for school/district subscriptions, we’ve added a user history log that keeps a record of what has been done in each student’s folder. An entry in the log is created each time a student creates/edits/deletes/copies a citation or notecard, merges, shares, e-mails, copies a source list, etc. etc… This should help in a variety of situations. For example, the subscription administrator could analyze what happened when a student reports that some of their work is missing from their folder. To access the log, go to the “user management” area in the administrative interface, search for the user by his/her personal ID, and then click the “log” link in the results list. Note that we only started collecting data on 2/29, so this “30-day log” will not have 30 days worth of data until the end of March.

This is not something specific to the NoodleTools Web site — if you are running with this configuration, you’ll notice that certain dropdown menus (those that get built dynamically via javascript) on various Web sites just don’t…well… drop down! This is a known bug and has been fixed in the upcoming 2.0.0.10 build of FireFox (which you cannot get yet — it is due to be released in December):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400082

For those of you who have not updated your FireFox installation to 2.0.0.9, we recommend that you wait to update the browser until 2.0.0.10 is available in December. For those of you experiencing the issue already, you can either use the arrow keys to traverse the dropdown menu, or you can use an alternative browser for a few weeks (although you will likely experience other problems with Camino or Safari if you are trying to use the notecards feature, since we do not officially support those browsers yet). The link above also contains some information about a temporary patch, for those of you who want to try that option.

Note that this bug is only an issue on Macs running Leopard (it works on Tiger with FireFox 2.0.0.9). PC installations of FireFox are not effected either.

Update 1/5/2008: This functionality is no longer broken in the most recent FireFox update, which is 2.0.0.11. Please update your browser to this version.

http://www.mdedmedia.org/MASLConferenceFlyer2007Color.pdf

Debbie will also be presenting in a conference session: Beyond Cut and Paste (Session 2, conference room 5/6). In addition, Anita Anderson, media specialist at Thomas S. Wootton High School (MCPS), will be holding a session on… NoodleTools! That talk is being help during Session 3 in conference room 4.

When school sites are having trouble connecting to our Web site, they have difficulty determining whether the problem is on their side or ours. Even when planned maintenance was announced on the NoodleTools blog (make sure you’re subscribed, if you aren’t already!), users aren’t always aware of it (or just want to know when the site will be back online).

To solve this, we now have a separate Web site, www.noodletools.info, which indicates the current NoodleTools.com server status. NoodleTools.info is hosted on a different server than NoodleTools.com, so it will be accessible even when NoodleTools.com is not. If there is planned or unplanned downtime, the site will provide information and status details.

Bookmark it now!

http://www.noodletools.com/tools/noodlebib_users_guide.pdf

The knowledge base will be updated next, hopefully before Monday. By the way, the features that we had hoped to squeeze in before the school year started are going to be delayed slightly. We’re moving our office at the end of August, which slows things down a bit. Those changes will be made as soon as possible, but probably not until the end of September.

Welcome back to school! We’re looking forward to working with you all again this year.