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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