Student and TechCAT extraordinaire Katie Chang has been documenting her semester abroad in Ireland on her blog. My favorite post? Her description of getting to class in the rain, and the walk back counting twelve (12!) broken and discarded umbrellas. What an experience!

For more examples of blogging in and about a foreign country, check out last spring’s cultural exchange trip to Japan. The list of participants on the side leads to numerous depictions of the trip as told (and photographed!) by the students themselves on their own blogs.

Like what you see? You might also be interested in Dr. Paul Martin’s Canadian Studies course, The Great White North, and the links along the side of it going to posts from student blogs.

I hadn’t been back to see the Landscape Change Program in a little while. Turns out they’ve made some really cool interface improvements. Now you can zoom in on images, see where an image was taken on google maps, discuss images, and create your own photo albums, among other things. See if you can spot the bicyclist in this early 20th century photograph taken at Shelburne farms.

Pretty neat, huh? If you’re looking for more images from Vermont’s past (and even present), you might start at the search page, where you can see a randomly selected image, drill down to your town using the interactive map, or - and this is my favorite - try to identify a mystery image.

The other day I came across an entry regarding the use of meebo as a communication platform for Librarians and their patrons. That reminded that I’d been meaning to try Twitter, since most reports I’d seen of it suggested that trying it was the best way to figure out what it really was. The fact that it came from the same folks that brought us Odeo piqued my interest even more. Well, I’ve tried it, and I kind of like it. If you’ve got a moment, give it a shot.

We used to have a service available to chat with a reference Librarian on call (and even push/share screenshots, etc. I believe), but I can’t seem to find it now. Perhaps it was just a pilot program?

Update: Fred Stutzman’s recent article, Facebook as a Tool for Learning Engagement appears to have some good advice.

The Ubiquitous Librarian has some guidelines on practices to avoid when using Facebook to engage your students:

Essentially it is a direct violation to email a student and advertise a service or event. If they join a group, then they are fair game; it’s consensual. But for me to look up all incoming freshmen who are computer science majors and introduce myself as their subject librarian, promote Safari Tech Books, or invite them to a workshop, open house, or an event, is grounds for termination.

We cannot use the ‘courses’ feature to find students in a particular class (that we know includes a project or research assignment) and send them a message with tips, suggestions, supportive material, examples, or even to offer of assistance; this is prohibited by Facebook.

Direct marketing is grounds for expulsion.

This seems to suggest a few possibilities for Facebook’s improvement:

• Offer “flyers” for targeted groups, such as those tagged with specific course names or subjects. As I understand it, flyers are currenlty only community wide.
• The nature of this service suggests a sort of symbiosis - Facebook and it’s associated institutions have (or could have) a mutually beneficial relationship. With this in mind, perhaps it would behoove Facebook to offer discounts or a certain amount of free advertising to the institution.

We use “flyers” quite often to recruit students and to get the word out about events and other resources. During a tea on social networking a while back, someone suggested that a faculty member create a group in Facebook to publicize a course he would be teaching the following semester. These seem to have ben successful so far. It would be nice to be able to target certain groups with these flyers, such as similar courses, or groups with specific tags (technology, computers, etc).

Statistics are fun. Google Analytics makes your site statistics even more enjoyable, with interactive graphs, site overlays, and powerful traffic analysis tools. Here is a brief overview of how to add this service to your UVM Web Templated site.

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Wow. Since I’ve just recently crested a ridge in a mountain of project work (only to see that I’m halfway there), I’ve taken a swing at cleaning and archiving my inbox.

Among the messages was one that I must have missed. It included a link to the DIL (DIL being short for Digital Initiatives Librarian), a blog documenting the work being done at our nascent Center for Digital Initiatives. Exciting stuff, and it’s always fun to find a new member of the UVM blogosphere.

Update: Just a few days later, Gotuit’s Scenemaker showed up on Lifehacker. This seems to offer a solution that is pretty close to what I had in mind.

The other day, Rob clued me in to QT Movie NoteTaker, a freeware app for taking notes on movies:

This is a free, easy-to-use program from DVcreators.net that simplifies the process of taking movie notes. This application lets you load a Quicktime movie, then click a button to stop the movie, enters the movie time into your notes automatically, then waits for you to write a brief or lengthy comment.

Really, a great idea for an application. To take this a few steps further, it would be nice to see a web based service like this. One that allowed users to document and share their notes on clips and films that reside on services such as YouTube and Google Video. Collaborative video note taking, in a sense, timestamp and all. Perhaps it already exists in some form - I seem to remember seeing a service which let you draw rectangles on flash video, but I can’t seem find it now.