“Another bub­bling intra-generational gap, as any mod­ern par­ent knows, is that younger chil­dren tend to be ever more art­ful mul­ti­taskers. Stud­ies per­formed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that 16– to 18-year-olds per­form seven tasks, on aver­age, in their free time — like tex­ting on the phone, send­ing instant mes­sages and check­ing Face­book while sit­ting in front of the television.

Peo­ple in their early 20s can han­dle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and those in their 30s per­form about five and a half.

That ver­sa­til­ity is great when they’re killing time, but will a younger gen­er­a­tion be as focused at school and work as their forebears? ”

“Stats pub­lished by Nielsen show that social media usage has increased by 82% in the last year, an astro­nom­i­cal rise. Face­book (Face­book), Twit­ter (Twit­ter), YouTube, blogs, and social inter­ac­tion are becom­ing the focus of our online inter­ac­tions, even more than search.

We’re social crea­tures, so it was only a mat­ter of time until we fig­ured out how to make the web an effi­cient medium for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, shar­ing, and forg­ing friend­ships. Now that we’re finally imple­ment­ing the social layer though, it’s tough to find a sce­nario where the rise of social media doesn’t continue.

In ten years, when you access the web, most of the time you spend will be to con­nect with your friends. Almost all of that will be on social net­works and through social media. It will be the #1 rea­son why we ever pull out our phones, tablets, or computers.”

“To add to that idea, some­thing like #ALAQnA would be great. The #edchat model is a ter­rific one to fol­low: a few nights at a week, at a set time, all of the #edchat twit­ter­ers respond-to/converse-about top­ics like “How can edu­ca­tors effec­tively assess stu­dents in the 21st cen­tury?”. The con­ver­sa­tions are amaz­ing if you fol­low the chats live, and they stay on twit­ter for the con­ver­sa­tion to con­tinue in the days (and some­times weeks) to follow.”

“I’ve recently been look­ing for sets of icons for all of the social web­sites that I belong to for my web­site, blog, and also print hand­outs. In the course of my research I’ve come across some excel­lent icon sets that design­ers are giv­ing away for free. If you have a need for social media icons for your library web­site, per­sonal web­site, or blog, here are a few resources that I found help­ful.” — via @ellyssa

“In this arti­cle we will show you how you can cre­ate a con­trib­u­tors page which will dis­play a list of authors with avatars or user­photo and any other infor­ma­tion that you like. This tuto­r­ial is an inter­me­di­ate level tutorial.”

“In this tuto­r­ial, we will be using Word­Press and Feed­burner with a few plu­g­ins to cre­ate a sim­ple Email Newslet­ter Ser­vice for your Word­Press blog. You can track the per­for­mance of your newslet­ter by check­ing how many sub­scribers you have, how many clicks each link gets and much more.”

Every year, we throw a big, game party to ring in the new year. This year (2010) is our houses 100-year birth­day, so we cel­e­brated with cup­cakes…
…and the cup­cakes were a game.
Here they are in ran­dom order — see how many you can guess! Mouse over the ques­tion mark to reveal the answer.” — via Iris (circulating)

“Well 2010 is here, a.k.a. the Inter­na­tional Year of Bio­di­ver­sity, and to us at the SCQ, it means that were finally ready to go ahead with our long awaited phy­lomon project. “What is this?” you ask? Well, its an online ini­tia­tive aimed at cre­at­ing a Poke­mon card type resource but with real crea­tures on dis­play in full “char­ac­ter design” won­der. Not only that — but we plan to have the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity weigh in to deter­mine the con­tent on such cards (note that the cards above are only a mock-up of what that con­tent might be), as well as folks who love gam­ing to try and design inter­est­ing ways to use the cards. Then to top it all off, mem­bers of the teacher com­mu­nity will par­tic­i­pate to see whether these cards have edu­ca­tional merit. Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.” — via @walkingpaper

“find the best cam­era for you”

“For this semi-scientific analy­sis I looked at 18 library mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing state and national orga­ni­za­tions. I did not include indi­vid­ual libraries or state libraries. I did include sub-groups and divi­sions. The list of orga­ni­za­tions was cho­sen more or less at ran­dom and is biased towards orga­ni­za­tions that sup­port New Eng­land libraries. It is by no mea­sure a com­plete list, so feel free to sug­gest one’s that I missed.

I uti­lized seven ele­ments to com­pare the orga­ni­za­tions. For each ele­ment, the orga­ni­za­tion received one point if the infor­ma­tion met the cri­te­ria out­lined below, and zero points if it did not. A higher rat­ing is equated with a higher score. You can use this method for a quick check of your organization’s Twit­ter presence.”

“Here they are to save the day—or at least the research project. Rochester librar­i­ans call on their inner super­heroes as part of a new effort to let stu­dents know how to find help.”