Featured Online Resource: 21st Century Information Fluency

It's time for the FOR for the week of January 30th.

This week's Featured Online Resource is the blog 21st Century Information Fluency. Curated by Dennis T. O'Connor, an ISTE standars consultant, among other things, the blog is formatted as a news digest, pulling together relevant articles from the web, all dealing with some facet of information fluency, the place where information literacy, computer literacy, and critical thinking meet.

Make a Wikipedia Book

and other ways to maximize your use of Wikipedia, some of them quite cool. From mashable.com

Get Rid of Annoying Facebook Features

A lot of people are annoyed by some of the features implemented by facebook a few months ago, such as the news ticker and the strip of friends on the right, with one or two of them available for chat. This slideshow from mashable.com shows you slick tricks for reversing some of these. While at mashable, you may wish to check out the latest news on facebook timeline, also with ways to lessen the blow of the changes.

Featured Online Resource, January 23, 2012

This week’s Featured Online Resource is the Columbia Center for Oral History, a project of Columbia University Libraries. The Columbia Center for Oral History contains an archive of recorded histories and encompasses over 8,000 interviews. The collection contains oral histories on the New Deal, interviews with leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, and anti-war movements. The Center just added a new oral history project entitled The Rule of Law. This project provides access to digital transcripts of interviews on the topics of the death penalty and Guantanamo Bay. The Center also has the 9/11 Oral History Project which contains over 900 recorded hours of oral history on topics such as “The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project” which gathered information from many different people who spoke about their experiences after September 11^th.

Every week, the Ort Library brings you a new and outstanding resource from the Web or from one of the library's databases. To get an archive of all FOR entries, click here. Also, you can suggest a website that provides well-organized access to useful info.

Details of the Wikipedia Blackout

Wikipedia is one of the high profile web sites that affected a blackout starting midnight last night as a way of protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

This NYT story explores ways around the blackout.

Meanwhile, HuffPo rounds up some highly-censored student tweets reacting to the lack of access.

And The Washington Post gives a survival guide. It of course refers to libraries, "where you can use free wi-fi without having to buy a $4 latte first."

I Took Your Name: R.E.M.-inspired book titles

Craig Popelars, marketing director of Algonquin Books, is the author of this fantastic blog post in which he re-purposes R.E.M. songs as future books. A must!