It’s really spring here. After a year or two of drought, we’ve had a lot of rain and now we have sunshine and bluebonnets blooming everywhere. It feels so refreshing. I was starting to feel like I was dried up and crispy myself, and now everything feels lush and fruitful.
Even though Earth Day is 22 days away, in honor of this lovely spring afternoon, here’s a link to WWF’s Time For Change website, where people (including many teenagers) from around the world are sharing their ideas for how to help the planet. Add your ideas or encourage your students to share theirs.
It’s a day to celebrate the internet’s power for good.
I’m very excited (and still stunned!) that I have been asked by American Libraries to answer some questions about blogging as a school librarian for an article which will be in the May issue, called Mattering in the Blogosphere.
Doug Johnson at the Blue Skunk Blog (who had a lot to do with getting this article published) asks those of us interviewed to post our responses, but I’m more than a little embarrassed about mentioning it here, and as usual I was a little overenthusiastic about it, so I’m just going to share part of one answer here:
What is the greatest benefit to blogging about school libraries?
The greatest benefit to me has been my own professional growth.Even though I began the site mainly for our faculty, it has developed into a place where I can share ideas with people on and off of my campus, and where I can reflect on things I’ve read, or discuss larger ideas about education, etc.
But the ability to get my voice out there, and to interact with others from outside my campus has been very valuable to me professionally. . . .To me that is the greatest benefit of blogging about libraries—learning how to break down the walls that divide us into “classrooms” or “campuses” or “libraries” and reunite the learning experience.
The other equally important question was about how blogging has helped my work with students. I do have to say it has helped tremendously and hopefully that is evident. I take my enthusiasm about ideas I read about or write about directly into working with students myself and also into sharing them with teachers on my campus.
Okay, that’s two answers.
I think I should have just given American Libraries the short answer.
For me, it truly is all about connecting– people and ideas. That’s what my job is and that’s where my real passion is. My blog just gives my passion a forum.
Thanks, American Libraries, for asking. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging….
Debby Brailas shared a great tool to use with photos from Flickr.com.
Splashr allows you to create postcards, slideshows, mosaics, etc, by either entering in a subject (tag) you want photos about, or by using the feed of someone’s Flickr account.
For example, here’s the show I created about Afghanistan. I entered Afghanistan as my subject tag, selected the type of show I wanted, clicked next, and it created an example with a link to go back to the show later or to email.
It’s quick and easy way to pull in some creative visuals for a class.
Penguin Books has just completed a fascinating project, at a millionpenguins.com,which was a collaborative novel written entirely by volunteers on a wiki site.
As their introduction notes,
“The buzz these days is all about the network, the small pieces loosely joined. About how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. About how working together and joining the dots serves the greater good and benefits our collective endeavours. . . .
However, is the same true in artistic fields? We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. . . . Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? “
You can read the novel that resulted from Penguin’s experiment here. Also, if you click on the discussion tab, you can view all the different threads of discussion that occurred while it was being written, as well as discussions of the process. (They eventually decided to shut it down for a few hours a day so volunteers could “clean it up” and organize.)
The participants actually worked together across continents and time to sort of the structure of the novel, how to write it on the wiki, characters, etc.
For example, after some struggle about the organization of it, one contributor took it upon herself to help organize the plot:
“Hi All - someone mentioned the idea of a “story arc” to help us get a sensible plot structure. . . .To get round this, I have set up a story arc page and a chapter summary page for each chapter. If people could summarise each chapter and refer to these summaries then hopefully we can build up a sensible timeline for events in the story.”
Others created sections about characters to work out how they would be handled.
It’s a fascinating project. According to Business Week, as of March 5, they had 75,000 visitors and over 1300 contributors to the novel.
What a great project for students, and again proof of the power of collaboration and the role of web 2.0 tools.
I’ve been working the last month or so on a project with one of our English teachers, Marcia Curtis, relating to the novel Kite Runner. She was interested in connecting with a school in Afghanistan so that students could interview students there, or communicate with them directly in some way. We did quite a bit of searching and I ran across an organization that builds schools in Afghanistan, and she contacted them about finding students to share with.
The director emailed her back–
“Unfortunately Afghanistan barely has electricity, even in the capital. Thus, few students even have regular access to computers. I don’t know of any high schools with the infrastructure to allow its students to communicate via e-mail. There may be select students who have such tools
afforded to them but those tend to be in the wealthy areas of the larger cities.”
I think even with our knowledge of the difficulties in Afghanistan, the severity of the response was still somewhat surprising to both of us. I’ve been thinking about that email a lot in light of the YouTube video by a college student that I posted about a few days ago.
Technology can afford us the opportunity to learn about the world in a real, grass roots level way–even if what we learn is that there are great inequities.
What a powerful learning experience for Marcia’s students when she could share that email with them. How much more real did Afghanistan become for them as she shared that, and shared photos of Afghani children from online sites she found? The global connection isn’t always about successes. It isn’t always about our ability to collaborate on a project.
But it is always about getting a glimpse, just for a minute, of what another person’s experience is like. And after all, isn’t that glimpse what can connect us?
One way to make an issue more “sexy” is to get musicians behind it. “Rock the Net,” is a new effort to jazz up and publicize the issue of Net Neutrality.
If you aren’t familiar with the issue, here’s a recap. Some large cable companies have proposed a “tiered” internet, where those who want their sites to load faster pay more, like a toll road fee. There are many concerns that a law like that would quiet the democratic nature of the internet, in that “do it yourself” sites like YouTube or wikis would have less access or visibility than sites created by corporations who could afford the fees.
No matter what you think of the issue, it’s a good method of bringing the issue a higher profile. Maybe we need a “Rock Education” effort!
Scribd is a cool new site, which allows you to upload your documents online, either to share them with others, or just to store them there privately. If you choose to share your documents, people can comment on them, listen to them, rank them, or even purchase a printed copy of them.
It’s like ‘YouTube for documents’, according to TechCrunch.
I tried it out and it is very user friendly. It automatically converts your document into several formats, including an mp3 one that reads your document aloud.
I can envision a lot of uses for ambitious student writers(or teachers), not to mention it being a handy place to store documents. I can also envision this possibly further complicating the issue of plagiarism as the popularity of the site grows. (All the more reason we have to ask students for real investigative or personal writing.)
When grading a stack of student papers, Jacqueline Hicks Grazette, a teacher at St. Albans High School in the D.C. area, recently noticed that a student used Wikipedia to answer a question, and had made a note of it on his paper.
That, among other things, led her to write this opinion column in the Washington Post this morning, Wikiality in my Classroom, where she realistically outlines the collision of Wikipedia, Google, online ethics, student stress and web 2.0 tools and the dilemmas teachers face.
“In the online world in which teachers and students navigate, ambiguity. . .
is daily fare. For young people who have grown up with instant access to information, it seems like no big deal. But to educators, trained in accurate sourcing and correct attribution, deciding what the limits should be often poses a dilemma.”
As a student in the article comments:
“We are part of a networked society. . .Your world is different from ours. We are taught to share information and collaborate. We do it all the time. No one really cares where it came from.”
A collaborative world
The student’s comment perfectly highlights the tension between the online culture of sharing and the rigors of academic scholarship, as Grazette highlights. She points to Princeton’s Academic Integrity website which describes this.
The internet is bringing research issues into the forefront in ways that they never have been before, because “research” has become part of our daily lives, not a “once in awhile” project.
A comment from one student she interviews drives home the need for educators to take the time out of the rush towards testing and excellence to really discuss internet ethics with students. They are already living in the “online” world in ways many of us are not fully, and will be living in this environment for years to come.
Isn’t it our job to help prepare them for making good choices academically and ethically? This is not to imply that many of us aren’t doing this–because we are–but how can we do it better across the curriculum?
Change
I also wonder how is all this going to change our ideas of academic scholarship, copyright, etc? The use of information has become such a grass-roots, democratic (little d) movement, that it is going to drive change in all our systems, and maybe changes that will make information more accessible to all.
Is MLA format really going to be the best way for tracking citations in the future, for example? What about the Dewey Decimal system? While both systems are capable of handling change and were designed in ways that can be flexible, on the other hand, is that linear way of thinking going by the wayside?
I’ve been hearing some comments about recent articles and news broadcasts, like this one, Trust but Verify, relating to Wikipedia being “banned” as a source by the history department at Middlebury College (now being joined by UCLA and others).
Actually, Wikipedia isn’t banned for student use entirely, just not permitted as a cited source for student papers and projects–Middlebury’s history department also doesn’t permit Encyclopedia Britannica as part of an effort to teach students about using ”scholarly” college sources, according to Cathy Davidson in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Challenge
Davidson shares a fascinating challenge–instead of disallowing Wikipedia, why not use this discussion as an opportunity to explore with students this whole new realm of information sharing?
Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn’t that what we educators want to model for our students?
Explore
She has an excellent discussion of ways to explore that with students, including looking at the “discussion” tab on an article; for an example, try the discussion tab on articles on Apple computers or on the Kennedy assassination to see the debate that goes on “behind” the articles.
A Library By Any Other Name (isn’t that a great title for a library blog?) offers some good analysis of Wikipedia, and also shares their new attempt to explain their ten guiding principles for those unfamiliar with it.
Exploring this tool(or any research tool) more deeply with students gives them a better understanding of both the power and the limitations of web 2.0.
Norman Morgan emailed this video which I had seen floating around the blogs recently, and it seemed fitting to share it and some followup as a vision of how the new interactivity of the web is changing our culture.
It was created by a Kansas State professor of Digital Ethnography(interesting title), Michael Wesch.
What has happened with this video is an example of the new web in and of itself. On his website, Wesch writes:
On January 31st I released the 2nd draft of The Machine is Us/ing Us hoping to receive feedback from my colleagues…. I sent it to 10 people. Four days later it was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere and the wild ride had begun. . . . It is hard to believe that a little video I created in my basement in St. George Kansas could be seen by over 1.7 million people, be translated into (at least) 5 languages, and be shown to large audiences at major conferences on 6 continents within just one month of its creation.
Also, as part of the “new” open source concept of an interactive web, he has licensed it under Creative Commons, which means that people are free to add to it, change the music, etc.
As part of the class, students are responding to the video with their own videos. I found this particular student video an undeniably powerful one that asks us some very hard questions about equity and web 2.0.
But I do believe in line with Daniel Pink in Whole New Mind that the new skills that will be important in this web 2.0 world will have to do with design and empathy–and the effectiveness of this video to move us and inspire thought (and perhaps action) is a tremendous example of the power of web 2.0.
It’s really spring here. After a year or two of drought, we’ve had a lot of rain and now we have sunshine and bluebonnets blooming everywhere. It feels so refreshing. I was starting to feel like I was dried up and crispy myself, and now everything feels lush and fruitful.
Even though Earth Day is 22 days away, in honor of this lovely spring afternoon, here’s a link to WWF’s Time For Change website, where people (including many teenagers) from around the world are sharing their ideas for how to help the planet. Add your ideas or encourage your students to share theirs.
