Engagement Present, Computers Absent

An interesting article from the New York Times this week that looks at a Waldorf school in Los Altos, CA, that has no computers, no screens at all, and that says computers and schools don't mix. And the chief technology officer of eBay sends his children there. So do employees of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard.

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A Case for Using Social Media With Learning

A new article from MindShift explores the "pros" around using social media as a central part of learning.

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THE SURPRISING TRUTH...about what motivates us

Dan Pink on what truly motivates us in the work that we do: ideas that we likely already know, but that are oh-so-easy to lose sight of.

Summer Time...and the Livin' Is Easy: A Timely Look at the History of Summer Vacation

A recent NPR-sponsored report takes a look at the history of the summer vacation in the context of school schedules--with a focus on current happenings in Ohio.

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Banned Kurt Vonnegut Book to be Read by Band of High School Students

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering 150 free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students of the Missouri school that recently banned the seminal 20th Century novel.

Three Books for the Grammar Lover In Your Life

A recent NPR review.

Why I Need My High School Library

Take a look at this award-winning video--student-created!

LMSs as tools, not revolutions

reflections on Esther Shein's "One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems."

In her article, “One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems,” Shein quotes Matthew Waymack, a virtual school director in Georgia: "The climate of the classrooms is better," he says, "the attendance of the students and teachers is better, and the overall feeling of being engaged is better." Waymack, of course, is referring to his school’s use of a learning management system, or LMS. Waymack is part of a new group of educators who, ten years ago, seemed to be light years ahead of the educational curve with visions of what online learning could look like. In the year 2001, my thoughts around any kind of non-lecture courses were something like this: “Correspondence courses? Sure: do some readings, do some writings, mail papers back to an instructor via the post. But online courses? Too problematic. Not really happening.”

Now, in 2011, I am recalling a decade-old idea of the insurmountable complexities around online learning...on my blog, which is itself a tool for online sharing and learning.

Waymack’s above quotation catches my eye because it embodies the highest ideal that might be represented by online learning: the notion that technology and strictly virtual realms of learning do not take the place of traditional learning scenarios, but that—rather—there is the possibility that with the aid of tools like LMSs, we might simply take moderate steps toward achieving better classroom climates, better attendance, and better overall engagement.

I can’t imagine any teacher—tech-savvy or not—balking at those aims.

Podcasts for the Classroom (Classcasts?)

A collection of some of my favorite podcasts with applications to the secondary school language and literature classroom:

GRAMMAR GIRL'S QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING

"In under five minutes, you'll get a fun and friendly dose of writing advice. Grammar Girl covers everything from punctuation and grammar to style and voice."

http://grammar.qdnow.beta.libsynpro.com/rss


THE MOTH

"The Moth features people telling true, engaging, funny, touching and eye-opening stories from their lives."

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themothpodcast


NPR's STORYCORPS

"At recording booths across America, everyday people interview one another about their lives. StoryCorps creator Dave Isay showcases these first-person stories in this weekly podcast."

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510200


THIS AMERICAN LIFE

"Official free, weekly podcast of the award-winning radio show 'This American Life.' First-person stories and short fiction pieces that are touching, funny, and surprising."

http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast


WNYC's RADIOLAB

"On Radio Lab, science meets culture and information sounds like music. Each episode of Radio Lab is an investigation -- a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea."

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/index.xml


CNN STUDENT NEWS

"CNN Student News utilizes CNN's worldwide resources to bring each day's top news stories to middle and high school classrooms. The 10-minute, commercial-free program encourages student participation and provides classes withhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif context for understanding current events."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cnn-student-news-video/id179950332


TED TALKS

"16 great TEDTalks that could turn you into a lifelong TED fan in 18 minutes or less."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-taste-of-tedtalks/id333575566

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Are School Librarians Expendable?

Take a look at the "Room for Debate" for June 27 from "The Opinion Pages" of The New York Times.

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(No) Ghosts in the Library

Another--this time library-centic--shenanigan from the folks at Improv Everywhere:

I Try to Keep Me Out of It, but I'm Both in the Center and Just a Link in a Chain

reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”

"When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalised to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process? Answers to that question - and let’s hope there are hundreds - will help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material."

I try not to write in the first person, and I think this is because as a teacher of English whose Advanced Placement curriculum is heavy on analysis, the old rule of thumb in conventional academic discourse is that first-person “I” is not used; rather, an objective, persuasive narrator maintains a person-less hold on the text that admits to no “I,” to no sense of infallible human error, but only is concerned with the ideas and analysis embedded in the text itself, as if those ideas simply and incredibly exist—no need for the feeble reassurance of a human author.

Obviously, I have already broken my own rule. But you knew that way up at the beginning of the previous paragraph.

But sometimes when we struggle to make sense of something (OK: “Sometimes when I struggle to make sense of something”), I need to say it simply like it is: “I think that….” This phrasing suggests more honestly where I am truly at in a given situation as a learner: I don’t yet know anything about this topic well enough to make a bold statement infused with certainty, but I am willing to venture into the realm of ideas, play around for a while, and try to figure some things out.

So…

The piece excerpted above—“The Future’s bright, the future is…”—is entirely spot-on when it comes to outlining one of the big challenges faced by students today—that students less and less need a curriculum based on content and more and more need one based on digital literacy skills. Absolutely. (I also think that I should be making my statements in a less first-person-esque fashion, but—as noted by such notable figures as Bob Dylan and the folks at futurelab—“the times, they are a changin’”). And I’ve thought this for years now, and I’ve thought this even more so every single week as of the past number of months. Is it something to do with starting a new decade that seems to encourage this thought that our technological world—our education world—is really changing as fast as we often predicted it would? Or is it really, actually starting to change as fast as we often predicted it would and we can no longer ignore the signs?

It is very difficult (impossible?) to know whether it is really true that “things are changing faster than ever before” today, as that sort of statement has also presumably been true at any other moment in our—at least recent—history. And yet: there is this underlying feeling, as a person today living in a technologically connected first-world country, as a teacher of ideas and writing, that my life—and particularly the life of my students—will operate in entirely different ways when it comes to information and meaning-making in the…quite near future. Does anyone else feel like a clock is ticking?

I didn’t want to use “I” to begin a discussion of this article’s quotation because, well, I wanted to make a well thought-out, analytical claim about the above quotation rather than “talking about it.” But the truth is I feel like any statement I make about the statement that “teaching students digital literacy skills is important and growing more so each day” is just another statement that I’ve already made. A number of times. Very recently.

So it feels like the only place there is to go is “I.” To me. To connect up thoughts, feelings—personal and professional—in a way that makes sense.

And the irony here is that—ostensibly—this is exactly where web 2.0 tools are taking us, each user: to a place where information, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and meaning are no longer consumed and analyzed in a discourse involving three people—teacher, student, and author—but in a way that involves every single person who might be connected to the student, who might stumble upon or be guided to the student’s reactions to the information, and in a way that is—because the student’s name (and often times picture, too) is stamped right on every single comment or reply she makes on her blog or class wiki or Blackboard learner management system. Learning—the interaction of ideas and meaning—is becoming both more personal and more social at the same time: more personal because the individual is now encouraged to put her spin on information and recreate it and rebroadcast it in a way that is intimately and distinctly hers, and more social because this broadcasted recreation—this mashup—will come back to her with comments and critiques from an audience that, well, exceeds her former educational audience of three by factors of ten, hundreds, thousands….

Strangely, the web 2.0 experience is “all about me” and “all about everybody else”: when I sit here at my computer and arrange the world on it in exactly the fashion that I want to, it feels very much like I’m at the center of an ordered information universe that I created; at the same time, I realize that the galaxy orbiting around me is the very thing that made it possible for me to create my own “information universe,” and that every other person like me out there in cyberspace is having the same experience. It is at this moment that I glance up at the “Hyperlink” button on my blog and am reminded that a much more accurate description of my reality online is as merely one link in a long, long, long chain. A "web" of chains.

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High School Students, Google, and the Wild West

“That there is a crisis in scholarly publishing, few would disagree. But what exactly is the nature of the crisis? For academic librarians it is, among other things, the skyrocketing costs and growing number of many of the must–have journals; or perhaps it is the so–called serial breakdown, which describes a practice by which students turn to Google and the open Web for all their research, neglecting the high–value (and often expensive) publications, mostly serials, that libraries have licensed.”

--from “The Devil You Don’t Know” by Joseph J. Esposito

To this list I might add online databases that are subscribed to by school libraries (such as encyclopedias) that are rarely used by students.

As someone more familiar with high school libraries than a university academic library, I am not so familiar with the reality of the growing costs for must-have journals—though I imagine the numbers are likely astonishing.

However, I am someone who is very familiar with the “so-called serial breakdown” at the high school level: the internet as it is now (and particularly as it was a few years ago) is sometimes compared to the Wild West—a world of “anything goes” governed by few laws…where the wildest and the strongest often rule, and the wisest are left in the shadows. One of the features of the Wild West is that it presents a certain allure; though we have grown accustomed to and fond of our lives today that are defined by social rules, even as adults, we also can’t help but wondering what it might feel like to rob a bank and ride off into the sunset with the loot. Enter into this digital Wild West teenagers, who dive into the world of the web (read: Google) ready to read, believe, copy and paste, and report on the wildest of web information discovered in this digital world.

Though I don’t know exactly whose “fault” it is, or what is to blame, but high-value (and yes, often expensive) publications—whether online or not—are not only not used by my students, but not even known of by the vast majority of them. And the truth is I am not even looking for who or what to blame; what I am looking for is a solution. As a teacher, I do have opportunities to introduce students to my school’s package of high-quality library resources, though I find that I rarely do that. Our teacher-librarian, of course, has more opportunities for such direct instruction, but she is a very busy person as well.

While I don’t want to keep my students out of the Wild West just for the sake of keeping them out of the Wild West, I do want them to be aware of quality: what is quality, and what is not. With ever-greater amounts of easily- and freely-accessible information (that is only growing all the time), it is painfully clear that my students—and most all high school age students, I think—desperately and literally need such skills. Imagine waltzing through the Wild West and not being able to differentiate between the bank robber and the bar tender: “No sir, I didn’t want THAT kind of shot.” That kind of mistake could be fatal. While attributing the novel Of Mice and Men to a certain Mr. Cliff Notes is not quite as serious a crime, in the realm of the high school English teacher, it is nearly as dangerous.

Metaphorically Speaking...You're OK

A fascinating Ted Talk featuring James Geary's thoughts on how ubiquitous and embedded is the metaphor in our ways of thinking:



And the Prezi presentation featured in Geary's talk:

Mixing Mind and Metaphor on Prezi

A Symphony of "Wows" and "Yuks"

“However, people’s dependence on multimedia, rather than on traditional text-based sources of information, could make them particularly susceptible to what scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords Professor Susan Greenfield calls “the ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors”. The more exciting the presentation, the more likely they are to be impressed by it. So, for an obvious example, young people using the net to get the truth may decide between creationism or evolution not on the quality of the arguments but on the cleverness of the web designers’ pyrotechnics. But healthy amounts of adolescent skepticism (“whatever”) kick in at about the same time as acne. So, if we are able to equip young people with the skills to evaluate different sources in the context of a media-rich world, pupils will know how important it is to take everything they find online - however wicked the graphics - with a huge pinch of salt.”

--from futurelab.org.uk’s article, "The Future’s bright, the future is…"

Sometimes I include the random PowerPoint slide of a rabbit in a football costume or of Darth Vader teaching grammar to young students. It’s fun stuff: I see how long I can carry on the ruse as if the slide is actually part of the real lesson, and make wild connections and long, drawn out, and detailed anecdotes that give credence to the notion that, “Oh yeah, after the Star Wars series Darth often appeared in elementary schools to teach the past participle to ten-year-olds,” or, “Yes, definitely the first mammal besides homo sapiens to get drafted into the NFL was a rabbit—of course, they are both fast and can change direction on a dime with those sturdy hind legs—and rumor has it that this rabbit was a distant, if not direct, descendant of the hare that was the inspiration for Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny.”

I am not really very funny, and the kids know it. I am only funny because I am not funny, and I generally apologize on the first day of class in September for all of the unfunny hyjinks I will drag my students through over the course of the school year. I don’t even use flashing lights or music (very often) to get a reaction out of my students—I just insist that my story/PowerPoint slide/random video is in fact true and entirely related to the task at hand—and yet they still remember such jokes at the end of the year (or the end of their high school careers) much more readily than they remember the symbolic significance of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn (much to my chagrin). Action research for my master’s degree thesis involved investigating the correlation between the use of humor in the classroom and levels of student engagement. It turns out there is one, and the trick is to try and infuse that humor with images and ideas that are also relevant to the lesson/idea/task at hand so as to ensure better and longer-term understanding for students.

But I’m just one person and, again, not very funny—nor am I bestowed with expensive tools and expertise in the areas of persuasion. Nonetheless, students believe my most ridiculous claims when coupled with a mere (ridiculous, at that) picture. And this concerns me.

If a noticeable number of my students are gullible enough to (time and again) fall for Mr. Fuller’s in-class song and dance, just imagine what they might be susceptible to believe online—when actual marketers with actual agendas and actual tools and actual expertise place a well-aimed and actual advertisement in front of them on the internet. “No problem,” you say, “young people can tell what is a commercial and what is ‘real.’” Yes, perhaps. Most of the time. But how about when those same “marketers”—or “designers of content,” as seems a more apt description of today’s online authors—deliver information within a context that is seamlessly integrated with other, seemingly important and legitimate content? What then?

At its most basic levels, the ability to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent, sincerely wise and merely flashy—whether in an online environment or a very real physical environment, say, at the grocery market (are online environments “real” or not?)—is the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, between truth and hoax. I sometime wonder in what ways P.T. Barnum might have leveraged the internet. Certainly, he would have been master orchestrator of wows and yuks.

What kind of symphony do we want our future-adult students to play in? What kind of symphony will they play in? Who will be the conductor, and who will be willing to call out the conductor when his directions are, well, just wrong?



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School Libraries and TLs in the News on CBC

"School libraries: How important are they to learning and critical thinking?" asked a CBC news story headline yesterday.

Also see this recent CBC story regarding decreases in Ontario library staffing.

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Eli Pariser on TED: Beware online "filter bubbles"

A great, short talk by Eli Pariser on TED that addresses some of the important information literacy ideas hinted at in today's earlier post.

Author-ity

“Authority” is, in general, a perhaps dubious term in a secondary school library context because there are at least a couple of things happening with regards to “authority” and “teens”: first, teens, by nature, tend to enjoy challenging authority, and secondly, the Internet creates a scenario where teens—or any human being, for that matter—can now access information themselves (rather than digesting information that is furnished solely by a textbook or a teacher) and/or create and publish information themselves. This access to virtually limitless content changes classroom dynamics: the teacher is less of a direct instructor and much more of a facilitator. This scenario very quickly changes traditional classroom authority dynamics, which in turn leads to a need for greater emphasis on information literacy—begging such questions as “What is authority and why does it matter?” and “Who has authority?” and “How can I wisely determine authority?”

Now, certainly we know that “authority” is not meant to suggest stronger/weaker, leader/follower power dynamics per se. Authority, of course, refers to the credibility of an author or source—“author-ity.” However, it is interesting, as an English teacher and library user, to see ways in which authority is being interpreted by students today.

Authority is very often confused with popularity. This is an easy mistake for human beings—particularly teens?—to make: the more we hear about and/or discuss something, the more credibility or authority it tends to embody. As legends grow stronger and more intriguing with each retelling, so does content gain more authority each time it is referenced. As my advanced biology students recently told me in one of our English class discussions regarding persuasion, “Proximity creates fondness”; this seems convincingly true in both the animal world as well as the world of content and media.

The “authority is popularity” rule is seen in the ubiquity of Google and the way in which the search engine organizes its search results: the most often visited—or most popular—websites appear near the top of a search result. While it is true that there are many factors that contribute to search results, Page Ranking is one important factor. As noted by Google itself: “Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank." Further, we all know that very often it is only the first page of results from a Google search that is looked at by a user. The details of how PageRank works are not so important; it is enough simply to note that the very way in which our most popular search engine today operates serves to blur a high school student’s everyday perception of what is important, what is popular, what has authority.

Happily, I find that, with some coaching, students can become very information literate—quite adept at skillfully determining what is authoritative and why. However, it can be a challenge to encounter a, say, sixteen year old digital native student who has had no exposure to information literacy. These students sometimes don’t understand how to wisely judge authority or don’t want to have to wisely understand authority—because doing so means changing the way he or she thinks, changing the ways of his or her online life that have become very comfortable relying on content from Youtube or Google as “answers.”

A great way to show students that there is a very real need to become information literate—and to possess skills that allow them to wisely judge authority—is to introduce them to “spoof” websites. Find a way to integrate a site (or sites) into your curriculum and see what the results are: how long does it take students to recognize something “fishy” is happening? Who notices first? Who doesn’t notice? How long does it take students to start extrapolating and realizing how important ideas like authority, reliability, and credibility are when roaming the World Wide Web—a place that is still in many ways in its free-wheeling Wild West phase. Some of my favorite spoof sites include “Feline Reactions to Bearded Men” and the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. See my blog post for a fuller list with links.

At the end of the day, it is simply interesting to watch the ways in which all people—but particularly young people (high school students)—have an evolving sense of what “authority” means, and how that sense is tied to advancements in the areas of technology and media and in the processes of how content is created and delivered.

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A Scene from the Unquiet Library

The Unquiet Library (the Creekview High School library in Canton, GA) has stood out to me since I encountered it over a year ago as an excellent example of a school library using web 2.0 tools to both reflect and broadcast the already vibrant learning that appears to be occurring as well as to help further create a culture of vibrant learning. This positive cycle of reporting on and creating a buzz around learning is one of the powerful ways that web 2.0 tools can be leveraged in a school library setting. One of the further benefits of such use is the resultant “branding” of the library that tends to occur; for obvious reasons, if a library is involving students and using the same media tools that students use, then the library will become at least more present if not also more relevant in the lives of those students.

A particularly notable example successful library/student/media interaction can be found in this “Group Reflections on 9th Grade Research: Presearching, Formative Assessment, Research Guides, and More!” post from March 2011. The ten minute long Youtube video features a collection of teachers and students discussing the finer points of their recent foray into online researching, database use, research guides, citations, and more. The content of the conversation is valuable on its own, but this particular video is a nice example of teachers and TLs going beyond content with students and creating a scenario that empowers students simply by the way in which the project occurs.

A number of positive things happen in the scenario presented by this video:

• Teachers, TLs, and students are working together collaboratively toward a common goal
• All parties are engaged in a discussion about the learning process
• All parties appear comfortable with the process and aware of what the learning goals are
• The “stakes are raised” for all parties—but particularly the students—to perform well, as there exists a tangible and immediate audience that will view and critique the video as soon as it is published. This act of immediate publishing and the awareness of a tangible audience tends to increase the sense of importance surrounding the moment, which in turn tends to leader to deeper and fuller levels of understanding.
• Students are receiving excellent, direct feedback on their work.
• Students will likely receive even further feedback on their work and/or their on-air performance in the form of in-person comments from peers or comments on the library’s blog.



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It's a Jungle Out There!

Doug Johnson, on his Blue Skunk Blog, notes in a recent post how different today’s academic research endeavors are when compared to even fifteen years ago. He notes how, if you finished your formal education prior to 1995, those five to ten sources you were required to find in your university or public library were difficult to locate. He likens this to operating in an Information Desert, where resources in general are scarce, quality resources even more so, and you likely need a desert guide to lead you to any existing oases of information.

In contrast, we today operate in an Information Jungle, where the Internet presents a sea of countless sources, and our main task now is something more akin to locating the most quality oasis and determining which oases are not worth our time. As teachers and TLs we know the difficulties of teaching students the important skills and concepts of Information Literacy (IL) or Digital Literacy (DL), and we know quite clearly what it feels like to be that Information Jungle Guide: with a vibrant jungle of information teeming with an ever-multiplying web of organic thought, we must teach our students which informational branches are OK to leverage for support, and which informational insects are pure poison.

Johnson then goes on to broach the topic of “spoof websites”—that is, websites that are created with the intentional purpose of offering up an example of how easily we can be duped into believing absurd facts when they are presented in a believable style and/or context. Johnson himself was involved in the creation of a notable spoof website, the Mankato, MN Homepage, where he appears as Sheik Yabouti, visiting professor at Mandota University, wearing the garb that he had collected during his stay in Saudi Arabia. Encountering and analyzing one of these sites offers up a rich opportunity for discussion around what is good and bad about the onslaught of online information, how to determine quality and reliability in the online Information Jungle, and also raises questions that ask us to consider what kind of skills we think will be important ten or twenty years hence when information and media are even more evolved. Such conversations invite students, teachers, and TLs to consider what skills and concepts might be important to master today with an eye toward being transferable tomorrow.

Here is a list of spoof websites that Johnson includes on his blog (worth a look):

• Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
• Mankato, MN Homepage
• Dihydrogen Monoxide
• Clones-R-Us
• Northwest Tree Octopus
• First Male Pregnancy
• National Motor Vehicle License Bureau

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"A New Study on Reading in the Digital Age" Survey Administered Digitally

“A New Study on Reading in the Digital Age” appeared in a recent issue of Teacher Librarian. The study, carried out by Scholastic, surveyed 1,045 children age 6-17 and their parents (for a total of 2,090 respondents) in an online survey in the spring of 2010.

The results of the survey are broken down into categories. The categories and some of the notable findings are:

READING BOOKS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

• During the ages of 6-17, the time kids spend reading books for fun declines while the time kids spend going online for fun and using a cell phone to text or talk increases.
• Parents are concerned that the amount of time kids spend with digital technologies is taking away from the amount of time they spend reading, exercising, or spending time with other live human beings.
• Technology might be a motivator to actually get kids reading, however: over half of the child respondents noted that they would be interested in reading more if it was on an ebook.

These findings suggest some things that we certainly already know—electronic gadgets are both ubiquitous in the lives of youth and a cause for worry in the lives of adults concerned about their youth. These findings also suggest something that we have known was coming (is here already, in fact) for a long time: ebooks and ereaders are bound to have an impact on the world of books and reading, and it makes sense that this impact would perhaps be greater felt amongst youth as youth tend to more quickly and easily embrace new technologies. What we do not yet know is how large this impact might be and exactly how it will affect things like school libraries, child and young adult reading habits, and what kind resource commitments might be made by school districts to change with the times—will districts consider spending money on ereaders? Will districts spend money on making ebooks available for download via the school library? Who will maintain these new technologies—TLs or district computer/network technicians? Considering such concerns as software obsolescence, does it make sense for a school district to invest at all in a technology that will likely transmogrify so quickly and to such a degree that in a number of years the technology may very well be irrelevant?

THE VALUE OF READING

• Children and parents agree that the most important reason to read books for pleasure is to open up the imagination and be inspired (Sir Ken Robinson rejoice!).
• Eight in ten kids feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when they finish reading a book.
• Around twenty percent of kids read for fun less than once a week.

For all those who fear that the imaginative mind of a child is no longer inspired in the realm of books (and likely only inspired in the midst of a first-person shooter game on Playstation), there is good news here. Creativity and imagination still are cultivated via books. And kids even feel good about completing a book. This small detail brings up an interesting point: books maintain a physical presence that ebooks or any digital content do not. For whatever reason, most people I know—certainly myself included—feel that sense of satisfaction when finishing a book. Is it because the physical turning of pages allows us to literally feel and concretely see our progress over time, whereas the clicking of a mouse and the downward scrolling of a bar does not? Perhaps. Is it because this small physical act that occurs with book reading is more akin to the basic performance of physical tasks that we as humans have come to know as necessary and good since our early evolution than is the act digitally “moving through” information with a more vague sense of when we started and when we completed?

ROLE AND THE POWER OF CHOICE

• While many parents actively try different strategies to make their children more engaged in reading—and this is certainly a positive—it is ultimately the power of personal choice that is the most critical motivator to getting kids to read. Children—and likely humans in general—are more likely to finish a book they choose themselves.
• Parents are generally pleased with their children simply reading—whether they are reading Jane Austen or Mad Magazine might not matter too much to many parents.

Teachers have always known that student choice results in increased engagement, increased performance, and often more robust learning. It is certainly good for parents and school libraries to offer well stocked collections of a wide variety of books. The second piece of information presents an interesting suggestion: while it is certainly better for kids to be reading anything rather than nothing, at what point might a parent or teacher try to suggest reading with more literary merit? Further, this information is part of what likely reinforces the generally accepted notion that there are “school books” and “personal reading book”: students know that they will read Shakespeare and Orwell and Atwood in class—why would they invest time, therefore, reading it outside of class (particularly when the initial investment of brain power and effort required to “get into” such literature is often times greater than that required for pulpier fiction)?

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Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Blogger and technology-in-education consultant Will Richardson has done it again in his March 21, 2011 blog post titled “Valuing Change.” What is “it”? It is offering up a thought-provoking snippet that recounts a recent experience he had with a teacher regarding the use of web 2.0 tools in the classroom. In this case, the teacher was less than keen to quickly integrate web 2.0 tools into his lessons because he felt like such insertions of “bells and whistles” act perhaps more as distracters than enhancers.

At the heart of Richardson’s reflection is the tension between, on the one hand, teachers teaching curriculum in order to see students meet predetermined curricular outcomes that they will be tested on (and keeping a fairly narrow, sharp focus on achieving that goal), and on the other hand, teachers integrating more “now-appropriate” pieces of technology into the heart of their lesson delivery and student outcomes. Such tension is present when any change is imminent (the person being asked to change might be thinking something like, We used to do it that way, now they're asking us to do it this way, and the leap from one to the other is laborious, painful, and perhaps even unnecessary at the end of the day). In response to this tension, Richardson advocates for teachers to find ways to do both in their teaching—to both cover curriculum outcome requirements and to make their classrooms infused with the stuff of 21st Century Learning. Richardson calls this kind of teaching “‘doing both mode,’ as in finding a way to engage students in understanding the concepts for the test but doing so in a way that teaches them to think more expansively by using online tools to go beyond the paper and pencil and learn about connecting and creating and collaborating along the way.” The less-than-keen teacher that Richardson was having the conversation with responded to his basic endorsement of “doing both mode” like this: “Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning. I mean, they don’t need to do any of that to get the concept.”

What is interesting about the real-life-experience-turned-case-study put forth here is this: both parties are correct. Richardson and the “doing bothers” are 100% correct in their assertions that classrooms must become more now-centric not only for the purposes of keeping students engaged, but also for the purposes of doing our best to prepare students for a future that we can only guess about the shape of. One gets the feeling that—despite the human tendency to historically speak of how “things are changing so fast” and “I remember the way it was when I used to do it”—with regards at least specifically to the technology-, computer-, and internet-related world, the rate at which advancement occurs (and therefore the rate at which obsolescence occurs as well) today truly is exponentially astounding. 2011 is very different from 2001. (I am reminded of this video that made its way around the web a couple years ago.) At the same time, the less-than-keen teacher and his ilk are also 100% correct: what is wrong with eliminating distractions and getting down to the heart of the matter with regards to learning concepts and—particularly within the context of a course that features a government-required exam at year’s end—preparing students for the evaluative tasks that we know are coming? Certainly, a teacher who does not invest a good faith effort in preparing his or her students for succeeding on an assessment that is deemed as “important” by the jurisdiction’s education policy makers is perhaps a teacher who is courting negligence.

As teachers, students, and citizens of this 21st century, this is a tough situation we have found ourselves in.

While I don’t necessarily firmly endorse either Richardson or the teacher to the exclusion of the other, one detail stands out as entirely true from Richardson’s post: The way in which learning takes place is changing, and is deserving of more and more conscious reflection at each step of the teaching process. It is true that there is and should be more emphasis on the way—or how—we achieve learning tasks today, and here is why: the content we are working with has not changed much or perhaps not at all—Macbeth still begins and ends in the exact same way it did 300 years ago, and the themes, symbols, puns, and enduring understandings inherent in the text are also unchanged. So we still—as teachers—must know our content, but we must interact with it in different ways. We must involve the tools and processes that are relevant to now. It is as if we are transitioning from slow-pitch to fast-pitch softball: we are still playing the same game, but the way in which we are playing the game has changed dramatically—it is much faster and requires much more savvy on the parts of all the players involved. For those pitchers still lobbing up big, slow, juicy, home run-begging slow pitches…well, they are still participating in the game itself, but a couple of things might be happening: the batters are either knocking each slow pitch out of the park because the task is such an incredibly easy one, or the batters are losing interest because slow pitch is so relatively boring—and they are putting down their bats, walking away, and looking for another game in town that holds their interest. Somewhere nearby, the batter is sure, there is a raucous game of fast-pitch softball being played, where the pitchers, batters, fielders, and fans revel in the speed and intensity of the play on the field, and—sometimes, when there is a quiet lull in the action—they can hear the faint sounds of slow-pitch softball and dial-up internet modems emanating from the other side of town.

While the above analogy serves the purpose of illustrating the situation—and leaves most readers wanting to buy a ticket to the fast-pitch game, where certainly fans would be simultaneously poking around on their iPads throughout all nine innings of action—it is also part of the problem: there is a certain sleek allure connected with all things technology-, web 2.0-, and 21st Century Learning-based that is both unmistakable and often irresistible. Which youthful player wouldn't want to participate in the fast-pitch game? Which students don’t want to see their own likeness reflected in the multi-colored iPod silhouettes? The human tendency to be attracted to most things new and fast—the tendency to put a sort of unthinking faith in all things that look like “progress” and hitch our wagons to an image of the future that is attractive—is one of the central impulses that is shaping our society today. The tension that we see between the “do-bothers” and the “not-so-keeners” that results from this tendency is simply the effect that this impulse has within the context of education; other realms—government, business, even parenting—are experiencing their own unique tensions in their own unique ways.

This allure of the new and our infatuations with progress complicate things. Parents would likely love it if the one ball game in town fit the needs of their children—whether fast-pitch, slow-pitch, or something in between—but that’s not the case. There are, in fact, many games in town and it is complicated to decide which game is best for your child. It is complicated to decide which school is best for your child, which type of teaching and teacher best fits your child, how your child should prepare for the future.

The task is made even more difficult when, more than likely, the fast-pitch game is the game that your child wants to play in, but you are not yet certain if there is lasting value in the fast-pitch game. Time has not shown you yet. What you do know is that you grew up playing slow-pitch, and it seemed to work out OK: you turned out just fine. Time has shown you that. So how to proceed? Combine elements of both? Create a new game: “slow-fast-pitch”? The title itself makes my head spin. Such is the scenario teachers find themselves in right now. Within this complicated context, it is no wonder that the not-so-keeners are attracted to simplicity and an elimination of distractions that shuns the integration of web 2.0 tools in the midst of their curriculum delivery.

Richardson, near the end of his post, hints at another complicating factor within education: it is often the case that government-mandated exams that account for sizable percentages of student marks—a single exam counts for 40% of students’ year-end English 12 mark here in British Columbia, for example—do not assess student mastery of concepts or skills that are specifically or exclusively learned via the use of web 2.0 tools in the classroom. This fact alone does not mean that such tools should not be used. But it does illustrate how teachers everyday operate in a system that is pulling them in two opposite directions: on the one hand, a large portion of students’ final marks might come from assessments that don’t have much to do with 21st Century Learning. On the other hand, teachers are expected to use such now-centric things as web 2.0 tools to deliver instruction and to require students to show mastery of the curriculum using these tools as well. For some teachers, this is fine—easy and enjoyable, even. These teachers naturally gravitate toward technology integration because they enjoy it and understand it. But for other teachers, this is a constant struggle that makes their daily teaching lives less enjoyable. Richardson gives his take on the situation: “My sense of it is that teacher (the “not-so-keener”) is still in the majority, and as teachers get incentivized to do even more test prep and one-size-fits all instruction, he’ll remain in the majority for quite a while longer.”

I don’t know definitively how to conclude this post. And I think that—for many teachers—that is exactly what makes now so complicated.

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Making quality accessible with OA and OJS

In the July 2008 issue of School Libraries Worldwide, University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies professor Rick Kopak outlines the benefits of Open Access (OA) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) in his article, “Open Access and Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over.”

As teachers and TLs, we know that students achieving a certain competence in their information or digital literacy levels is essential (see this post). We also know—perhaps through our own first-hand experience or through seeing our students’ struggles—that the Web exists as a collection of information so vast that it is quite easy to become lost, overwhelmed, and confused when sifting through the web of information. As we search for information relevant to a project or a paper, we often feel much like Ray Bradbury’s protagonist Guy Montag in Part 2 of his novel Farhenheit 451. As Montag struggles to decipher for himself what is real and what is controlled or contrived, how to literally and figuratively read both books and the immediate world around him, Bradbury employs a metaphor to illustrate Montag’s futile efforts: information passes swiftly and profusely through Montag’s mind just as sand falls through a sieve. Our students’ experiences on the web are often much like that: information filters through the sieve of their minds like so much detritus with only a small portion of the content remaining in the sieve. What remains in the sieve is—unfortunately—too often information that is not necessarily marked by quality, credibility, or accuracy, but that for some other reason was “big enough” to remain left in the sieve. What too often determines this “bigness”—what is left over—are factors like ease of accessibility (the first hit on Google) and information that is comprehensible to the lowest common denominator. Kopak remarks on this conundrum by noting, “The increasing availability of information via the Web brings much of good quality, but also much of less discernible authority, trustworthiness, and provenance.” In the effort to increase the quality of the information that students encounter and use in their learning, OA and OJS offer themselves as helpful tools.

OA and OJS are useful because they offer greater ease in accessing “the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article” (Kopak). Essentially, OA and OJS make more immediately searchable and available quality articles from reliable journals that were formerly available only in their original paper versions or via databases such as EBSCO, which are fee-required sources for information (often times schools or school districts do pay for access to such databases, but my personal experience has shown me that often times students do not bother using the services at school or in their password-protected forms at home. This is likely an issue that is teachable with an increased focus on information literacy by TLs and teachers in general). This accessibility is important, as locating and using quality information is the first step in most projects and papers; if this first step itself is cumbersome or confusing, then the chances for success in general dramatically decrease.

As I note on another blog, this

is not to say that OJS are a panacea with the effect of teachers no longer needing to teach digital literacy to students. OJS are, however, powerful tools that enable students to have a first place to look—at least one de facto "wise choice" that can be made before diving into the information sea—or crawling upon that information web?—that is Google.

And experience tells me that the more tools the better.

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Not Waiting for Superman

Is it a bird? No. Is it a plane? No. Is it Superman? Well, yes—with regards to British Columbian (BC) TLs and student literacy advocates—it is. Only this time his alter-ego is not named Clark Kent, but rather Ken Haycock.

In his article “Connecting British Columbia (Canada) School Libraries and Student Achievement: A Comparison of Higher and Lower Performing Schools with Similar Overall Funding” from the January 2011 issue of School Libraries Worldwide, Dominican University, USA, professor emeritus Haycock—formerly of the University of British Columbia and San Diego State University—analyzes seven key school library funding and staffing variables in a selection of both low- and high-performing public and private BC schools to determine the nature and extent of the relationship between these variables and student academic success regardless of student demographics.

Haycock prefaces the presentation of his research with some engaging statements that serve as narrative summaries of his research findings. A few of these statements are:

• “Among predictors of academic achievement, the size of the school library staff and collection was second only to the absence of at-risk conditions in terms of poverty and low adult educational attainment” (38).

• “Teacher-librarian time, schedules and collaboration with teaching colleagues were associated with higher test score outcomes” (38).

• Quoting Lance and Loertscher from a 2003 study: “If you were setting out a balanced meal for a learner, the school library media program would be part of the main course, not the butter on the bread” (38).

The seven school library variables—and an anecdotal summary of his findings in the study—are outlined here:

• Access. Overall, schools with libraries open more hours per week during and outside of school hours were more likely to be higher achieving schools. During school operating hours, libraries at high performing schools were open 25% more hours on average than libraries at low performing schools: an average of 26 hours during school per week versus 20.8 hours per week. Outside of school, on average, libraries at high performing schools were open nearly 65% more hours than low performing schools: an average of 8.6 hours versus 5.2 hours. (40)

• Staffing. Libraries with more qualified school librarian hours, more paid clerical and technical staff hours, a larger number of volunteers and total number of staff were more likely to be associated with high school performance. At high performing schools, libraries were staffed with teacher-librarians for 29.2 hours per week versus 18.3 hours at low performing schools. Volunteers were more likely to be found at high performing school libraries than in low performing school libraries: an average of 20.2 volunteers versus 11.4. Total library staff hours per week were nearly double for high performing schools, with an average of 57.9 hours versus 31.5 staff hours per week for low performing schools. (40)

• Partnerships and outreach. Schools in which teacher-librarians were spending more hours offering student reading incentives, providing more information skill group contacts per week, and identifying materials for teachers were more likely to be higher achieving schools. High performing school teacher-librarians spent an average of 3.9 hours per week on reading incentive activities, twice that of counterparts at low performing schools. High performing school teacher librarians also spent 2.8 hours per week identifying materials for teachers, more than double that of counterparts at low performing schools. (40)

• Usage. School libraries seeing more group visits per week and more items circulating per week were more likely to be at higher achieving schools—though how much of this is due to differences in school size is not known. High performing school libraries received an average of 19.9 student group visits per week versus 13.8 at low performing school libraries. (40)

• Networked technologies. Schools with a greater number of library and school computers with catalogue access, and schools with a greater number of library computers with Internet access were more likely to be higher achieving schools. Libraries at high performing schools had 52% more computers with Internet access and nearly twice as many computers with library catalogue access. Even more profound, high performing schools offered nearly three times as many computers with school-wide library catalogue access than low performing schools. (40)

• Large current collection. Schools with libraries stocked with a large collection of books of all types and with more current materials were more likely to be higher achieving schools—though how much of this is due to differences in school size is not known. Libraries at high performing schools held an average of 15,000 items in their collections versus 12,000 at low performing schools, and their holdings on average were nearly four years newer as well. Spending on print resources at high performing schools was more than double that at low performing school libraries: $11,700 versus $4,900. (40)

• Adequate funding. Additional buying power such as that derived from school and parent fundraising was related to school achievement as indicated by the combined results of public and independent schools. School/parent fundraising at high performing schools far outnumbered funds raised at low performing schools, with $6,100 versus $1,800 annually. (41)

Perhaps the most striking detail in all seven of the variable areas above is this simple fact: in all cases, a greater allocation of resources in any form to the school library—whether money, time, human resources, materials, etcetera—resulted in a positive relationship with student academic achievement. We generally know this to be true intuitively, but what makes Haycock’s research so engaging is that he presents it as true empirically. As TLs, we tend to maintain an understandable bias when it comes to all things school library related: of course we “know” that there is a strong correlation between greater allocations of resources to the school library and student academic achievement, but we are not always able to point toward a document—toward tangible black and white print—that definitively supports our “knowing.”

What is particularly engaging about Haycock’s article is the fact that it is jurisdiction-specific. Many similar studies look at such jurisdictions as school libraries in Canada, school libraries in the United States, or school libraries in a particular US state. However, Haycock here examines the contextually-relevant data from BC and offers up his findings—findings that all BC TLs and BC student literacy educators, advocates, and proponents should know well and should keep easily accessible when it comes time to create school- or district-based budgets that affect school library funding. To quote former US President Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Or, in this case, “It’s funding allocation and priorities, stupid.” In the Ministry of Education’s 2009/10 Annual Service Plan report, Minister of Education Margaret MacDiarmid reiterates BC’s commitment to literacy: “Our Government’s commitment to literacy, laid out in our Great Goals, is for B.C. to be the best educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent, and we remain committed to that goal.”

We have the Minister’s commitment, we have the research data. We are merely waiting for the funding prioritization—both provincially and locally—to fall in line with what is required to make BC superlatively literate. What we are not waiting for, fortunately, is Superman.

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Narrative Report Card: Profile of a Successful School Library

In the Winter 2011 issue of School Libraries in Canada appears a school library profile of Kelowna Secondary School’s (KSS) library. Reading this profile took me back to my “early days” of TL coursework and UBC’s LIBE 461 curriculum that looks at the basic management and layout of a school library; I recall reading similar library profiles in that course. But reading this profile also reminded me that all individual parts—though they may vary slightly depending on the uniqueness of each individual school’s context and nuances—that add up to the glorious whole that is the successful secondary school library are, by and large, the same. And this is good news, as the ever increasingly complex technological world that accompanies the school library mission today has the potential to create for the TL feelings of being overwhelmed.

The school, community, and administrative support for the KSS library is both impressive and sensible. It is impressive because a clear sense of mission and full support is connoted throughout the library profile. It is sensible because we know—and we have known empirically for decades—that a well-supported and well run library is one of the keys to a successful school environment. I think that most teachers or people involved in public education would nod their heads in assent when it is stated that “schools that are known as ‘vibrant’ and that strongly feature a ‘culture of engagement’ tend to also feature a strong library.”

Not only do students at the KSS library have access to 60 desktop and 60 laptop computers in the library, but they also have the ability to reserve audio-visual/technological equipment via an online form. Teachers have access to two online streaming video services; many educators are aware of the various—and generally increasing in quality—streaming services available for schools, but far from all schools subscribe to such services. To have the services available and make them a central part of a school’s content delivery methodology is commendable.

The KSS TLs note that having a strong library program has much to do with being vigilantly aware of the always evolving nature of libraries, information delivery, and patrons’ information needs. For example, how often and how conveniently can the community access the library? Do community members access the library, or are they involved with the library? Also, how can the library support new initiatives within the school or community? Finally, how are student needs changing? Having a keen and continuous awareness of these “moving targets” is essential to maintaining a successful library. Just as a teacher must be so in relation to students in the classroom, the TL must always be one step ahead of a multitude of possible or certain changes that are coming in the future.

Impressively, 75% of the KSS library’s seats are occupied by classes reserved by teachers. This is a truly phenomenal number, and a strong indicator of not only the health of the library, but the health of the school’s learning culture in general.

Interestingly, KSS TL’s note that the library has undergone a transformation from a “traditional resource centre” into a “learning commons.” The difference seems to mainly be moving away from an emphasis on the library as a place to come and find resources and move toward an emphasis on the library as a more active, working learning environment, where information is not only retrieved but also analyzed, discussed, evaluated, mashed up, and synthesized into something new—a new idea, a new product. Part of the KSS library’s journey from resource centre to learning commons included a greater emphasis on developing French language resources, recruiting and utilizing expertise from the broader community, and further emphasizing movement toward becoming a virtual library that has more to do with an online and database presence and less to do with “bricks and mortar.”

KSS TLs remark that it is important—though the library seems to be a constantly buzzing and constantly complex place—for the library to remain a refuge within the school. “Despite apparent flurry of activity, a library is still often a safe harbor among storms of public high schools,” they say.

While all the physical, technological, cultural details noted above are entirely important in creating a success school library program, at the end of the day, the KSS TLs seem more focused on the “teacher” portion of their twin moniker: “Remaining focused on professional service and encouraging our fellow teachers to embrace inquiry based instruction is our primary objective,” conclude these teacher-librarians.

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Truthiness In Advertising

In her article “A Fine, Fine Line: Truth in Nonfiction,” children’s and young readers’ author Tanya Lee Stone tackles the question what is gained or lost by blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction? As genres like narrative nonfiction and historical fiction by definition have one foot in each territory, why might it be important to either withhold or divulge to the reader what is true and what is not?

Stone uses the analogy of a box of chocolates to illustrate her point: when we open up a box of assorted chocolates—just like Forrest Gump said—we never know what we are going to get. What purports to be chocolate might in fact be a thin shell of chocolate covering a mostly fruit-laden sweet. What is missing here, says Stone, is labeling: if a thing does not identify itself accurately, then the experience of the user (the consumer—eater or reader) may be—pardon the pun—bittersweet. When we expect fiction, deliver fiction and label yourself as so. When we expect nonfiction, deliver truth and label yourself as so. And whatever you do thereafter, stick to your label: we want what we bought to be the thing that was advertised. Our horizons of expectation, as literary critics Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss might say, begin even before we crack open a book: we begin to form visions and versions of a work based on our initial perception of it, whether that perception is created through word of mouth, back- or front-cover book “branding,” or any other method of familiarization. We cannot rely on books that “look” like nonfiction but that are at best only based on nonfiction, says Stone. She offers up another helpful example from personal experience to illustrate the importance of transparently delineating fiction and nonfiction differences:

I grew up voraciously reading those orange-covered Childhood of Famous Americans biographies. When I discovered, years later, that they were fictionalized (now stated on the back covers, quite rightly), I was furious. I felt duped. Do you know how many facts are embedded in my knowledge base that are not, in truth, facts? I don’t. This may contribute to my zealous fact-checking and research habits. But before someone comments that I should see that as a gift, I have already considered that angle. It was not a gift. I was misled. Worse, those books didn’t need truthiness to be engaging. I loved them. But ultimately, they let me down. I can’t rely on what I learned from them.

Lest she be labeled as cranky and up-tight, Stone goes on to say that she is all for “interesting packaging and cool concepts that will engage and entice young readers,” but that—as she knows from personal experience—clarity in identifying genre is important. “Keep the line between historical fiction and nonfiction crystal clear,” she says.

I sympathize with Stone’s thesis, and I fully understand why she writes as she does. At the same time, two things immediately came to mind as I read her piece.

First of all: the tantalizingly blurry line between fiction and nonfiction is something that I celebrate in my classroom each year (and hope that my students celebrate along with me. Usually, they do. Sometimes—in a fashion something akin to Stone’s lament—they don’t). In the spirit of great Canadian First Nations author Thomas King, whose 2003 Massey Lecture Series titled “The Truth About Stories” dives into the delicious way in which Truth can often be found by examining different versions of the truth, we analyze such works as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and ask ourselves: “How might we as readers be seeing a clearer version of the Truth by following Foer’s loops and leaps through various blurrings of the truth (and many outright and outlandish non-truths)? And if we conclude that such authorial meanderings are only obfuscating the truth, then why are we bothering—why did Foer bother—with a 400 page novel that states a Truth that could perhaps be stated in five pages? We do enter into our classroom discussions with a clear understanding of the genre and of what the author is “up to”—a clearly labeled box of chocolates. So in this way, Stone and I absolutely operate on the same level. My only word on this topic would be: while truth in advertising is important, so is reveling in the ambiguity that is the line between fiction and nonfiction, and the constant playfulness inherent in trying to discover and define just where that line lives.

Secondly: Stone also notes in her article that another reason she is wary of blurring fiction and nonfiction is that there are “unending creative ways to tell a true story.” There is, she would likely say, plenty of richness and intrigue inherent in the everyday stories of real, live people that are passed through the generations—no need for adding extra spice. And this idea caused me to realize: our students do this—tell creative stories that are (mostly) true—everyday with social media.

Social media tools like blogs and Facebook in the lives of youth today have created a divide between person and persona, a situation where marketing the online self—the persona—becomes a nearly full time job. The notion of marketing the online self via social media branding is an idea that has for years been not only noticed but written about, analyzed, and packaged as a blend of science and art that—when done deftly—results in positive outcomes for both the person and the persona. A quick search online reveals the numerous websites that are dedicated to discussing the topic: The Social Media Examiner (“How to Boost Your Personal Brand with Social Media”), consultant and blogger Chris Brogan’s “100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media,” and Personal Branding Blog: Navigating YOU to Future Success! just to name a few. So we know that our students are familiar—on a personal, experiential level—with the basic idea of telling stories that are true with the end goal of entertaining or impressing an audience. And sometimes, I am very willing to bet, those stories that are told—those blog posts, those Facebook posts, those exclamatory Tweets—are not entirely true. They may be building toward or pointing toward a Truth, but they are (I am being exceedingly kind here...) likely not entirely true. Is this OK? Is social media creating a generation of split personality, bipolar humans whose lives exist as some sort of synthesis of person and persona, human and 01101010110001101? Or is it creating savvy story tellers in the “first person predominant” that are “networking” (remember in the 90’s when that term meant “handshaking” and “let me give you my card”?) nearly 24-7? And what will be the results of all this?

Just so you know, I generally detest clichés, but: time will tell.

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Transference as Transcendence: Out the Assembly Line Factory Door and Into the Web of Information

American media as of late has reported on the rapid decline of Detroit’s population. What used to be the fifth-largest city in the United States is now a city that has experienced more than a decade of steadily increasing population exodus as the Ford Motor Company finds itself in the midst of economic and identity crises. Detroit is a city that was built on Henry Ford’s industrial-era assembly line model of work, where the valuable worker was the worker who could efficiently and repeatedly perform a single task in isolation along a line of multiple tasks. The end result? Cars! Cheap cars and well-paid workers. And in the 1910s this was an absolutely phenomenal way to work. But there is a reason that, in 2011, Detroit as a city is struggling with both a population and an identity crisis. As Bob Dylan noted, “The times they are a-changin,’” and—as all educators today know—21st century learning is not in the business of producing assembly line workers.

In his article, “Assumptions, Information Literacy, and Transfer in High Schools,” James Herring tackles one of the perhaps most important and least explicitly-considered facets of education: the transference of skills and knowledge. Transference is both so highly embedded and so important in the process of education (in terms of humans learning as they mature, which is differentiated here from the sequential experience of school) that it is often overlooked in terms of what teachers and TLs are doing in their day-to-day lives. However, it is important to remember that learning is, at its core, perhaps nothing more than the process of unraveling how something is similar or different from something else, and in making such distinctions, we come to see how and which skills and concepts can be applied from one situation or task to the next.

His format throughout the article is this: after outlining a series of six assumptions (held by teachers, TLs, and students) regarding information literacy (IL) in select Australian high schools, he goes on to show how the six assumptions are largely challenged by the findings he made in these high schools. The heart of Herring’s findings might be summarized thusly:

• Teaching IL is—like teaching any subject—largely a process of making the implicit explicit. Students do not generally realize the importance of IL skills and how these skills are relevant to their future. In this scenario, there is very little or no student “felt need” or “buy in.”

• Making the implicit explicit, as noted above, is another variation on the importance of metacognition in learning. Students who can both understand content as well as understand the reasons for and importance of the content they are learning will develop learning connections that are both deeper and more enduring.

What follows is a reflection on selected details from Herring’s article:

• Students often perceive IL as something that is or is not taught by individual teachers based mostly on those teachers’ personal preferences. As such, students’ perceived value of IL is diminished (“If only some teachers find it important, then obviously not all students need to find it important either. And I think I’ll—conveniently—choose to be one of those students who find IL unimportant. Nice. Now I don’t have to worry about that part of my learning.”)

• Most teachers regard IL as a purely skills-based piece of learning. Some teachers is merely and only using a search engine effectively. In this scenario, IL becomes something akin to a single tool used at a single point in a process, and is as a result not understood by students as “here is something that I can use today and tomorrow in all areas of my studies and my life.” Only a few teachers understand that IL is also related to concepts metacognitive thinking, and that the more informationally literate students are, the more likely they are to become at least academically successful regardless of the subject of their studies.

• Many teachers and TLs assume that students understand the rationale for what they are being taught. This assumes that students themselves are capable of making the implicit explicit, which is rarely the case.

• This detail makes simple (and good) sense: a lack of teacher repetition and reinforcement leads to a lack of transfer. Teachers must collectively reinforce the importance of IL for students to buy in to the process.

• Some less engaged students regard transference as the teacher’s responsibility, not the student’s (that is, these students wait for the teacher to make the explicit implicit, and assume that if this step is not taken, then the topic at hand—in this case, IL—must not be important).

• Most teachers and TLs see transference as the students’ responsibility (uh-oh!). This assumption may likely be based on the fact that—for most teachers and TLs—the importance of and benefits of IL are utterly obvious. As such, teachers and TLs assume that students see these obvious benefits as well.

• Finally, when there is a lack of student understanding with regards to transfer, there is usually no “culture of transfer” in the school—that is, the staff is not collectively aware of the importance of and committed to emphasizing IL.

We know that IL is important, and will only continue to become ever more so in the foreseeable future. We—teachers and TLs—know this. But another important party in our teaching lives do not know this. Let’s make the implicit explicit: in with transference and metacognition, out with the industrial assembly line model of understanding that sees each skill as a discreet, one-step task that is only valuable in a single context. If he were alive today, I like to think that even he would see that we can get more mileage with transference and metacognition.

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