What in the World is IceCasting?

“IceCasting is an experiment in MobCasting, an idea that Andy Carvin has been exploring lately. The Illinois Technology Conference for Educators (IL-TCE) will be held in St. Charles from March 1 through March 4 and I thought this might be an interesting way to extend the learning.

Everyone loves attending conferences. There's something about being surrounded by your colleagues and being exposed to new ideas at every turn that really just gets people jazzed up about technology, teaching, and education in general. This blog is a way to capture that feeling and share it with other people. It's a place to capture those ideas that you just can't wait to take back to your school, or make you think differently about the way you're doing things now.

If you experienced something at ICE and want to share it with people, there's two ways that you can do so. Send an email to teach42.icecasting@blogger.com, and the entire text of the email will be instantly posted here. You can also attach photos to the emails if you'd like to! If you'd like to leave an audio comment, simply call 1-661-716-BLOG (2564), use 555-555-5555 for the login and then enter 2005 as your pincode. Leave a message and your audio comment will be posted directly to the blog!

So in between sessions, if you feel inspired, pick up your cell phone and give the number a call. Share what you've seen or heard that inspired you with everyone else. Please feel free to pass this information on to anyone else attending the conference.

If you happen to use Flickr, then tag your ICE photos with ICE2005. I'll be adding a feed to the sidebar that will grab all of our communal photos that way.” [IceCasting]

Steve Dembo seems to be doing all of the heavy lifting at this point (text and audio), but it’s certainly a great idea. Keep up the great work, Steve!

To my great regret, I won’t be able to attend the Computers in Libraries conference this year, so I’m going to have to attend via the blogs. Thank heavens for non-complex, navel-gazing conference bloggers!

In my RSS presentations, I always use the Chicago Sun-Times as an example because NewsIsFree has been scraping their site for years. I used to be more of a Chicago Tribune reader, but I've become a Sun-Times person because of that feed.

Now, though, Steven, IMs to tell me he's found a feed on the Sun-Times site itself! Great news for Chicago newspaper fans! Maybe this will even trickle down to my Sun-Times-affiliated local papers...!

Remember a few weeks ago when I highlighted Libraries Matter, a wristband campaign started by the Alliance Library System here in Illinois? Well, since that time, they've been quite busy. Not only do they now have a Libraries Matter blog with an RSS feed, but they've also added a separate Libraries Matter Gallery photoblog with an RSS feed. Even better, there is now a Libraries Matter Podcast!

"All libraries matter, and none more than school libraries. They hold our very future. Researcher Keith Curry Lance recently released the results of a study showing the direct impact of school libraries on academic achievement. Listen to an exclusive interview with Keith as he discusses his findings."

One of the ideas I've been pushing lately is using blogs to humanize libraries, speaking in what I call "the key of we" instead of in the third person. These are excellent examples, and I'm impressed that ALS gets it so well. Nicely done.

On a side note, the only one of my member libraries to have joined the wristband campaign so far is the Palos Heights Public Library (go Elaine!), and luckily they've agreed to send me a few bands when their batch arrives. The Lance Armstrong wristbands plus a bunch of knockoffs are all the rage at the kids' schools right now, so I can't wait to sneak in some library ones. Thanks, PHPL! :-)