We are pleased to (officially) announce that Chicago/Turabian bibliography-notes formatting will be available in NoodleBib starting September 1st. All subscribing users will automatically have access to the new formatting option, and it will also be available as part of the free NoodleBib Express tool (which allows you to create individual citations).

There are two “bibles” of Chicago style — Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (7th ed.) and The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.). There are a few differences between the two guides (most significantly, the noticeable lack of coverage of online sources in the Chicago Manual of Style). We decided to stick with Turabian’s Manual for Writers (which is written more with a student in mind) as our “primary” guide for the new feature. In the same way, we use the MLA Handbook as our primary guide for MLA formatting (written for secondary school and college students), rather than the MLA Style Manual (written for graduate students and scholarly authors).

We look forward to working with you all again this school year!

Debbie will be presenting at IASL in Berkeley today (Sunday, Aug. 3) from 1-4 PM.

Seeding the Oyster: Leadership Through Dialogue
Marilyn Kimura and Debbie Abilock, Room 104
You’ll recognize the names of these discussion groups: Socratic seminar, Literary Club, Harkness Table, deliberative dialogue, professional study group. Yet few librarians have used them as advocacy tools to build learning communities in support of literacy and collaboration. We will provide an opportunity for you to experience several types of inquiry discussions using provocative texts, photographs and film clips. As you learn discussion, reflection, and facilitation skills, you will see how nurturing inquiry and intellectual dispositions can seed your leadership in the school community.

Our users know that NoodleTools is unique because we focus on helping teachers and students learn. Not mindless fill-in-the-blanks software, NoodleBib is a powerful and accurate citation and notetaking program where students get the support they need when they need it. Throughout the research process students are learning to investigate analytically, think critically, articulate ideas clearly and document their evidence accurately.

Sharing these goals, Pearson Education recognized that we were the right partner for the next generation of their writing software. We’re delighted to announce that NoodleBib is seamlessly integrated into the new version of Pearson’s MyCompLab, a writing instruction environment. From the MyCompLab composing space, a student can click the “Cite sources” link in the Writer’s Toolkit to open NoodleBib, create a source list and notecards, and then import that work directly back into the MyCompLab editor. Users will find NoodleBib a slick fit with MyCompLab’s intuitive composing space and writing instruction resources.

[ click image for full-size view ]

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About Pearson: Pearson Education is the global leader in educational publishing, providing scientifically research-based print and digital programs to help students learn at their own pace, in their own way. “The new MyCompLab empowers student writers and facilitates writing instruction by uniquely integrating a composing space and ePortfolio with proven resources and tools. In this revolutionary application, students receive feedback within the context of their own writing—encouraging critical thinking and revision while honing their skills based on individual needs. Administrative features developed specifically for writing instruction bring instructors closer to their student writers, make managing assignments and evaluating papers more efficient, and save instructors time.” More…

Debbie spoke in two AASL/ISS sponsored sessions at the ALA Annual Conference last week, one on visual information literacy and another about ethics in a Web 2.0 environment. Thanks for attending, and to those of you who came by to say hi!

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.

NoodleTools’ Online Opportunities for Young Writers Web page was just selected as one of Writer’s Digest’s 10th annual 101 Best Sites for Writers in 2008. Used by teachers of English, history, and science as well as elementary school teachers in collaboration with the school librarian, this site describes authentic opportunities for student writers in online publications. Each publication is described in a critical annotation that includes age range, guidelines, and reader focus.

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

The new (3rd) edition of the MLA Style Manual is now available. We’re really happy to see that they’ve simplified the citation of Web-based content (in particular removing the distinction between different “types” of databases that has confused students and teachers alike). We had several discussions with the MLA editorial staff about this, and they listened! In fact, we’re acknowledged by the editor (David G. Nicholls) in the Preface!

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.

As we are every summer, we’re hard at work on some exciting new projects and NoodleBib features for next Fall (look for upcoming announcements on this blog). Meanwhile, we continue to listen to your suggestions for how to improve the existing tools. Although they aren’t always announced, we usually do a minor update to the site about once a month. Here are a few of the more significant improvements that went into the most recent update on 6/1:

• 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!

Two minor (but potentially very helpful) changes to report:

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.

It has come to our attention that a Mozilla bug is causing a problem with dropdown menus for Mac users running Leopard OSX and FireFox version 2.0.0.9. In NoodleBib, this effects the dropdown menu that you use to select a citation type — clicking the dropdown arrow does not open the dropdown menu (although you can still use the keyboard arrow keys to traverse down the list and make a selection).

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.

Just for fun, we thought it might be interesting to see the geographical distribution of the current NoodleTools subscribers in the United States. Each pin in this map represents one NoodleTools account (where an “account” could be a single school/university, a district, or even an entire regional consortium in some cases). Individual subscribers are not displayed on this map — these are only schools, districts, etc.