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.