On November 4th I’ll be giving a presentation at the 40th Annual Sinclair Community College Writers’ Workshop. My session is titled “Marketing and Promoting Your Writing Today: Building an Author Platform.” In it I’ll cover the importance of building an online author platform for reaching new readers, opening up new opportunities and increasing sales. I plan […]
Blacklisting Wikipedia and Google as a Credible Source?
In my work as an academic librarian, one thing I frequently teach is how to identify a trustworthy source. For research purposes, Google and Wikipedia have their limitations but they are almost always the first step for students. Because of this, one strategy is to take aggressive steps to prevent students from using them. I […]
Are There Alternatives to Slideshare for Embedding a Powerpoint?
Although there are plenty of competitors these days, Powerpoint is still a preferred tool for creating presentations due to its familiar controls and ease of use. But many are no longer happy to simply create a presentation, show it to an audience and then let it sit on their computer. One solution is to send […]
4 Common Misconceptions About Plagiarism
A big part of being information literate is knowing how to use information ethically and responsibly. This includes avoiding plagiarism, which we often define as deliberately stealing a chunk of text and trying to pass it off as your own. But it’s much more than this, and many times plagiarism isn’t as obvious as “don’t […]
Are eBooks Bad for Reading and Writers? Leasing vs. Owning and More
This week Wired published a provocative article about ebooks. In the piece, titled “The Abomination of eBooks,” author Art Brodsky points out how the applicable rules for ebooks are fundamentally different than those for print books; in particular ebooks are leased rather than actually bought and owned. Because of this, he argues that it doesn’t make […]
Where Can You Find the Most Useful and Insightful Conversations Online?
One major goal for teachers and librarians today is to foster “information literacy,” a set of skills that allows us to efficiently communicate what information we need, understand where and how to search, think critically about information and use it strategically to achieve our goals. Information literacy instruction typically involves activities like a discussion of what makes […]