What I Learned Today…

Web 2.0 and programming tips from a library technology enthusiast, What I Learned Today… covers blogs, rss, wikis and more as they relate to libraries.

Monthly Archives: February 2009

Gmail Multiple Inboxes

February 6th, 2009

The title I think is a little misleading – but this new feature from Google Labs is awesome!! When I first read this, I thought I could read multiple Gmail accounts in one window – but what it really means is that I have have multiple searches run right in my inbox screen.

The new feature–called Multiple Inboxes–allows users to have multiple viewing panes open simultaneously without having to open another browser window. The upgrade gives users a quick view at important labels as well as saved searches.

Gmail Multiple Inboxes

I have set this up in my work email to show me unread items at the top and then items from the multiple Koha mailing lists – this is pretty darn handy. Check it out under the Google Labs in your email account – that and many other of the Labs tools are well worth installing to make your Gmail experience that much more enjoyable – and productive.

My delicious bookmarks for 2009-02-03

February 5th, 2009
  • CiteAlert
    CiteAlert is a service which automatically notifies authors by e-mail soon after their work is referenced in a newly published article on External linkScienceDirect.
  • eBook Hood
    ebookhood.com is your ebook neighborhood. It allows you to convert text and webpages to formats readable on the iPod and other reader devices, share the ebooks and reviews with other readers in the neighborhood.
  • Liferay – Liferay Social Office
    Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise. This full virtual workspace streamlines communication, saves time, builds group cohesion and raises productivity. All you have to do is log in and work the way you want to, at your convenience.
  • Liferay – Liferay Portal
    Liferay Portal is all about choice: we give you over 60 tools and a selection of today's most innovative technologies to enable you to do everything from creating websites to building intranets to simply getting the right documents and applications to the right people. See why 60,000 people a month are checking out the product InfoWorld calls the ?Best Open Source Portal? on the market.

More of my links

Teach Students Open Source

February 2nd, 2009

I just finished reading a great article in EDUCAUSE Review titled Open Source: Narrowing the Divides between Education, Business, and Community. Jim Whitehurst has a great explanation for why we should be teaching our students on and about open source software (so great, I wish I had come up with it first :) )

We live in an increasingly global community. Gone are the days when working for a company in an office meant serving a small geographic area from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today’s graduates will work in a matrix environment where projects cut across organizational and geographic boundaries, requiring cooperation and communication. Open source uses the power of collaboration to provide students with hands-on learning and to equip students with an expanded skill set that is very attractive to businesses.

Open source better prepares students for the business world by exposing them to real-world problems and encouraging learning through the completion of real tasks. Open source amplifies a “hands-on” approach to learning by connecting students to a community of users in an effort to solve problems. Open-source developers don’t rely on textbooks; they rely on the knowledge base of other developers with whom they connect through community forums, building off of one another’s ideas to create a solution that is eventually shared with all. To this extent, open source better prepares students for future job experiences and allows them to complete, while they’re still in school, work that’s being used by the global open-source community.

Open source also teaches students useful skills that can be applied across other coursework and classes. Students have the opportunity to work with many more code bases in open source than are found in traditional student projects. This strengthens skills in collaboration, project management, and testing and encourages a well-rounded computer science education, making students more marketable in the business world.

Make sure you read the entire article and send it on to the decision makers in your institution. Jim touches on many points that are right in line with my ideals and the ideals of libraries in general.