Yiddish @ Sydney

The National Library of Israel, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project is please to announce the opening to the public of a digitized version of the Frankfurt Memorbuch, one of the most important sources of genealogical data on German Jewry.

The Frankfurt Memorbuch is a massive 1073 page manuscript documenting the deaths of important members of the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, one of the most important communities of Germany Jewry, over
a period of almost 300 years (1628-1907).

The notations are generally in the form of the yizkor prayer "May God remember the soul of ..." followed by biographical data, much of which is a description of the piety and good qualities of the deceased.

The site includes page and chronological indexes (the entries in the manuscript itself are often not in exact chronological order) as well as an essay on the Memorbuch in both Hebrew and English by the late Cecil Roth (first published in 1965 and presented here with permission of the Cecil Roth Trust).

The digitized manuscript is presented in the DjVu format (plug-in required) which provides high quality, magnifiable images compressed into relatively small files for easy downloading. In order to view these images it is necessary to download and install (once) the free DjVu viewer program.

To access the Memorbuch:

Memorbuch -- English site
or
Memorbuch -- Hebrew site

I'm attempting to do this, and have decided it would be fun to see where Reb Avrom (Yiddish 4 and sitting in on Yiddish 2) is at the moment.

So, let's see if the new toy works, with Yiddish even...

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אוי! טו אַ קוק!

We all know that the Internet is "really" only for North America (i.e., the US and if the PTBs of the Intratubes are being generous Canada, and okay England sometimes), so with the start of the new academic year there almost upon them, there are some ideas floating about.

First, Firefox is going to be bundles into a "campus edition" with plug-ins that Mozilla thinks will help students (Zotero for references and tags, FoxyTunes music player and Last.fm support, and StumbleUpon for searching). It's not available for download just yet, but will be shortly.

Notely is a web-based collection of tools, including a calendar, to-do list, contacts, course listing, notes, etc. Notes are downloadable as pdf, doc or txt files. It's available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish (although when I clicked Spanish it stayed in English and when I was using the English Notely decided it wanted to be French). You can upload material and share via email, Facebook (see yesterday) and RSS.

Not bad.

And now I need coffee.

Ian Lamont has written about conducting business meetings in Second Life:

Right now, Second Life is not a great place to hold business meetings. ... I'll sum up some of the obvious problems: A poor UI, robust technical requirements, a steep learning curve, an inability to scale, and numerous distractions.

He then continues by interviewing Rebecca Nesson, of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School about her successful venture into Virtual Learning. The article can be found here.

Others have found benefits using Second LIfe (pedophiles and "bombings" and instability due to phenomenal growth notwithstanding) as evidenced by the Second Life Wiki which has an impressive list of participating institutions, mostly in the US, Canada and the UK. Those institutions in Australia that are listed are mostly technological programs (film, digital) with the exception of USQ.

While I will peruse the courses of the participating institutions, I think the steep UI and the access to a reliable -- and speedy -- ISP for students remains an issue.

Still waiting for Outback Online...

While students registered at Sydney Uni are able to download EndNote, some people don't like to use it (not sure why except its quirkiness perhaps). This is to let you know that there are other *free* alternatives.

Two worth mentioning:

• Easy Bib (mybib): You enter the details and it formats the citation according to either MLA or APA rules. Once you're finished, click on format, then add another entry. At the end you can print, download as an rtf file or view it online. If you click "save", a copy will be emailed and you can access your bibliography later.
  
• BibMe: will find the references for you. You can use autofill or manually enter the data. The engine will search for the media you choose, then you select the entry you'd like to add to your bibliography. Once you've selected the entry, it will display it in your chosen format (MLA, APA, Chicago) to the right. After you've complied your bibliography, you can either download the list, save it to your account (after you've registered, obviously) or start over.
  

Note that these generate bibliographies. You're still on your own or going to have to rely on EndNote for foot/endnotes.

A new source for creating web-based notes that are shareable.

Based on Stickies, this site lets you create notes for hard-copy texts (linking the note to the ISBN number and therefore to the listing in Amazon) as well as online resources (websites, podcasts, videos). The notes are tagged and can be kept private or shared.

It looks useful (no Yiddish there yet, I'm afraid -- it's mostly maths at this point) and easy to use. The Flash Demo is a bit tedious, but worth watching for the initial set-up.

Study Stickies

If you've students who are interested in social networking, but want an Australian flavour to their groups/pages, lead them to StudentFace, the newly launched networking site for Australian tertiary students.

You need to be an enrolled student at an Australian university, with a valid uni email, to register.

Make sure to read the FAQs.

Foreign Language Education Learning with Video Games and Live Web Media by Ravi Purushotma.

It's very long, but very insightful and well done. And actually is his thesis put into action. It takes a while to load, so be patient, but it is worth the wait.