A table of Exam Planning Resources–including Calendars, Final Exam Schedules, Class Assessment worksheets, the Exam Study Plan, Test Preparation and other study handouts–is set up in the Center for Student Learning. Please drop by and pick up the resources you need for exams and download the Four Week Study Plan Fall 2009!

Also, Cougar Countdown is coming November 30! Cougar Countdown is a 2 week series of events and activities designed to support and assist students during Exam Week.  Offices from Academic Affairs and Student Affairs have joined forces to provide a full calendar of events—check it out in next week’s GSO!  Activities will be hosted in the Addlestone Library and the Stern Student Center.

You can also join COUGARcountdown on Facebook.

It’s an Addlestone LITE session about collecting and organizing and managing your research!   Who knew digital technology could make this easy?  (Okay, so it is supposed to do that.  Boy, does it ever!)  Come learn about some web applications that do just that:

• Zotero to collect, manage, and cite your resources
• Delicious to organize and share your web research
• Citulike to discover, manage, store, and share scholarly references
• Flickr to share photos and create slideshows
  • Flickr Album Maker
  • picsviewer
• Wordle to create word clouds
• Mind Mapping to problem solve and promote creativity

Thursday, November 12, 2009 @ 3 AND 6PM
Collecting and Organizing your Work
Addlestone Library Room 122

What other reason do you need to live in the early 21^st Century?  Come to learn yourself or print out the FLYER (pdf) to let your students know how to improve their research capabilities.   Please hand out the flyer in your classes.  Their research will improve.  Their papers will improve.  Your free time will increase (okay, two out of three is not bad).

FEEL FREE TO DROP IN OR REGISTER AT http://tinyurl.com/Addlestone

Session Description:
Need help managing all your sources for your paper? Use Zotero to collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Access your bookmarks anywhere, share them with study partners and organize your web research using Delicious. Use Citulike to discover, manage, store and share scholarly references. Share photos and create slideshows with Flickr. Use Wordle to generate word clouds. Need help getting a handle on your research project? Mind Mapping promotes creativity, helps you solve problems, and helps your brain remember information.

For more information about the LITE sessions visit http://blogs.cofc.edu/LITE

If you keep wondering what Twitter is, why everyone is talking about it, if you should start doing it, or if you should just ignore it entirely and hope it will simply GO AWAY, The Complete Guide to Twitter, by Mark O’Neill, from MakeUseOf might help you make up your mind.  The guide “tackles every Twitter feature, tip and trick you can think of.”  The recently released guide provides instructions and screenshots for learning how to use the Twitter interface, provides suggestions for tweeting from your desktop, and details many other helpful hints.

Twitter Basics
Even if you are not sure if you want to play around with Twitter, you might want to consider signing up for an account.  It is very easy for your name or brand to get hijacked in social networking sites and very difficult to get them back.  I recommend this for most social media sites, even if you aren’t sure you want to use the application.

Here’s the basics for Twitter:

• To Tweet means to send a message.
• You can only Tweet/post 140 characters.  Shorten words and be brief, use slang and abbreviated words just like you would if you were sending a text message.
  • Twictionary: The Dictionary for Twitter! is a great place to find the meanings of abbreviated words on Twitter.
  • Use URL shortening services like tinyurl to save characters in your messages.
  • If you want to send pictures with your tweets, use a content hosting service like Twitpic.
  • @twittername sends a message to a specific user – EVERYONE SEES IT
  • d twittername sends a PRIVATE direct message.  YOU CAN ONLY SEND DIRECT MESSAGES TO PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW AND THEY ACCEPT THE REQUEST AND FOLLOW BACK.
  • BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU TWEET – You can protect your updates with a privacy setting but it will be very hard to understand the nature of twitter, promote yourself, or make new contacts if you do.  YOU CAN DELETE A TWEET BUT THEY DON’T EVER REALLY GO AWAY.
  • DON’T SPAM! Don’t send messages to people you don’t know.
  • DON’T BE SELF PROMOTING! Mix your messages.  It’s best if you use Twitter for personal contact most of the time and self promoting occasionally.

• Followers are people who want to see what you are tweeting
  • Remember to use Twitter to relay interesting news, valuable information, your opinions on current events…
  • Don’t follow everyone.  Be selective until you get the hang of it.
• ReTweeting is when someone resends a tweet that someone else said.
• Hashtags are used to search the Twitter system for tweets about a particular topic.  Users can define their own hashtags by using #before a word or phrase.
  • I monitor #cofc, #chs, #Addlestone Library, and #club addlestone right now on the CofC Twitter Account.  I monitor other hashtags on my personal twitter account.
  • #hashtags is a good place to look for twitter trends.
• Sending and Receiving Tweets
  • You can send tweets from the Twitter website, your phone, or with external applications.
  • I like tweetdeck and hootsuite because they allow me to manage multiple searches and twitter profiles.
  • You can also tie your twitter account to your Facebook profile.  When you do this, anything you post on your wall is automatically sent out via your twitter account.

How Can I Use It In My Every Day Life?

• Watch Twitter hashtags to keep abreast of current trends
  Bates Information Services provides many useful tips for using Twitter in real life in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip available at www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html One of Bates’ suggestions is to use  word-cloud generators to see what words are most frequently used in conjunction with a news event.  She uses Search Cloudlet, an add-on for Firefox.

• Analyze current trends
  One of today’s hot topics is Balloon Boy (found via the new Bing Twitter Search)
  

• A very quick Wordle visualization based on the tweets produced this – Balloon Boy Hoax, and some comparisons to Kanye.  I find this humorous.

There are lots of ways to visualize twitter trends.  A good starting point to find out how is to read the article 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by flowingdata.

• Monitor Mentions
  Bates also provides a useful suggestion to “monitor mentions of your organization’s names…” in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip.   As I noted above, I monitor #cofc, #chs, #Addlestone Library, and #club addlestone right now on the CofC Twitter Account.  Although it is fairly quiet on twitter in the library right now, we do have times when activity increases.  For example, we see more activity on #cofc, #chscool, and #rave when students plan a rave in the rotunda.

YouTube Video by sultanolli3

It is nice to know what’s going on around you.  Especially if in the next 15 minutes there are going to be a lot of students dancing in the rotunda.  I’ve been watching the library hashtags for most of the fall 2009 semester and there are a growing number of students using it to communicate with each other.  They seem to use it primarily to communicate where they are in the library or to relay information about where they are going after they leave.

• Gather Highlights from a Conference or Event
  Another great suggestion from Bates in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip is to “Gather hightlights from a conference.”  She suggests searching for the conference hashtag within a week of the conference and copying and pasting all the tweets into Wordle.net to generate a word cloud that can help identify dominant conference themes.  Using a hashtag for a conference or event helps facilitate communication during and after the conference.  It allows attendees to keep in touch, plan meet-ups, discuss information, ask questions, and clarify information that is being presented during the conference.  After the conference attendees many groups continue using their hashtag to stay in touch and continue communicating after the conference is over.

• Community Involvement
  I think one of the best parts of twitter is the ability to keep in touch with people you meet and add them to your social network.   How many times have you added someone to your phone, scribbled emails on your hand, scraps of paper, or a restaurant napkin, and couldn’t ever seem to get back in touch?

  I also think twitter is a wonderful way find local and global events happening that you might not have been aware of otherwise. Two such events/organizations in Charleston I have been able to contribute to and be a part of due to my daily interactions on twitter are the Social Media Club Charleston (#smcchs) and BarCamp Charleston (#barcamp) an ad-hoc, user generated “unconference” taking place October 24, 2009 at the Lowcountry Innovation Center.  I have also found it helpful to follow certain organizations on twitter like CAA (College Arts Association), ALA (American Library Association),  and wfh?! (user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter that tells you what is trending).

  My best advice about twitter is to try it out.  Initially, I was skeptical myself about the usefulness of this particular social web app.  Now I think that I couldn’t do without it.  It is my instant line of communication to people with the same interests as me, exposing me to places, events, and organizations I want to know about.

Starting today, the Department of German and Slavic Studies and the Addlestone library is hosting an exhibit on the 20th century Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is one of the most famous German language poets of the 20th century. Her poems, stories, and novels focus on questions of gender identity, war, and the belated Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming-to-terms with the Nazi past) in postwar Austria. Bachmann wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and existentialist philosophy and language critique permeate her oeuvre. Since her death, her writings have assumed a prominent position in the 20th century German literary canon and an iconic status among feminists in Germany and Austria. Contemporary authors such as the 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek view Bachmann’s work as a crucial turning point in the emergence of new female voices in German language literature.

The exhibit will be held on the second floor of the Addlestone Library throughout the month of October. In conjunction with the exhibit, the Bachmann scholar Kirsten Krick-Aigner (Wofford College) will give a public lecture entitled “Ingeborg Bachmann: A Voice for the 21st century” on Friday, October 16th, at 3:30pm in room 227 of Addlestone Library.

For additional information about the exhibit or the special lecture, contact:

Morgan Marcell Koerner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of German
The College of Charleston
Department of German and Slavic Studies
9 Liberty Street, JC Long 421
Charleston SC, 29424
koernerm@cofc.edu
843-9530-1997

Looking on Amazon for a book? Rather borrow it than buy it? Make life easier by installing the Amazon/Library Catalog search plugin. Download the LibGuides Facebook application to view our research guides directly from Facebook. Need an answer quick? Chat or text a librarian from your dorm, your classroom, or during your break between classes. Want to make a Facebook Page for your sorority, fraternity or club or get updates about what’s going on in the library when checking your Wall? Ever wondered why you might want to check out Facebook’s privacy settings? Check out this great video in 50’s style from yourtango.  Nick O’Neill has a great blog post titled 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know that provides a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

Feel free to drop in.  We hope to see you there!

Would you like to chat with a librarian? Asking a question is as easy as going to the library webpage at http://www.cofc.edu/library/ and clicking on the ASK A LIBRARIAN TAB! The built in chat widget, added this year during the campuswide redevelopment of the College of Charleston website saw a 300% increase in IMs over September 2008, with IMs from the home page being largely responsible.

NEED HELP?  CHAT WITH A LIBRARIAN TODAY!

Student Computing Support recently installed Office 2007 on the lab computers in the Addlestone Library. Being a Mac user, the transition has been a little difficult for me. In an effort to help patrons, I went looking for some helpful quick reference guides and found a wonderful selection of printable quick reference sheets at CustomGuide via Tech Republic.

CustomGuide makes the reference sheets for a variety of programs and platforms (Mac/PC).  They have quick reference guides for the new Office Suite, Adobe Products (CS3), operating systems and Internet browsers.  I highly recommend them.

Here’s the Quick Reference Guides they developed for Office 2007:

• CustomGuide’s Office 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s Word 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s PowerPoint 2007 Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
• CustomGuide’s Outlook 2007 Quick Reference (pdf)

The web team at the College of Charleston added a new feature to blogs.cofc.edu that allows you (and others) to post to multiple blogs by category or tag. This process is one of the features of using RSS ( or “NOT SO” Really Simple Syndication).   Robin Good provides a wonderful article on RSS from top to bottom for the non-technical user at: http://www.masternewmedia.org/content_delivery_and_distribution/rss-really-simple-syndication/RSS-what-it-is-best-uses-applications-guide-20071120.htm

Why Would I Want To?

• I have 3 blogs and I am tired of posting the same content to each of them
• I want to post ALL my content in one place and select which post goes where
• I want other people to contribute to my blog via their own blog/posts

How Do I Do it (on my Blogs.cofc.edu Blog)?

You can enable the plugin in the Dashboard of your blog by selecting Plugins and Activating Feed WordPress. After you have activated the Feed WordPress plugin, you will need to add the website/blog/feed URL for syndication, adding it to your syndicated sources.  For more information on the Feed WordPress Plugin visit: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/

Other Useful Uses for Syndication

• Integrate social networking apps  -  for example, what you post on Facebook automatically appears in Twitter
• Gather content from all over the web in one place without having to visit each site individually
• Collect a “Reading List” from the web to feed on your blog as a widget
• Gather multimedia from all over the web on one topic

Once you get the hang of using RSS to gather and read information, you may want start creating your own customized feeds to suit your needs.  Yahoo Pipes is a free tool that allows you to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

The Browsing Book Committee (Andrea Galbo, Martha McTear, Will Breard, and Jannette Finch) at Addlestone Library started a browsing collection blog at http://blogs.cofc.edu/browsingbookscollection.  The blog features book reviews, new browsing books, a Twitter feed, and interactive widgets to LibraryThing and Shelfari.

The browsing collection is located near the Circulation Desk (Calhoun St. side) @Addlestone.

While reading 6 Facebook Hack Codes And Tips To Show Off Your Geeky Skills By Ryan Dube from makeuseof.com I ran across a couple of interesting and useful hacks.  The second hack mentioned, “Aye, Make Yer Profile a Pirate’s Page…” would be great for Talk Like a Pirate Day. It is not particularly useful, but we can just call this one fun.  What is useful is that Facebook allows users to select the Language their page is displayed in.

The second profile hack is also one of the easiest to implement. Facebook offers users the ability to transform their Facebook pages into any language that they like. If you scroll down to the lower left corner of your profile page, you’ll see your current language setting. Click on this, and you’ll have a list of all languages available to you. Notice the English Pirate option?

The 4th Tip “Download Complete Photo Collections from Your Friends Profles” was one that I have been looking for.  I can’t count how many times my I have run across an album from a conference, event, etc. and wished that I could download the entire album for myself.  According to the author, you can download the Firefox plug-in FacePAD and download entire albums.

After you install the FacePad plug-in, make sure you select Tools->Add-Ons, and configure the options for FacePad so it has your correct Facebook language. Then, all you have to do is go to your friend’s photo albums, right-click on the title and select “Download Album With FacePAD.”  That’s right, you’re not downloading a single picture – but an entire album.

Another tips I found useful in the article was “Scheduling Facebook Status Updates with Sendible.  If you use your Facebook status to let people know where you are but can’t be at a computer, can’t use your cell phone or don’t have internet access, this could solve your problems.

The last tip I would like to share is how to “Hide Your Online Status from Certain People.”  Unfortunately with the merging of business and personal there are times when Facebook can be a real time drain.  If you are trying to schedule your day there are times when you don’t need unwanted interruptions.  Everyone also has the friend/friends that just don’t seem to have anything to do.  I had set my Facebook status to offline but this seems as though it would be far more useful, allowing you to talk to who you want to when you want to.

…open up your chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook display, click on Friend Lists, and create a new list called “BlockList.” Make sure after you create it that it’s configured under “Display these lists in Chat.”  Now, all you have to do is either click “edit” and add the friends you want to block, or if they’re already online, just click their name and drag them under this new list. Once you’ve got everyone there who you want to block from see your online status, hover your mouse over the green dot to the right and click on “Go Offline.” Now, you appear offline to only those certain friends.

To full article from by Ryan Dube from makeuseof.com, visit: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-facebook-hack-codes-and-tips-to-show-off-your-geeky-skills/