Well, it took a day longer than anticipated to work out some kinks, but the new version of NoodleBib is finally here. Included in this release:

1. MLA 7th edition formatting

Any new MLA bibliographies that you create starting now will be formatted based on the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook. If you have an MLA list in your folder, you will be prompted to convert it when you click to open it from the My Lists screen. You cannot continue to edit existing MLA lists using 6th edition formatting, so you are required to update if you want to continue editing the list in NoodleBib. However, the conversion screen also does give you the option of saving your existing (6th edition) list out as an RTF file that you can open in Word, if you do want a copy of it in that form as well.

2. Chicago/Turabian Legal Citations

We’ve added a number of legal source citation options for Chicago style bibliographies. Court cases, Federal or State bills, resolutions, reports, documents, hearings, regulations…. Well, you get the point!

3. Notecards

Notecards have a whole new look in this version of NoodleBib. Since releasing the original notecards feature a few years ago, we’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of classrooms and talked with many of our users about how we could make notecards more functional. The most common request was that you wanted to be able to view, organize and manipulate large numbers of notecards easily. A lot of teachers were asking students to write 50-100 notecards, and the old interface just couldn’t do a good job with that many notes — with so much data on the screen at once, it could take a long time to load, it became difficult to see what you had, and reorganizing notecards into clusters was difficult.

NoodleBib now organizes your notecards for you on a virtual tabletop. You can easily create notes (using a familiar template that you’ll recognize from the old version) and then visually organize them into piles using drag-and-drop. Just drop one notecard onto another notecard to create a pile, as you would do with paper notecards on your desk. And there’s more!

• Create an outline as well, link notecards you’ve created with subtopics in your outline, and even export your outline with the notecards included
• Search your notecards by keyword, tag, or by source
• Add not just regular word tags, but colors and visual cues as well
• Teachers can comment directly on notecards

There are definitely things that we’re still working on with this, but we wanted to make sure that it was released in time for teachers to get a feeling for it before school started. We’re aware of some minor bugs that we’ll be fixing over the next few weeks, but please do e-mail us as you start to experiment with it if you have suggestions or find a bug.

4. Tutorials

We’ve begun to create a series of short screencasts, trying to stay under 2 minutes for each. The first few of these are available here, and we’ll be putting many more of them up in the next few months.

5. PowerPoints

New PowerPoint presentations are available here. They can be useful to present NoodleBib to students or staff, or to get an overview of what NoodleBib is all about.

6. User’s Guide and knowledge base updates (coming)

The User’s Guide and knowledge base are now being being updated for the new version of NoodleBib and for the MLA 7th edition changes. We will post an entry on the blog when this is complete. The user’s guide should be available in about 2 weeks. The knowledge base may take a little longer, but the goal is to have it done before the end of the month.

7. Next steps

We have a growing team of developers here already working on some new things, including:

1. APA 6th edition update: APA came out with the 6th edition of their APA Publication Manual, so we’re in the process of reviewing the changes and deciding what to change (compared to the MLA update, the APA changes are fairly small).
2. Rework of teacher comments/feedback system: While we did add the ability for teachers to add comments on the notecards as well as the citations, that was really more of a temporary fix until we could get to what we really wanted to do, which is to redesign the way the comments are written and read. A more centralized system, where all the comments can be read in one place, students can respond to comments, and more.
3. More to come, but (yawn) we need some sleep now…!

Here is the final update schedule for our upcoming release, which includes MLA 7th edition formatting, a rework of the notecards feature, Chicago/Turabian legal citations, and additional features and bugfixes:

• We will take the server offline Friday evening at approximately 9:00 PM PST.
• Since this is a big update and will require thorough testing on the primary servers, we will keep the site offline on Saturday, August 1st (exact time TBD, but you can just assume it will be unavailable for most of Saturday).
• The site will be available on Sunday, August 2nd.

Note that APA 6th edition changes will not be part of this 8/1 release. However, we are in the process of reviewing the changes in the new edition of the APA Publication Manual, and will post again on the blog soon, once we have a timeline for those changes.

The following updates are scheduled for 7/31 – 8/2/09 (exact date/time TBD):

1. MLA 7th ed. update
2. Chicago/Turabian legal citation forms
3. Notecards update (see previous post)

We are aware that the 6th edition the APA Publication Manual is being published in July. Depending on the scope of the changes, we will decide how and when to proceed with updating NoodleBib.

Three years ago we integrated online notecards into the NoodleBib citation software. Since we didn’t know how (or if) teachers and students would use it, we designed it to be as simple and flexible as possible. Since then, the notecards feature has been “discovered” and today is being used in thousands of schools with great success. Virtually all schools that originally subscribed only to the citation software are now also using the notecards.

Over the last two years, we’ve visited classrooms to observe and interact with students using NoodleBib’s notecards for research projects. Our observations and the feedback that we’ve received from these early adopters (and from many other users) has been invaluable. They are the backbone for the changes to the notecards feature that we’ll release this summer.

Over the next few months you will be getting more detailed information, but we couldn’t resist giving you a sneak peek now. Click the thumbnail below to see our first published screenshot of the new online notecard interface (if you are using IE, you’ll probably want to disable automatic image resizing, to view the screenshot without distortion).

Note: A stand-alone version of the notecards tool is pictured here. The version integrated into NoodleBib will look similar.

The new software models how a student might pile up and play with the organization of real notecards on a physical table top. A student can:

• Stack notecards by dragging one on top of another;
• Mouse-over notecards or stacks to view a quick summary of their contents;
• Label notecards not only with text-based tags, but also with visual symbols and colors for various tasks and reminders (e.g., “Important,” “Need help,” etc.);
• Navigate around a virtual “tabletop” that is larger than the monitor’s screen size using a map (see bird’s eye view in the bottom-left hand corner of the screenshot in which each dot represents a notecard);
• Search notecards by any keyword, tag, or source, then manipulate the search results efficiently (e.g., search for all of the notecards tagged “habitat” and stack them with one click);
• View and edit within the popular current interface of NoodleBib notecards (old notecards will migrate automatically to the new interface);
• Create an outline, then slide notecards onto topics or subtopics in the outline (the software keeps track of what has been already used);
• Print and save the final outline filled with content as a single word-processed document.
• Read teachers comments and questions directly on the notecards just as easily as they see comments on citations now.

NoodleTools was down for about an hour this morning. We’re investigating the cause, but it is running smoothly now and the problem seems to have been an isolated incident. We received a mind-boggling number of e-mails and voicemails reporting the issue =) Since this happened before work hours, we couldn’t update the NoodleTools.info site to explain the situation, so apologies for any inconvenience this caused.

The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook will be published this April (pre-order now). NoodleBib will be incorporating these changes as part of a July 2009 update. The 3rd edition of the MLA Style Manual came out in 2008, and based on our discussions with the editors, the changes in the Style Manual will for the most part be mirrored in the new edition of the MLA Handbook. However, we have chosen not to make changes until July for the following reasons:

1. Changes in the middle of the school year would be confusing for students (and teachers).
2. Some types of citations (like mailing lists, forums, and blog entries) are not addressed in the MLA Style Manual.
3. There may be minor differences between the Style Manual and the Handbook, since they are targeted to different audiences. Based on our thorough analysis of the changes in the new Style Manual, we’ve submitted feedback to MLA about some potential improvements/clarifications that could be made in the Handbook. We’ll see what comes of that (they’ve listened to us before).

NoodleTools will be offline for maintenance on 1/2/2009 between 10 PM and 12 AM CST.

Please note that our telephone support number has changed to (650) 561-4071.

Debbie authored an article titled “Guiding the Gifted to Honest Work” in the most recent issue of the Duke Gifted Letter (Vol. 9 / Issue 1 / Fall 2008).

Students will tell you that plagiarism is everywhere and, perhaps, even irrelevant. To make their case, they point to recent examples of high-profile authors, politicians, musicians and even clergy who have used the work of others without acknowledgment. Although the penalties have sometimes been severe, students assert that these cases prove that intellectual property and copyright are unworkable and outmoded. Read more…

Debbie will be giving a keynote and conducting one session at the Ventura County Office of Education tomorrow, October 3rd. Then its on to Portland on Thursday, October 9th for the OASL/WLMA Conference, where she’ll be doing one of the extended sessions (9 am – 12 pm).

Who Knows What …and How Do I Know it?
Students make judgments about authority in their everyday lives, but don’t necessarily transfer this to evaluating online sources. We’ll look at the relationship between trust, expertise and authority in the real world, the academic world and in the new permeable Web where learners expect to create information and construct knowledge, not just consume it.

Beyond Cut-and-Paste: No More Cat and Mouse, Revisited
You’ve been telling your students not to cut-and-paste, but are you teaching the specific skills they need to avoid plagiarism? Do your students (and do you?) know the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing? Do they know how and when to quote a source directly? Do they recognize common knowledge? Do they understand how to develop their own opinions and voice? Constructivist, student-centered teaching ideas and documentation strategies for your information literacy curriculum.