Bonbons: a bookish Christmas tree

So you're in the library, and you've got the Christmas tree up....

and hey, it's another chance to not only celebrate the season and goodwill and so forth, but also to be distinctly library, maybe do a bit of marketing that's a celebration of the year's popular books.  So we asked the kids for suggestions, and then made up some special decorations for the school library Christmas tree...

A closer look.  Hands down, the most popular book in the library this year (gad, that was a frightful pun!)

and finally, my origami boys came through big time - 32 sheets of luminous lime cardboard turned into this fabulous star:

How to make the decorations? (you're on your own with the star!): find copies of favourite book covers (eg. from bookdepository.co.uk), create a Publisher document with them, print in colour on glossy photo paper, stick onto a sheet of stiff cardboard (we used the luminous lime) and cut them out.  We could have done fancier than paperclip hangers, maybe, but what the heck - it's real, and fun, and reflects the kids' interests and enthusiasms this year.

What do you think?  The kids think it's cool!

Bonbons: Pride and Prejudice, in Facebook style

...this screenshot is just the beginning.... read it all (chuckling madly! - I did!) here.

They do admit to reversing the usual Facebook order (most recent first) since I guess we are most used to reading P&P in narrative order...

Charles Bingley created an event: Ball at Netherfield.  Snort!!!

Bonbons: Christmas cards from the Twilight crowd

As a teacher librarian, you don't necessarily get a bunch of Christmas cards - but every one you do get is special.  The evidence follows...

And this student has already started telling me which new books to buy NEXT year...

I think she meant 'voracious', since it was a word I kept using in relation to her reading habits.  Isn't the comment on the left fabulous?

This is the envelope for the one from the 'vivaceous' reader.  Great postcode!

This was the winner of our Twilight competition (she won a limited edition Twilight Tshirt which I sourced from special sources...she also spent much of November writing an intense vampire romance novel of her own.

This message may relate partly to Twilight, but the sentiment is one that would have any teacher librarian incandescently pleased.  I am.

Whether this is the tip of the iceberg, or the whole iceberg, each one is delightful and very much appreciated.  What lovely kids! (as so many are).

(Names have been blacked out for privacy reasons)

Bonbons

With next week being the final week of the term and the school year, I've lined up some bonbons to share with you.  Twilightery, other fun stuff as Christmas approaches.  Avagoodweegend!*

*that would be Have A Good Weekend in Australian slang.

Twilight dolls

Hmmm.  Did you notice something odd about that image?

Here's a hint....

Yup.  Twilight character dolls.  Likely to be over $100US.

Read an article here, and the manufacturer's website is here.

(Images sourced from those links).

Verdict on the Twilight film?  I enjoyed it, and am hearing positives from the kids who've seen it (released yesterday in Australia).  Very amusing to hear audience responses to favourite characters, scenes, quotes, events.

Busy times in the library right now.  Stocktake, end of the school year (which it is in Australia, we're heading for the summer holidays) and so forth.  So there'll be another week or so of entries, and this blog will take a summer break.  Woohoo!

How the internet affects reading

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" asked Nicholas Carr in an article in The Atlantic. He has a number of useful links, including this quote from a research study:


It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Damon Darlin in the New York Times disagreed: "Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down, It Frees Our Minds", he concludes:

...the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

All teachers teach reading and research skills. These are both pieces worth considering.

Fiction Friday: The Twilight crowd recommends...

The Twilight crowd has been reading faster than me (or, that would be, enthusiastically borrowing books before I have time to read them myself!).  Here are some of the ones they've liked best in the last little while - some newer, some that have been around for a while longer:

(Actually, I've also been reading the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire mysteries.  We had a conversation, the Twilight crew and I, about all the vampire romances we aren't stocking in the school library.  The words "too much bonking" and "local library" came into the discussion...that's the thing about vampires.  They ain't all 'vegetarians'....).

Another reader of The Hunger Games (a Fiction Friday pick from a week or two ago) had exactly the same beef as I did with the incompleteness of the ending.  So it's not just me.

Image source

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Twilight movie reviews

Entertainment Weekly has a roundup of the reviews of the Twilight movie (not out in Australia till 11 December unless you've got tickets to an advance screening) here.  Interesting to read the reader comments (many of them negative)

Or read an amusingly snarky-eyed view of them here.

The consensus seems to be that if you like that sort of thing, you'll like it; ie. it's probably similar to a film like Dirty Dancing, involving swooning fans and bewildered critics.  Sometimes a meringue movie is an excellent thing.  But only if you like meringue movies.  And among the hardcore Twilight fans, there are bound to be those charmed and those appalled by any film that translates their imaginations onto a screen.

EW also has an article about filming New Moon (the success of the first film fuelling the second).  Also, a box office analysis of Twilight's opening week - at $US70+ million, it's the largest opening weekend for a film directed by one woman.

If you love Twilight, you probably don't want to read Twilight: The lost script.  (If you like snark, you do).  That was the source of the image above.

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Shelving YA fiction

Interesting discussion of YA fiction "a genre that's getting harder and harder to box" on the blog Bookshelves of Doom, in an interview with A.S. King, author of the forthcoming Dust of 100 Dogs.  Read it here.

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How exciting are your library trolleys?

Find some inspiration among the 2008 Pimp My Bookcart competition here.

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Vampire of the Mall and the T-shirt of 2008

In conjunction with the release of the Twilight movie (not yet in Australia, but 11 December isn't far away!), Robert Pattinson (who plays Edward Cullen, a distinction as invisible to many girls as such distinctions often are...) is being mobbed in American shopping malls (read the NYT article here) - and one fan wore the best T-shirt of 2008.

On the front:

I never got my letter from Hogwarts.

On the back:

So I am moving to Forks to live with the Cullens.

Hmmm.  Think I might borrow the school's badgemaking machine for a little while...

Fiction Friday: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was recommended by Stephenie Meyer on her website, so the Twilight fans are keen to read it, given its anointing by their favourite author EVER.  It was also favourably reviewed by Stephen King (that review is reproduced on the amazon.com page for this book).

The gist of the story: in a dystopian future America, each of the twelve districts is forced by the authorities to send a girl and a boy to participate in the annual Hunger Games: twenty-four into the arena, constantly televised, and only one will survive to be the winner - the death of the other twenty three being prime time viewing, manipulated by the authorities.  A gruesomely engaging premise, and naturally the heroine, Katniss (odd name - doesn't quite work for me) is one of the twenty-four.

It's done cleverly, sidestepping too much grue and violence (despite the setup), and will probably find a ready audience.  My gripe is with the ending - a major plot point is held over to the sequel.  I recognise that many books have ongoing plot lines linking books in a series, but this particular one was a payoff that should have been addressed - even if not fully explored - in book 1.  Just felt a tad disrespectful of the reader, to me, given that book 2 is not available/published.

Still, if Stephenie and Stephen like it, who am I to argue?

Image source.

Google hosts LIFE picture archive

The picture archive from LIFE magazine goes back to the 1750s, and in the twentieth century in particular, includes many iconic images.  The archive is now being hosted by Google - find it here.

Image source.

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Plagiarism and malpractice

Ensuring students are aware of what constitutes correct use of information, and what is plagiarism and malpractice is important (of course).  The NSW Board of Studies has a program done by all NSW HSC candidates.  If you're not aware of All My Own Work, you may find it a useful online resource.

The program's content is divided into five modules:


1. Scholarship Principles and Practices
2. Acknowledging Sources
3. Plagiarism
4. Copyright
5. Working with others

Each module contains:

• Information and advice on the module focus questions
• Quiz questions
• Summary
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Link to a glossary
• Links to relevant websites.

The site also includes the statement: Honesty in HSC Assessment, detailing the roles and responsibilities of staff and others as well as students.

(HSC=Higher School Certificate, the end of high school qualification in NSW schools)
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Wanting to be famous

Two points of view.  Author Andrew O'Hagan, interviewed on the Book Show here, sees the wish of teenagers to be 'famous' as a signal of moral decay and likely to lead to disappointed adults.

Author Justine Larbalestier, in her blog entry here, sees this wish as evidence of an answer that conceals uncertainty, and not necessarily anything to do with moral decay.

Apart from the interesting variations in viewpoint, also possibly a resource for debating or writing involving the discussion of different perspectives on the one issue.

Twilight fanfiction

The internet has facilitated the sharing of fanfiction to an extraordinary degree.  What is fanfic?  Stories that use the characters and world of an existing story - a book, film, game - and embellish and develop it in the fan's particular ways.  Harry Potter is just one example of a book that has generated lots of fanfic (over 370,000 stories).  Check out the list here of fanfic inspired by particular books.

The Twilight section on fanfiction.net has nearly 1500 pages of stories by a vast multiplicity of authors, 15 stories per page (quick maths: that adds up to A Lot! - but nowhere near the Harry number), with different endings to existing books, stories that take place within the time frame of a book, utterly different character stories, you name it.  There are RSS feeds, so updates/additions to stories can be tracked.  One example a Twilight fan here is enjoying has Bella as Aro's daughter - she looks eagerly for the next instalment of Volturi Secrets. 

The quality of fanfic is, as you would expect, highly variable.  In the classroom, some students engage with creative writing exercises by writing fanfic; although you need to watch that they don't let the world and its rules constrain their writing (or spend all their time reading for research, to avoid writing...).  The volume and popularity of fanfic also attests to the affection in which the original works are held; and shows that young people are writing (not just texting!).
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The 200th post

Just thought I'd note that this blog has reached 200 posts with over 6000 visits and 10000 page views.   And not just by mentioning Twilight (oops, I did it again!), she grins.

Thanks for visiting!  Come again!  I keep finding the useful stuff and keep posting it here, so I can remember and you can enjoy.

Cheers!

ms b

PS We thought up a GREAT school library Christmas decoration idea.  When we've got it refined, we'll share it.  And you still haven't seen the fabulous foyer, either....

Things a teacher librarian can't do: No. 2

Bring forward the release date of the Twilight film in Australia to match its US release. 12 December isn't so far away, is it??? The anticipation is positively feverish. Hmmmm. I don't want to know when the first little enthusiast finds an illegal online source of a pirated copy of it...

Twilight film - advance screening in Australia on 3 December

The Twilight film's Australian release date is 11 December, but Hoyts has advance screenings on 3 December at some cinemas, including some in Sydney, for members of its club (you cansee which cinemas, and join on the site).  Other cinema chains (Greater Union, Reading) may have similar offers - check their sites.

I've had some kids already tell me they've booked for 11 December, and Gold Class, so they have the best possible experience.  Aaaaah.  I hope they do!

After the A-mazing initial cover (you've forgotten?  Let me remind you:

OK.  Breathe deeply.  The worst is over.

Entertainment Weekly is featuring three 'collector' covers on an upcoming issue.  Rather better, at least if this is anything to go by (sourced from stepheniemeyer.com):

Head over to Stephenie Meyer's site for more news, if you're not full to bursting yet.

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Fiction Friday: Temeraire

This is one of the best books I've read in ages, adult or YA. It had grazed my consciousness, sorta kinda, and then something brought it to my attention again. Hmmm. Think we do have a copy of that in the library. I fished it out a couple of weeks ago, and devoured it in short order, before promptly ordering the rest of the series for the school library. What's the gist? Historical fantasy: the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France, from the point of view of the British. Oh, and the military includes an aerial corps. With dragons. Excellent dragons.

It's terrific writing, great imagination, a sense of history, good storytelling. I put it in the hands of several of my keenest fantasy readers, and they've all read it fast, asked for more and are evangelising about it independently. One of them, who'd been at the top of the list, hopping from foot to foot for months waiting for Brisingr, and enjoyed that, said this was the best book he'd read in ages and ages (and where's the next one, miss?). Well done Naomi Novik.

Temeraire is the first book (also published as His Majesty's Dragon), and then follow Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles. The last only in hardback until February next year. Peter Jackson has the film rights (director of The Lord of the Rings series. Yes, him. Should be good! - but probably not for a couple of years). Naomi Novik's website is here .

The cover on the copy I had in the library is a more painterly thing, less graphic - I like these striking covers, and the kids do too. As you would have gathered, we have a building list of reservations, and they're turning over fast.

The object lesson for me - and I've made a conscious effort to read more of the YA fiction this year than last - I've always read it, of course, but this year even more - is that a) I'll make happy discoveries for myself and b) never underestimate a good book, well-recommended. I know my enthusiasm meant more than if I'd just said, what about this? without having read it myself.

Oh, and will I admit to adding these to my personal library at home?

Image source: The Book Depository .

PLR/ELR: Australian books in libraries

The 2007-8 Public Lending Right/ Educational Lending Right Annual Report might not be on the top of your to-read pile, but it's an intriguing look at what's popular in school and public libraries in Australia. It relates to books written by Australian authors, fiction and nonfiction, and on the general lists included, children's literature rates highly. The Appendixes cover popular books over the last year and over a longer time span.

Here's the top twelve from the last year (ELR):

1 Fox, Mem: Possum Magic
2 Vaughan, Marcia K.: Wombat Stew
3 Rodda, Emily: Rowan of Rin
4 Klein, Robin: Hating Alison Ashley
5 Baker, Jeannie: Where the Forest Meets the Sea
6 Rodda, Emily: The Forests of Silence
7 Jennings, Paul: Unbearable: More Bizarre Stories
8 Gleitzman, Morris: Two Weeks With the Queen
9 Jennings, Paul: Unreal! Eight Surprising Stories
10 Marsden, John: Tomorrow, When the War Began
11 Park, Ruth: Playing Beatie Bow
12 Jennings, Paul: Round the Twist

I don't know offhand the publication date of any of these, but my guess is that they're all at least five years old, if not more, which is interesting to note too.

One book, three covers

It is fascinating to see how one book can have a multitude of covers (as I've blogged about previous-like ) - and the assorted, varying, interpretations associated with them.  The Allen and Unwin blog, Alien Onion, has the US, UK and Australian covers for Teen Inc - and a description of the book - in this blog entry .  Worth reading (and seeing).  Which one would trawl in the most kids in your library?

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Interactive best seller list

The Wall Street Journal, source of yesterday's article on vampires, has an extensive book section, including an interactive bestseller list where you can see how fiction and nonfiction rate against each other over time, as well as viewing past bestseller lists. Look at it here.

While it is American-focused, I find lots of useful ideas in the online versions of international newspapers. Had you expected the WSJ to range so far from economic and financial matters?

Real Men Have Fangs: vampires have never been more popular

Pulp genres interbreed as wantonly as alley cats. The vampire novel, once strictly relegated to the horror section, has in recent years infiltrated the romance, science-fiction, fantasy and young-adult shelves of bookstores. Individual authors may specialize in anything from gothic swooning to crime-fighting, globe-spanning action, high-school intrigues, chicklit-style shenanigans and Southern-fried humor.

Whatever the chosen literary mode, however, vampires are pretty much a constant. And while America's men may still regard the vampire as a nasty, blood-guzzling villain who prowls cheap horror films, to female readers he now appears as the latest incarnation of Prince Charming.

Vampires have never been more popular.

From Real Men Have Fangs, by Laura Miller, a thoughtful critical piece in the Wall St Journal that explores, among other things, issues of Edward's (controlling) relationship with Bella in Twilight.

Strange maps

Had you thought of comparing the size of China's provinces (population-wise) with other countries of the world? Nope? Don't need to. This entry from the Strange Maps blog has done it.

There are more things in heaven and earth (and in the blogosphere), Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.*

One to share with the Geography teachers at your school, or just keep an eye on for your own fascination. Maybe a library display possibility, strange map of the week?

*With apologies to Shakespeare, and Hamlet.

Image source

Presidents and Picture Books (first Tuesday in November)

Read the Allen and Unwin blog, Alien Onion , for their take on presidential aspirant picture books (Obama and McCain and Hillary Clinton).

And then read the source article from the New York Times, here.

As Alien Onion says, it's a field unploughed by the Australian picture book industry.  Rudd? Howard? Turnbull? Gillard?  Hmmmmm.

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Inkheart film trailer

There's a film of Cornelia Funke's book, Inkheart, that's close to release - imdb shows no date yet for Australia, but the UK is down for this December, the US January 2009, so it's not far off.  Inkdeath, the third book, will be published very soon, and I have some happy kidlets hyperventilating at that prospect.

Here's the Inkheart trailer from trailerspy (DET users can usually see trailerspy video).  The page's link is below if the video doesn't show for you.  There's also an earlier teaser (usually shorter) trailer there too.

Inkheart Trailer

Trailerspy link to Inkheart trailer page.

Fiction Friday: ALA 2008 Teens' Top 10 & Australia's Inkys.

Found this here.  The longlist is here.  We have all of them but the last in the library, and they've been borrowed regularly.

The 2008 (USA) Teens' Top Ten

The vote is in! More than 8,000 teens voted on this year's winners. The 2008 USA Teens' Top Ten is: 

1. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
   
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
   
3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
   
4. Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead
   
5. Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports by James Patterson
   
6. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
   
7. The Sweet Far Thing  by Libba Bray
   
8. Extras by Scott Westerfeld
   
9. Before I Die  by Jenny Downham
   
10. Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson
    

Australia's version of this is the Inkys , results not yet in for 2008.  Inkys longlist is here ; Inkys shortlist (3 Australian, 3 international) is here and shown below.

• Town, James Roy: My brother Kimlan works all night fixing the road. He wears a shirt that reflects the light from the cars. The boss man says that if he does not wear that shirt, no one will be able to see him unless he smiles.
  
• Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan: It's funny how these days, when every household has its own intercontinental ballistic missile, you hardly even think about them.
  
• A Brief History of Montmaray, Michelle Cooper: Officially, the head of our household is Uncle John, who is Aunt Charlotte's brother and Veronica's father (and the King of Montmaray), but he's rather distracted on his good days, and downright alarming on his bad ones.
  
• Genesis, Bernard Beckett: …the only thing the population had to fear, was fear itself. The true danger humanity faced during this period was the shrinking of its own spirit.
  
• Boy Toy, Barry Lyga: It was like watching the mating rituals of retarded birds, clumsily stepping the wrong patterns around each other over and over again.
  
• Before I Die, Jenny Downham: I sit up and switch on the bedside light. There's a pen, but no paper, so on the wall behind me I write, I want to feel the weight of a boy on top of me.
  

Off the top of my head, and without checking, I'd say Tales, Montmaray and Before I Die would be the ones of those which have been borrowed regularly from our library.

Halloween in the library

We did a bit of decorating of the library foyer for Halloween, to promote reading - according to the students, it's 'cool', so that's a nice accolade.   It wasn't hard to fill the bookcase with fantasy/magic/spooky/wizardly books, although I must admit to a soft spot for Anticraft: Knitting, beading and stitching for the slightly sinister...

We made the bookmarks you can see in one of the pictures (I use Publisher, and have a preset blank I've made and saved on which I put the current theme) and the pennants and tags.  One of my co-workers had the pumpkin light, and that was where it all started... No lollies, and we stayed away from the icky end of it.  Lights, corndolly decorations and beads from Ikea, fabric and little skeletons/spiders from Spotlight, large skeleton from a two dollar shop, cardboard is standard colours, fonts sourced from the site I mentioned here, Twilight poster from Dolly, a couple of book promo pieces gifted by the lovely local independent bookshop.  The Ikea stuff and fabric were the most expensive ingredients (and also reusable), while the rest is largely ingenuity and time.  We'll box it up next week and have some more fun next year. 

My favourite of our slogans:

The TRICK with reading:

TREAT yourself to a book (from your school library).

What's a girl to read?

Justine Henning, in an article in the NY Times, lists 12 notable books for girls, asks, What's a Girl to Read?

To quote:

Parents and other adults in these novels usually fail to prevent young people from acting out — with variously comic or tragic consequences. Yet their authors recognize the developing moral intelligence of both their characters and their audience, producing stimulating books for young readers (that parents might even enjoy).

• Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicolson, by Louise Rennison. Be More Chill, by Ned Vizzini.
• Breakout, by Paul Fleischman.
• The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler.
• Feeling Sorry for Celia, by Jaclyn Moriarty.
• Flipped, by Wendelin Van Draanen.
• The Friends, by Rosa Guy.
• If You Come Softly, by Jacqueline Woodson.
• Life Is Funny, by E. R. Frank.
  Looking for Alaska, by John Green.
• Luna, by Julie Anne Peters.
• Make Lemonade, by Virginia Euwer Wolff.
• Rules of the Road, by Joan Bauer.
• Sandpiper, by Ellen Wittlinger.
• The Skin I'm In, by Sharon G. Flake.
• Someone Like You, by Sarah Dessen.
• Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson.
• Tears of a Tiger, by Sharon Draper.
• Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume.
• Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld.

But go and read her article - she provides a summary of each book with age-range recommendations, plus additional useful web links. It's from 2006, but I hadn't come across it till recently. So maybe you hadn't come across it either. Till now.

Conversely, Naomi Wolf expresses concern, in another NYT article, about Gossip Girl books and similar series. To quote:

The "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series — the most successful in a crowded field of Au Pairs, It Girls and other copycat series — represent a new kind of young adult fiction, and feature a different kind of heroine. In these novels, which have dominated the field of popular girls' fiction in recent years, Carol Gilligan's question about whether girls can have "a different voice" has been answered — in a scary way.

and she concludes:

The great reads of adolescence have classically been critiques of the corrupt or banal adult world. It's sad if the point of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly. Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.

And if you click here, you'll find ten questions readers of Wolf's essay posed, and how they were answered.

What is a girl to read?

Australia film: Set to Screen Podcasts

As part of the publicity and buzz around Baz Luhrmann's new film, Australia, there's an educational component involving podcasts and creative challenges for students.  To quote from that website:

Learn moviemaking from a master.



Great movies are full of adventure, and Australia, the next film from Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet), is no exception. But making a movie is an even bigger adventure—an adventure in creativity—and with the Apple Set to Screen Series, you can be a part of it.

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

Start your journey now.


Subscribe to the Set to Screen Series, and iTunes will automatically download each new episode that’s posted. Once you’ve watched an episode, come back here to check out the notes about the featured member of the production team, and—if there’s a challenge for that episode—get all the details you’ll need to participate.



Image source.

Things a teacher librarian can't do: No. 1

Supply four (new) YA vampire romances a week to Twilight enthusiasts looking for another hit....

Although we do our best to point them in the direction of other books they may enjoy - they narrowcast and I'm trying to expand their range (eg. Maximum Ride series).  But I've got a couple of particularly voracious readers who are reading faster than I can buy, and I suspect faster than authors are writing.   Of course in the adult vampire romance stakes, there are a number of quite voluminous series by several authors.  Local library time...

It's lovely that they know there's a hit they can only get from reading a book.

Fiction Friday: Dairy Queen

Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Read this one in the holidays, and it was great fun.  DJ Schwenk is like Josephine Alibrandi, a voice leaping off the page, a first person narrator who keeps you reading.  Like Josie, she's not always reliable - reflecting how her understanding changes over the course of the summer.  Her family owns a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and with her two elder brothers having decamped to football camps (they're both star players), her father being injured, her mother working two other jobs and her younger brother collecting skulls and playing sport, much of the farm work falls on DJ's shoulders.  Then the coach of a rival town's football team, and a family friend, suggests that DJ should coach one of his players who can also help on the farm.

There's a sequel: The Off Season.

Hexadecimal Colour Codes

When I switched the background colour of this blog to pink, in the coding what changed was its six digit hexadecimal colour code. If you'd like to see more colours than you'd imagined, and their codes, take a squizz here.

To quote from the page:

This page demonstrates the six-digit hexadecimal representation of color of the form #RRGGBB, where RR, GG, and BB are the hexadecimal values for the red, green, and blue values of the color. Using a hexadecimal code is the most reliable of the several ways you can define colors in HTML or style sheets.

PS. I could have gone into the blog template and changed the colour in the html forest there, but instead I used an option from the WSYWG layout mode in Blogger - (What You See is What You Get) because it's easier. If you know about these codes, though, you have an idea of what to look for if you do go into the forest...

Online presence: who finds you and why

One of the fascinations of compiling this blog is toddling over to see how people find it.  I'd like, of course, to think that it's morning-coffee-reading for charming teacher librarians.  Yup.  Except there's that problem of if you do get morning coffee, amid the busy life of  a school library.

The site gets on average about three dozen visits a day, and around fifty page views.  When I look at the referrals, the vast majority are people who've googled their way here.  Not TLs, but folks with questions.  And if they're coming here from Google, it means that this site is usually on the first page of Google's hits for the query being entered (eg. twilight fonts).  In case you didn't know, Google ranks pages by what you could call a usefulness logarithm - if people link to it or click to it, the more links/clicks the more useful the site is presumed to be, and the higher it travels up the Google rankings.

I've done nothing to advance or hinder this.  I write what I write, blog an entry for pretty much every weekday of school terms, and let it stand on the net as a source.  I've blogged about a variety of things, under the general umbrella of teacher librarianship, and I find them all over, in online and print sources I read, things I hear: the flypaper mind and scavenging soul of a teacher librarian/hunter-gatherer, collating rather than originating (pause while I ponder the amusement of this entry actually being original, rather than collation!).  But this entry isn't about my genius, or presumed genius, or possible genius, or anything like that.

I'm fascinated by the fact that a modest, unpublicised blog can create the presence it has in search engines.  A proportion has been fortuitous - I happened to be blogging about Twilight in various ways just as its popularity went stratospheric.  But the hits are far from being all Twilight-related.  For Melina Marchetta's new book, Finnikin of the Rock, the entry on this blog is on the first page if you google.  And that's just one example.  Day by day, entry by entry, this blog becomes a resource, a reference, and not necessarily in ways one has thought of, planned for or intended.  Brick by brick, you don't always see the potential castle.

The take-home point of this musing is to consider how this applies to our kids, and the presence/s they build online.  How easy or not their work may be to find.  How it presents them - good light?  bad light?  How quickly something can be so findable worldwide.  Although I haven't tried it, the question of how eradicable (or not) such a presence may be.  And points like that.  So if you've come here for the Twilight fonts, here's the link.  If you're a teacher librarian, there's a take-home point I hope you find useful/thought-provoking too.

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Social networking and privacy online

In a useful article from Nick Galvin of the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled, The kiss and tell of social networks, possibly the most apt and thought-provoking observation is the one at the end of this quote:

Among many younger net users there is now an assumption that everything should be shared and a casualness about what was once thought of as personal information that makes many older people shudder.


"I don't know what it is like to live your entire life publicly online," says social media expert Jeffrey Veen. "But there are kids today who are figuring it out."

Veen has been at the heart of the internet revolution all his working life. Among other things, he has been a key designer behind hugely successful social media applications such as Flickr and the blogging service TypePad.

He says attitudes to privacy and information sharing are easily defined by the generation you belong to.

"There is a generational divide that is as strong today as the divide that existed between kids and their parents over music in the 1950s," says Veen, visiting Sydney last week for an industry conference, Web Directions South.

"People older than 25 years think of everything they do on their computer as being private unless they share it, where people younger than that think of everything they do on a computer as public unless they choose to make it private. This is a fundamental difference."

(my highlighting)

The article points out some of the traps of this thinking - eg. the use of social networking/googling by employers to assess prospective employees, which can be a plus or minus, depending on what they discover.

The secrets of storytelling

Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind, according to Jeremy Hsu in his article, The secrets of storytelling, from Scientific American.  The article covers the following key concepts:

Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.


These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.


By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
 
Which means to me as a TL that stories/fiction (and I've heard people say it could be done by local libraries, and the fiction section isn't necessarily an essential part of a school library...) are most important to education and learning.  Who'd'a thunk?!
 
We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.



Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history.

Worth reading.  I found the reference to this article here.  Hmmm.  Might save this article to use to promote the next round of holiday borrowing.


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Twilight movie: third and final trailer/release date/soundtrack/new poster

Twilight Trailer

The third and final trailer for the Twilight film.  Sourced from this page at TrailerSpy, so fingers crossed not blocked by DET filters.

Also viewable on the Twilightthemovie home page.

The imdb page for the film still lists the release date for Australia as 11 December 2008.

There's a new poster:

and the official Stephenie Meyer website, stepheniemeyer.com has a track listing for the soundtrack.

Image source. 

Fiction Friday: graphic novels

We're about to put our graphic novels in a separate section - some manga, bought this year, but also Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, and Shaun Tan's The Arrival, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.  Be interesting to see how it goes.  My plan for next year is to have students who like manga form some sort of advisory committee to make suggestions for additions.  The Children's Bookshop in Beecroft is one specialist bookseller making a particular effort to learn about manga so it can advise teacher librarians.  Their suggestion is not to go deep in one series, but thin and broad, a few from many, to meet the widest range of user interests.  Realistically, I'm not sure that a school library can fully support every manga reader's every wish, given the volume/frequency of issue; unlike what one tries to do with popular fiction series such as Ranger's Apprentice, Redwall and Twilight, to name just three, where you do try to stock all titles.

It was therefore thought provoking to find this article from the Guardian in the UK, about a US graphic novel venture aimed at teenage girls that hasn't worked: and that one of the main issues may have been quality.

A quote from the article (which is by Ned Beauman):

 Although it does have some big hits, the manga industry is mostly a triumph of market segmentation: among the thousands of titles published every year in Japan, there is something for every conceivable taste. Coming out of this giant, delirious laboratory, a popular title may keep up such an intimate dialogue with its specific teenage audience that it is almost unintelligible to anyone else.


Discovered via Read Alert.  Image source: the Guardian article .

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Social networking - how many of these do you know?

Upon finding a very interesting article about storytelling - about which I'll post shortly - I was also fascinated by the list it supplied of ways in which to share this via social networking.  Myself, being neither whizz nor Luddite, but somewhere on the continuum in between, I expected to recognise some - but there were certainly a number new to me.  I posted about the list on Barack Obama's website a couple of weeks ago: well, here's another list to test you (from the choices provided by Scientific American):

• Facebook
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• Yahoo Bookmarks
• MySpace
• Google Bookmarks
• Newsvine
• Mixx
• Yahoo! My Web
• Propeller
• FriendFeed
• Windows Live
• Reddit
• Digg (32)
• StumbleUpon
• Xanga
• Blinklist
• Furl
• ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• N4G
• Blogmarks
• Faves
• Current
• Simpy
• Slashdot
• Meneame
• Yigg
• Oknotizie.alice.it
• Fresqui
• Diigo
• Care2
• Funp
• Kirtsy
• Hugg
• Sphinn

So, how many did you recognise?  And how many would our students recognise?

The fact that these are options offered by an established publication such as Scientific American also gives this list some authority as another snapshot of significant social networking sites.

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Search Google 2001

As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, Google is, for a limited time, offering you the chance to search the net with the 2001 version of the Google search engine, complete with that snazzy logo and results from the Internet Archive.  Gee, is it really ten years since I remember reading something in, was it Time magazine? about a search engine that would have us abandoning Yahoo and AltaVista and Dogpile?

Play here.  But it is only there for a limited time, it will be gone sometime in October 2008.  Could be an interesting voyage for kids - YouTube, for example, didn't exist.

To quote from the FAQ:

So what exactly happens when I do a 2001 search using this cool interface?



We've set up this search page to return many of the webpages from our 2001 index as results. When you click on a webpage result, you get taken to today's live version of the website. When you click on the link to "View old version on the Internet Archive," you are taken to the earliest 2001 copy of that webpage on the Internet Archive so you can see what the full webpage used to look like.

Books by ISBN

Just suppose you have an ISBN (although why you'd have it without the book, I'm not sure.  But the world is an amazing place, after all) and you want to know which book it belongs to.

The internet is an amazing place.  Try Books-by-ISBN, a site that mainly collects data from assorted Amazon sites.  And then lets you search by ISBN.  It appears to be a private venture (eg. it's not a bookselling site) run out of Germany (written in English - covers English speaking areas, German, French and Other).

Books-by-ISBN is here, and its FAQ page here.

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