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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Multiple Parties (and a wee touch of multiple literacies...)

In the March 14 edition of The Vancouver Courier, reporter Mark Hasiuk writes an opinion piece with a rather innocuous title: “Teacher-librarians react to book-banning effort in Vancouver schools.” No one should hardly be surprised by the headline; in fact, most BC residents with an at least basic understanding of schools and librarians would likely expect such a reaction from TLs. What is interesting, however, is the actual content of the article: where it goes—from A to B, title to conclusion—is an eyebrow-raising reminder of the multiple parties involved in the lives of teachers and (perhaps particularly or especially?) TLs.

As teachers working in a publicly-funded system, we are potentially involved with (is “responsible to” a too-dramatic phrase?) at least the following groups in our day-to-day work lives: students, parents, colleagues, administrators, custodians, our own District, the public in general…and part of that “public” are the media.

Hasiuk makes a point—in suggesting that more TLs be hired rather than paying more than half a million dollars for a District Diversity Team—that is, at first glance, engaging and seems sound. And in a narrow fashion, it is a sound point: in a Province that is not only comfortable with such self-styled superlatives as “The Best Place on Earth” but that—more relevant to this article—also in its 2006 strategic plan vowed to "Make British Columbia the best-educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent," it would seem to follow that such money should be spent on making BC students more literate human beings. It is absolutely true that BC school boards are in desperate need of additional funding for TLs. But his point seems also to oversimplify the situation; it could just as easily be argued that the work of the Diversity Team and its “wave effect” on the content and delivery methods used by teachers has its own positive impact on students’ “literacy”—though perhaps a slightly different kind of literacy, a literacy that focuses more on social values and the ethical treatment of others. What is surprising to me, though, is the way in which Hasiuk approaches the situation: rather than discussing TLs and their reactions to book-banning (as, again, noted in the article’s title), he goes on to explain his personal feelings regarding what he sees as the hypocrisy of the District Diversity Team.

The issues raised in Hasiuk’s article and TL Moira Ekdahl’s response on her blog are intriguing on their own—diversity, social responsibility, public funding, book weeding, censorship issues, book banning—and together make this situation a nice little snapshot of a day in the life of a TL. But the content of my previous paragraph is noted only to be able to note this: it is astounding how the noble and well-intentioned mission of a TL (increasing student literacy levels) so quickly and so often becomes so much more—and so public! I recall with the golden glow of fond memories a statement from one of my wise teacher education professors at Seattle University: he said something like “Some people get into teaching with the idea that they will simply teach their subject, take care of the students, and that will be that—nothing else to worry about. But you can never escape the politics of teaching, and to do so would likely be to miss out on much and to actually be less effective in your work. So just as a head’s up: politics are involved, it is unavoidable—know this before you step into the classroom.” And he was, and is, right. So, the particular “day in the life of” one TL, Moria Ekdahl, serves as a sharp reminder that, as teachers—like it or not—you never know what kind of “politics” you might play on any given day, and which particular party you will play it with. But it happens, and it is good to be ready for it when it does.

One further note: the ubiquity of connectivity brought on by the internet in general and social media specifically, it should be noted, serves only to bring about more opportunity for interaction—both good and bad—with all the various stakeholders that teachers interact with. It is important to remember this fact, to remember that the technologies we use today can both be avenues for promoting our educational goals as well as avenues for “cluttering” or complicating our work lives. It is also, then, important to decide how to use technology in a way that—ideally—serves to help you in your work life more often than hinder you. (We must, I suppose, model a healthy and balanced approach to being digitally literate!).

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