Not So Distant Future

 We just got my son a new/used car today–a VW Beetle.  While we were waiting to pick up the car, a sign in the dealership caught my eye.

“On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers.  Drivers wanted.”

It struck me that this is a perfect analogy for web 2.0 tools.   They allow each of us to be drivers, not just passengers;  active participants, not just observers.

Don’t we want all of our students to be drivers instead of passengers?

On his blog 2 Cents Worth, David Warlick posts a question for teachers for an article  which will appear in May’s issue of Cable in the Classroom.

What is your greatest challenge in teaching appropriate, ethical use of web-based media to your students?”

Since we have discussed that question here frequently, I would be interested in your experiences and ideas.  If you have comments or thoughts, please share them here. (and your ideas might just get published!)

Cisco’s new ad campaign, “Welcome to the Human Network,” beautifully captures the myriad of ways our students can now connect with the world.

Cisco also provides a place to contribute your own “network” story at http://www.cisco.com/web/thehumannetwork/index.html.

I love their slogan–”On the human network people decide what’s possible.” 

This is what the new web tools are all about and what appeals to our students–the ability to customize tools, use them the way they want, and  connect to the world.

“We’re more powerful than we could ever be apart.”  

See this story on Fischbowl to see how true that is.

Students seem naturally attracted to poetry, and yet studying it sometimes has negative connotations for them.

One of our teachers, Nancy Donaldson, shared with me a great site for engaging students with poems in a more personal way.

It’s called the Favorite Poem Project, begun by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

The feature that most interested me were the videos, created by participants from across the country, (some students, some adults) about their favorite poem.

The short videos do an excellent job of connecting the poem with the reader’s life and explaining how the reader connects with the poem.  They aren’t just a reading of the poem, but a very short evocation of the reader’s life and how the poem was important to them.

I also think the ideas behind the site could be translated into an excellent project for a classroom as well, and I’m sure it has already been done somewhere.  In addition to viewing the videos, students could submit their own favorites to the database, or create their own videos as a project here.

A few interesting ones I viewed:

Yina Lang(high school student) reading “I’m Nobody! Who are You.”

Richard Samuel (a glassblower) reading “Poem.”

  John Ulrich (college student) reading “We Real Cool.”

The video part of the project seems like an excellent merging of digital video technology, storytelling, and literature, with a really meaningful result.

Will Richardson, (who by the way is coming to speak here on February 6!) shared two great sites for those of you who love books or want a way to keep up with your books.

    Library Thing and Shelfari both allow you to easily catalog and share your own book collection, but with the added feature of allowing you to see the network of other users books as well.  

To add books in your collection, it’s easy.  Search the title, isbn, etc., click on the matching book and add it to your collection.  Shelfari displays books visually as though on a shelf.  It also has a nice feature which allows you to track books you’ve checked out to someone. (nice for teachers, especially).

Library Thing allows you to pick which display you like, (arrange your book on a “shelf” or a list, rate and review the book, converse with others about it, and it has a nice recommendation feature like Amazon.com’s.   It looks to have more comprehensive features.

These sites are social networking at their best–you can share books you like, get ideas for new things to read, make your lists of favorites, make your own list of subject headings(tags), and meet people who share your interests.

(Note to library software developers–Why isn’t library catalog software this simple?  and visual?  It’s improving but it is nowhere near this user friendly! )

Thanks, Will, for a great tip!

  Home for yet another ice day, so I am catching up on my reading!

Another item in the Columbia Journalism review article I mentioned yesterday struck me as interesting for research. 

As one effort to change the Times-Herald paper, “When (editor)Levine took over, his paper began a ’sourcing project,’ designed to force reporters to avoid ‘going to the same three or four sources [for] every story.’ More and more diverse sources, the theory goes, should improve story ideas and stories, and help reporters know more when they say what they know.”

How would we change and deepen our students’ research skills(or our own) if we widened our circle of sources that we used to get information or required them to vary theirs? 

So here are a few ideas:

Have students use foreign newspapers.  Our LexisNexis database includes a whole section of international newspapers, as does our Nettrekker database(password required for both).   BBC News site offers a western, but more European approach to events in the news.

Have students try a different search site(other than Google) to see what results they find.  For example, they could try Clusty or Exalead.

Require that students find the name of an expert in the field they are researching and describe the expertise of that individual.

Require that students find an independent source to retrieve statistics related to their topic–that is, a source outside of an article they are using.  Again, the LexisNexis database or U.S. Census Bureau are good starting places for statistics, as is Infoplease.com, which has a good overview of world statistics.

Require that students conduct an interview with a person with expertise in that area, either in person, by email, instant message, Skype(an online phone service), on a discussion board, etc.

Any of these methods could help students develop the habit of “deeper” searching and lead to a deeper understanding of their subject.

Then students truly could display the “five I’s” that Mitchell Stephens mentions at the end of his article–by being informed, intelligent, interesting, industrious, and insightful, skills they can carry forward with them.

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell Stephens writes a fascinating analysis of how the availability and immediacy of news on the web is changing mainstream newspapers.  It strikes me that many of his findings have implications for our teaching and our students.

“News now not only arrives astoundingly fast from an astounding number of directions, it arrives free of charge. . . . But the extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events — insights, not just information. What is required — if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news — is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom. ” (emphasis mine)

As students become more able to educate themselves via the web, long-distance learning, networking, etc., it seems to me that this analysis and wisdom is the added value that we as teachers contribute.

The article goes on to quote Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent(U.K.): ““The idea that a newspaper is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid. So you have to add another layer: analysis, interpretation, point of view.”

Mike Levine, editor of the Times Herald-Record(Middletown, N.Y.), comments: “We’re not the infantry anymore. . . .We don’t just go out to board meetings and take dictation. That’s not really much of a contribution to the community. What are needed are journalists who can connect the dots.” (emphasis mine)

When we ask students to do research, write a paper, or do homework, are we asking them to “connect the dots” or simply rehash what is already known?  Are we really understanding that they can “find” the five W’s online in a matter of minutes, and are we asking them to analyze and ask why?  

I don’t want to generalize because I know many times students are asked to probe more deeply, and I do know the projects students really respond to ask them to do this, but in this changing environment, are we asking students to do this often enough?

It requires a focus on our part on what we want students to achieve from any given research assignment and what good practices we want them to walk away with from the experience. 

So many web 2.0 tools allow us to help students connect the dots and be more reflective about their experiences.   When students create a wiki about their research, or blog with students from another campus about a project, or create a video about a research assignment that they post on Google video for comments–all of these are ways they can synthesize, reflect and connect the dots.  

Ideas or comments?   Part two of my reflections on this article later….

Text messaging while in class, listening to an iPod, and skimming through Google links, the behaviors our students are demonstrating in the classroom are the ones they are also carrying into the workplace.

This post  on Assorted Stuff drew my attention to the Pew Internet study, Digital Natives Invade the Workplace, (among other studies on Pew’s site).  The study summarizes five ways in which our multi-tasking, ever-”on” students are changing the workplace.

All of these have relevant implications for the classroom.

First, video games–over 70% of teens and almost all college students play video games, according to the study.   One impact–workers/students want a project to complete and then want to “move to the next level,” and not be dictated the number of hours required. Actually, schools already do assign homework in this way,  but the workplace generally doesn’t.

Second, according to the report–students are “technologically literate but that does not necessarily make them media literate.”  One insurance company, Swiss Re, is actually offering a program next year to train their new employees how to find and evaluate quality information, including that from subscription databases, because they have a problem with employees grabbing the first thing they find on Google.  Dow Jones has a similar training effort with their employees.

As a librarian, this as always leads me to the questions–how can schools help students in this regard?   If we as teachers are satisfied with our students finding all their information on Google and don’t teach them to use databases or to evaluate their sources, or dig deeper, then they will carry poor habits away with them.  When we complain about the poor quality of the local news or the poor writing in a news article, where do we think those reporters are coming from? 

Third–today’s students are content creators.  Over half of students have posted something(blog, photos, myspace page, etc) online.  But often new employees (and our students) don’t know where to draw the line between what is appropriate to post or what’s not. 

There are an increasing number of cases where employees have used cell phone cameras to capture an image embarrassing to a company and posted it, consequently losing their jobs.  

Are we teaching them in schools how to manage tools like their cell phones?  Is banning them from classrooms enough?  Do we need to teach them how to draw the line or create policies for what is appropriate to photograph and post?  How do we create a set of internal controls that doesn’t feel emprisoning, but offers students guidance on what crosses the line?  Are we having conversations about that in the classroom?

Fourth–our students are rankers.  This one hadn’t occurred to me, but makes sense.  Our students are used to ranking teachers online, ranking their school, ranking American Idol contestants , ranking music, ranking teams, etc., and making very public comments in their rankings.  

Two questions arise to me here–are we ever capitalizing on that skill and asking them to rank things in our classrooms and libraries, so we can talk about ranking?
And again, some word about the public nature about what they are doing and appropriateness seems like it would be helpful here. 

We tend to ban those sites from the network, but does that prevent us from discussing them and helping students be more prudent in their use or comments?  Employers are finding difficulty with employees freely posting information, ranking, or commentary about their employer in ways that aren’t necessarily appropriate to be aired in the public forum that is the internet.

Fifth–our students are multi-taskers and they will be bringing that quality to the workplace.   Like our lives, their lives are increasingly a blend of work and play, simultaneously, as they listen to their iPod while doing homework online while imming with their friends.  Work/homework becomes a more fluid thing.  

A skill I find I myself need work on when online is how to remember my original task.  I start reading one site, jump to another that’s mentioned and five sites later am trying to recall where I came from or what was my original intent?   I’m trying to train myself to use tools like bookmarking the sites on delicious or in my favorites so I can recall them later.

The Pew report has interesting implications for the classroom, and it’s definitely recommended reading.  The overarching need I see  is the need for conversation with students as opportunities arise in classrooms across the curriculum, and the need for it to happen on a more institutional basis, that is, not just by accident, but by design.  How can we build opportunities into our curriculum and where, so that we are helping our students be ethical, wise and constructive contributors to this enormous global conversation?

I was talking with a group of teachers yesterday, and one remarked, ‘I just love the internet.’  Everyone sitting there concurred immediately.   Another teacher commented now when her students ask her something, she can just turn to her computer and immediately find the answer instead of telling them, she doesn’t know or isn’t sure.

 Now, I know this amazement over the internet might be scoffed at as old hat, but I decided today is a day to acknowledge how this tool is changing the classroom, and to be enthused about it in a basic, heartfelt way.

I love the internet too.

On a personal note, I would like to pay tribute to Beth Rogers.  For those readers outside our campus, Beth was the librarian at our ninth grade center, a facility which is attached to my library.

She passed away this morning after a several year struggle with cancer.   She was vivacious, spirited, and smart.  I hate to use the cliche that she was courageous, but she really was.  She worked even when ill to train our new staff before she retired earlier this fall.   She had a varied career, from district librarian in East Texas to State President of ATPE, to librarian at our campus.

I know she might dislike for me to say something in this public a forum, but maybe she’d understand.

I relied on Beth’s common sense and support a great deal, the more reponsibilities I had, probably more than I had realized. I wish I had told her that more often.  

So this is just my reminder to tell people more often about the good that they do and about what you appreciate.  Remember to focus on the important things.  And remember that the contributions you make each day to students and staff go far beyond what you ever truly realize.

Carolyn