Fusenews: Now That’s Edutainment (shudder)!

• Research, wikis, myth-busting, and Snapple all coincide with librarian Roxanne Feldman’s current project with her school’s fourth graders.  "My daughter has always been fascinated by those Snapple ‘Real Facts’ under their bottle caps. Not long ago, a few odd-sounding ‘facts’ piqued my interest and I started to verify the validity behind each fact we encountered. It turns out that not all of those facts are entirely true." So what do you do when you encounter untrue facts?  You turn them into a class project!  Head on over to the ALSC blog where Roxanne explains how she turned Snapple caps into a wiki project teachers everywhere should note. Thanks to Educating Alice for the link.

• Lois Lowry had a rather charming link up on her blog just the other day.  A guy is currently attempting to take 365 self-portraits of himself over the course of a year.  Day 203 is dedicated to his favorite book, The Giver. Awww.  Thanks to Lois Lowry for the link.

• The Quills are dead-ish.  Sheesh, that didn’t take long, did it?  I credit the Cybils. Thank you Leila for the link.

• For months I have been secretly holding a contest to see which blogger could use the phrase "wheat-based robot overlord" in a sentence.  This week, the winner is Gwenda Bond.

• I’m all for renovating libraries.  I’m even a pushover for coffee shops amongst the stacks (and I love our teen patron who suggested that all food and drink in libraries be free).  But then I got sent this bizarre little model for the public library.  Note the eclectic new buzzwords swimming about this baby.  One of my favorites was the reference to an "edutainment center".  If I say that phrase enough times my teeth literally attempt to jump from my mouth to as to prevent me from saying it again.  Guess I don’t "crowdsource" enough.  And as my boss pointed out, since when has "creatives" become a noun?  I don’t always agree with Annoyed Librarian, but on this matter we are as one.

• The number of public children’s librarians in New York City that blog has decreased by a factor of one.  Librarian Walter Minkel of the highly intelligent The Monkey Speaks blog has moved to Austin, Texas.  We shall miss him here at NYPL, particularly his ukulele.  Couldn’t nobody ukulele like Walter could.

• Your jolt of movie news then.  From Cynopsis Kids: "DreamWorks Animation is shifting its 3D animated movie How to Train Your Dragon to a March 26, 2010 release, from the original November 20, 2009.  The movie is based on author Cressida Cowell’s book about a young Viking boy.  Moving the release of the film allows it "access to the maximum number of screens in a less crowded release window," said DreamWorks Animation’s CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg explaining the reason for the shift.  Still sets for release in November 2009 are two 3D movies A Christmas Carol and James Cameron’s Avatar."

• One of Iceland’s most famous children’s authors is here in NYC and he wants to tell you a story.  If you’re in the mood to hear author Andri Snær Magnason read from his book The Story of the Blue Planet, be good enough to stop by Scandinavia House on Saturday, March 1st at 1:00.  You may as well.  The title has been published in 20 countries, but not America.  Not yet.  Thanks to Ernest Bond for the heads up.

• Recently my co-worker Rebecca was discussing her sister’s habit of reading the newest ebooks to pop up on the website Project Gutenberg.  This is a site that has uploaded a huge amount of books for your downloading pleasure.  Well, Rebecca’s sister apparently has grown quite fond of reading some of the 1920s girl novels she’s been finding on the site.  So, just out of curiosity, I took a gander at some of the pickings.  Sure as shooting, there are quite a few works for kids on the site.  I don’t know how inclined you are to read Seven Little People and Their Friends by someone with the last name of Scudder (good character name, no?) or even Peter Prim’s Profitable Present, but they’re there if you need them.

Filed under: Fusenews