Not So Distant Future

To get somewhere, you have to be able to imagine where you are going.

On her blog, Information wants to be Free,  Meredith Farkas suggests:

“Maybe it would make sense to be asking the miracle question in our libraries. If a miracle occured(sic) one night and all of the problems with your library were gone (or we miraculously reached library 2.0 overnight), how would you know that a miracle had occurred? What would be different? What would the library be like?

Once you have that vision for what your library/Library 2.0 should look like, what specific steps do you and your colleagues need to take to get there (how do you get to 1.3, 1.6, etc.)? Once you have your answer to those questions, you should have a clear roadmap for reaching your goal.”

Bonaria Biancu created an insightful model of what library 2.0 might look like:

Notice the emphasis on removing barriers to use, being invitational, and creating spaces for collaboration.   In addition, the library is available everywhere, not just in a defined space or time.  And the patron is not just as a user of information, but  a participant and content creator.  

Darlene Fichter questions even this notion of a patron, pointing to Jay Rosen’s article on “The people formerly known as the audience.”   Read the whole thing if you haven’t already–really brilliant ideas for both teachers and librarians.  A few excerpts:

“Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were. . . .”

Rosen cites both Tom Curley, CEO of the AP and Mark Thompson of the BBC:

“. . .We’re not on your clock any more. ‘The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place’. . . .Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience.”    

and finally,

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.

Fichter noticed that Andy Carvin carried this idea into his presentation at Computers in Libraries, calling library customers the “people formerly known as patrons.”

So her visual for a web 2.0 library mission incorporates that idea of trust and respect for the “people” (in this case our students):

She challenges us:

“We can only build emergent systems if we have radical trust. With an emergent system, we build something without setting in stone what it will be or trying to control all that it will be. We allow and encourage participants to shape and sculpt and be co-creators of the system. . . .

Radical trust is about trusting the community. We know that abuse can happen, but we trust (radically) that the community and participation will work. In the real world, we know that vandalism happens but we still put art and sculpture up in our parks. As an online community we come up with safeguards or mechanisms that help keep open contribution and participation working.”

Even as we seek in schools and libraries and classrooms to connect our students and to create conditions for collaboration, are they still the audience, more often than not?

And in thinking about how to put this into practice in a school library(or a classroom)–

–How can we ask students to participate and create content for our libraries?  Do we have library blogs for students?   Do we, as Joyce Valenza does, set up wikis for pathfinders and invite teachers and students to add the links to them?    (By the way, look at her incredibly student friendly website.)

–Can students help define our policies for our libraries or classrooms?   One of our elementary librarians has a library council which helps govern her library.   I’ve seen wikis used to define web 2.0 policies that were created with student input.

–Can students create our library displays in our physical space?  We tried this last year–setting up an empty table and asking students to create the display.  (and imagine doing this online….?)

–Can students initiate programs we are holding in our schools or libraries–forming a panel who helps select the guest speakers?

–Do we survey students about our renovations, collections, services?   Do we have a suggestion box in our classrooms or libraries or on our websites?  

–Do students and teachers help select our books and media?  In the classroom, do they help select our reading lists?

–How do we use web 2.0 tools to help build community?  Do our library catalogs(or teacher websites) allow reader feedback(like Amazon?)  If not, do we have a place where students/teachers can provide that feedback?  And why aren’t we asking our library vendors to add such a thing to their software?  

–Do we make ourselves “available” 24/7 outside the classroom?  Are our catalogs available for home use?  Do we have an “email the librarian” (or email the teacher) feature on our website, or a chat box, or a skype button, or a way a student, parent, or teacher, can easily leave us a message or question?  

As we seek to redefine what our libraries and schools and classrooms can be, envisioning what our “miracle” looks like will help us reshape our practice.

Thanks to Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens, for creating the Library 2.0 reading list from ALA where I found many of these links.

Happy Global Library 2.0 Week.    I’m planning to “leave the grid” for a few days and seek drier weather.   Keep your comments or library 2.0 posts coming!   (And remember if you add a post to this meme, tag it with “globallib2.0week.”)

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One ”techie” tool that has got me jazzed this summer is Skype.

    If you haven’t used Skype, it allows you to “phone” or “conference call” others from your computer to anyone anywhere;  it also has a chat room feature which you can use along with the conference call or separately.

Some great features include the ability to log or bookmark the chat or call, so that it can be read or heard later, for your own reference or to share with others.

In the last couple of weeks, I have had the opportunity to participate in some very exciting conversations via Skype.  This morning I got to be part of a teacher workshop in New Jersey.  The presenter, Patrick Higgins,  ”skyped” in three of us, and he interviewed us about blogging over Skype as the teachers listened in and asked questions.

The more I’ve used this tool, the more I’ve been thinking about its use in the classroom and in the library.  (And since it is Global Library 2.0 week, it seemed like the perfect time to write about it!)

We often talk about networking with others outside of our campus and connecting students to those outside of the campus.  There is so much that students can gain from interacting with students in other places with other experiences, or in interacting with experts in different fields.

But also, as our campus is thinking more about interdisciplinary connections between subject areas within our current “8 period day” framework, I think tools like Skype and blogs are great ones to enable our students in different classrooms to connect to one another within our campus, as well as without.

I am imagining the possibilities of our junior American Literature class skyping into our junior American history class, for example, to work on a particular investigation.  Add to that an outside person skyping into both classes to talk to them simultaneously about something related to what they are studying.

I’m imagining the use of this tool as a librarian, skyping in a guest speaker, or guest “researcher” for a class working on a particular research problem, or skyping in authors for a chat with a class.  Or hosting a regular once monthly “skypecast” of a guest speaker on a technology topic.   Or hosting a book discussion ”skypecast” during the evening as a special library event for students to join in.  It’s video conferencing made very simple, and like blogs, though it is a techology “tool” it offers all sorts of connective possibilities for us and our students.

And again, like blogging, it is about helping students have reflective conversations that extend their learning, and that extend their range of possibilities.

(I’m going to write more later about the Skypecast I participated in today, once the audio of it is available soon on Chalkdust, Patrick’s blog.   Even though I was there as a guest, I learned a great deal about blogging, (probably learned more than I shared!) because the other two Skypees,  Konrad Glogowski  and Clay Burrell, have used blogs much more in a classroom setting and shared a deep understanding of how to effectively help students with them.)

Barbara Barreda wrote recently about Joyce Valenza’s presentation at the Building Learning Communities conference.  Joyce talked about how as a librarian she wanted to be where her users are.   I see Skype as one  web 2.0 tools that would allow for that possibility.  

So many of the web 2.0 tools allow us to remove barriers–the hours of a school day, the walls of a classroom, the walls of a building, the city limits, a country’s borders.    What can we provide for our students when we open up the possibilities of a barrier free learning environment?

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I just caught the end of the Democratic “YouTube” debate.  As I was watching the follow-up discussion by some of the “you-tubers” who prepared videos,  one of them mentioned that he thought we could never go back to the traditional debate format.   This format felt much more spontaneous and authentic.  Others, including the candidates, seemed to agree.

After watching this, I think about those of us in education.

Are we doing enough to incorporate these tools which can turn a sometimes static and prepared presentation in a classroom into something spontaneous and more authentic? 

What issues are raised when you mix the “new” tools and the “old”?   What happens to the idea of journalism, teachers, television?

How does connecting and networking with people you might not normally encounter bring something new to the table?

Did this “mash-up” work?  How can we use mash-ups in schools with the “old” and the “new”?

And if it did work, (as I think it did), would we ever want to “go back?”

A few days ago, I wrote asking for others to join in brainstorming  how we can bring web 2.0 learning into our libraries.

In his post, “Are Your Ideas Sticky?”, Doug Johnson reminds me that one key part of this is (and maybe the first step) is getting our message across, by keeping it simple and upfront.

Scott McLeod had written about this several weeks ago, inviting a collaborative effort to create a vision statement, and while I created a “sticky note” of my question, I hadn’t really been able to entirely summarize what went “on” my sticky note, at least not concisely.  (Scott, I did see your request for me to “share” mine! )

Since we are completely redesigning our building, our mission has been on my mind, because I have been trying to incorporate web 2.0 “ideas” into our actual space. 

After reading several writers in my bloglines this morning, ideas are racing through my head and I feel like I am moving closer.   Thanks also to Doug Johnson’s post on exuberant discovery,  Ewan McIntosh’s insightful post about ingenuity, Will Richardson’s comments about passionate learning, and Mabry MS’s logo,

   So thinking aloud here, a library 2.0 should be a place of:

• Exuberant discovery
• Passionate learning
• Connected Learning
• Reflective learning

Our real job is to connect people (staff and students) with ideas.  All the interactions that happen, reading, researching, talking, writing, searching, creating – seem to have to do with that.

So some possible themes for our website, brochures, and logo to capture that–Feedback appreciated! 

The ”idea” center

“The library:  Connecting people and ideas”

“The Research Center:  Where Students Connect, Collaborate, Create, and Reflect”

“The Research Center:  Inspiration happens here”

“Discover yourself at the Library”

“Discover yourself at the Research Center”

“Discover yourself at the Center”  

So–this is my shout-out for some of you to  join in on the brainstorming and share your feedback.   

What does School Library 2.0 look like to you?

Image credit:  whslibrary on flickr  http://www.flickr.com/photos/99107397@N00/653396228/

Next week is Global Library 2.0 Week.  Libraries often operate in isolation, particularly school libraries.   How can we learn ourselves through the power of networking, as well as help our staff and students connect to learning networks?

During the week, consider connecting with another librarian.  Join the Global Librarian group, the TeacherLibrarian group, or the Librarian 2.0 group on the Ning network.   If you’re just learning some of the web 2.0 tools, check out the School Library Learning 2.0 from the California School Library Association–a self-paced learning guide.   

Start with the power that web 2.0 tools can bring into libraries–the power to connect, collaborate, create, reflect and share.

How can we create a library environment that is imaginative and creative, (like Mitch Resnick’s model below)  yet purposeful and made for authentic learning experiences and connected to other libraries? 

Let’s share ideas this week on how we can bring web 2.0 tools into libraries, onto our websites, into our library design, into a network, and into our teaching and research assignments.   Tag your posts ”GlobalLib2.0Week.”

Librarians are first, educators, so I hope some “non-librarians” will respond too.  After all, web 2.0 tools like tagging make us “all” librarians.

Image credit:    http://www.flickr.com/photos/edublogger/851051243/
(thanks Ewan for posting photos from the BLC conference!)

Technorati Tags: “globallib2.0week”

I’m experimenting with ways to use a wiki to help students reflect on a research process, as I was writing about a couple of days ago.

I’d like some feedback on this Process Journal site I created.  The idea is to give students some guided questions, but instead of having them “write” their reflections, have them “chat” about it, using the embedded YackPack chat on pbwiki.

One downside I see is that it doesn’t record the chat for later reflection.   Skype or the regular YackPack site would allow that.

But since there are a variety of ways to go about this self-evaluation process, I thought this might be a worthwhile one to try with students.  Comments welcome…

This is my week to get on board with Skype.  (Hey, it’s something to do since it is yet another overcast, rainy summer day here!)   And I’ve partly been helping a family member set their account up to use for phone calls on a trip to study abroad.

Last night, I attended my first Women of the Web 2.0 chat, which is held online every Tuesday night.  Whoo hooo…it was actually fun!   The four “women of the web” use Skype to conference in with a guest speaker. If you haven’t tried attending this,  you can listen into the conversation using windows media player, etc., or get on Skype and speak yourself.  Last night’s session was a fascinating one about internet safety,  from a more empowered standpoint–the podcast will be up at wow2 soon. 

This morning, I’m “attending” a little bit of the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston via Skype’s chat feature and courtesy of David Jakes who is there.   The first session I listened in on via chat was Dean Shareski’s on Google Earth, where he shared a site called Google Sightseeing. 

Another idea I picked up from the session that for some reason hadn’t occurred to me is having students use deli.icio.us or Furl bookmarks as a search tool, not just a bookmarking tool.  They can search other people’s tagged bookmarks for ideas for good websites and to network with people knowledgeable about a certain field, (since we bookmark sites related to our interests.) 

The idea as Will Richardson points out is to use the power of the network.   It’s interesting because in the “old” days if you were in graduate school, you used the indexes and particularly the citation indexes to build this type of knowledge base of who were the key players/articles/researchers.  

And now, through the power of the network and these connections, I’m sitting at home, chatting via Skype with Will Richardson, David Jakes, Dean Shareski, and others, as they narrate a presentation by Tim Tyson at the BLC conference. 

It took me about 9 months to reach this point in my own network, encouraged along the way by people at my own campus….people who were willing to say “Why not invite Will Richardson to our campus!” (thanks Vicky) and teachers and computer techs who said, Why don’t we try that out?

As we were chatting during the session, I was thinking about how we don’t really network or encourage our students to network even within the campus very much.

We could use tools like Skype even within our campus, classroom to classroom as a way to connect our students and courses.  I could foresee two classrooms working across Skype to plan something, research something, or have a discussion.   The chat can be saved and logged, as well.

In terms of making these interdisciplinary connections, a group of our teachers attended a workshop at High Tech High this summer on interdisciplinary learning.  I’m eager to hear what they learned about making those connections, and it’d be interesting to tie in some of the web 2.0 tools within our campus as a first step towards building networks for students.

By the way, David Jakes will be Skyping during sessions today and tomorrow if you want to try it out and join the conversation.

A few days ago, I wrote about reflective learning, and really identified with Will Richardson’s and David Warlick’s comments about focusing on the learning and community, and how the process sometimes gets lost in the production of the product.  

Ironically, as I was reading Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix last night, I noticed that Harry has difficulty in Snape’s Potions class.  Frequently his “product” doesn’t meet Snape’s expectations.   After some discussion with Hermione and reflection, Harry realizes that he needs to slow down and focus on the process more.

Now that may be a simple analogy that doesn’t entirely fit, but the point is, that many research models that we use support this focus on process and self-evaluation, (such as the Big 6, or Carol Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, and many others).

Carol Kuhlthau  work particularly focuses on the process, students’ emotional stages as they move through it, and how we can support them during the process, by identifying when the most opportune times for intervention are, and what those types of interventions could look like.

As teachers and librarians, how can we provide more time for reflection and focus on the process and the learning?  But particularly, how can we do that in a way that builds a supportive community of learners that Will Richardson writes about?

Where I see the breakdown occurring is in several areas:

1.  Do we have expectations?  –The students may not be required to spend time on the research/reflection part of the assignment prior to the production part.   Kids are in a hurry(and so are we sometimes).  I’ve seen students starting their powerpoint on the same day they are doing the research assignment.  Where is the time for them to absorb what they are learning? Is the assignment so fact-based that all they are doing is regurgitating information?

2.  Do they have enough time for reflection during the process and afterwards?  In our haste to cover so much content, are we neglecting the time to reflect?   Can the research be spread out over several weeks or over the semester to create time for more deep inquiry?   (This would model authentic research–which isn’t completed in a couple of days or a week.)

3.  Do we ask students to evaluate the process?  The product gets evaluated in many different ways.   How can we help them be more reflective as they are doing research and share that reflection with other learners who are having similar experiences as a means of extending their reflection and gaining support?

4.  Do we help them build a network for discussing the process and extending their learning?   Or are they working in isolation?    Do real scientists and researchers work in isolation?  Do we?  How does helping students build a network help create a more authentic experience?

4.  Is our goal even to teach that reflection?  Should we?  What is our goal?  Product, process, learning?  Is the focus of the assignment actually reflective of what the goal is?

Some concrete ideas for focusing on process–

1.  a research process log or questionaire (And some other examples I’ve linked to).  These could be used at the end of a research period, weekly, or throughout the stages of the process.   One question I am pondering is how to make these types of questionaires more networked–post on a wiki? or blog?  Other ideas?

2.  a research blog –A place where students can write reflectively about their process, and dialogue with others in their class.

•  If it seems too overwhelming to have each student create a blog, use a group blog and have a scribe for the week or day. 
• Or  threaded forum may work better, where students can toss out topics they need help with and get feedback.
• What about podblogs?–Group the students in the class into pods or groups.   Each group collaboratively writes a blog as they move through a learning process.  That way, the teacher is only checking in with four or five blogs per class instead of 30, and the group can interact and form community and share tips and help during the research process.    The 6 or 7 members of each pod can alternately post to the blog.

3.  Wikis–use wikis for students so they can collaborate as they collect information.   We have done this and it worked well.    Students across class periods working on the same topic were able to help each other gather the research.  (This would work best when there are a set of topics that all the classes are working on.)   As Will Richardson points out, Wikis have a much neglected but interactive discussion feature.  Pbwiki even incorporates chat features and yackpack, which allows recorded conversations to be sent back and forth.  How could those types of discussion tools be used along with a research wiki to stimulate discussion of the learning that was occurring?

4.  Google Docs–encourage students to use Google docs as they take notes or begin writing, and have them invite a few of their fellow students to join in as collaborators or just as readers.

5.  Sharing bookmarks–another route other than wikis is to have students set up accounts on del.icio.us or Furl or Google Notebook, because these tools not only allow students to bookmark their findings, but to share their bookmarks with other students.  Diigo not only allows students to bookmark their sites, but annotate them, clip them, and share them on a blog, email, or album.   Bookmarking a collection of sites that they can use later conveys the idea that the learning is ongoing, that they can “add to” what they have found later, in a way that a set of notecards or a bibliography doesn’t, because they seem more “final” and product oriented.   And these sites allow them to network and learn collaboratively from one another.

6.  Evaluation–As librarian extraordinaire Doug Johnson reminded me in an previous post,

“One of the things I’ve noticed is that when we ask students to follow an information problem solving model like the Big6, we tend to ignore the 1st step of defining the task and the last step of evaluating the product and the process. “It’s the final step where we need to ask students to reflect on both how good their product was AND how effective they were in doing their work. I’d ask students to always answer the question ‘What will I do differently next time to improve my work and skills?’”

Even if we ask students to reflect on the process along the way, asking them to reflect at the “end of the journey” or to try to pull their thoughts together after the process is important.   And having them do that in a way that is networked(like a blog or wiki discussion or a chat on Skype, or a classroom discussion, etc.) allows them to learn from one another, and build on one another’s evaluation and learning. 

That is where we are really having them extend their learning, deepen their reflection, and internalize their own learning process.

Other ideas, thoughts?  This potion I’m working on is not fully baked yet

Want to get some summer inservice without dealing with airports, rain and flight delays?

If anyone is eager to hear some fascinating speakers like Tim Tyson, Marc Prensky, Alan November, Chris Lehmann or Christian Long,  and is interested in using Skype, David Jakes is planning to skypecast some of the sessions from the Building Learning Communities conference this week.

He’s posted a list of sessions starting on Wednesday.  (If you haven’t used Skype, you can download it for free, and it has a chat feature as well as phone feature–the chat feature is what he’ll be using to record conversations during the sessions, so you can follow along from afar.)

Vinnie Vrotny is liveblogging another conference–the Laptop Institute conference, and is skyping as well.

As David Warlick points out, the ability of these tools to extend the conversation and learning to a year round process is profound, (as well as a little overwhelming!)

Seth Godin writes more about the iPhone, and how Verizon turned the contract with Apple down.

  As Julia Roberts says after she is turned away from a Beverly Hills boutique in Pretty Woman, ‘Big mistake. Huge.’

Godin points out that “no” is often the default answer, “because the potential for upside seems too small compared to the mammoth disruption that organizations imagine will beset them.”

In another post he comments,

“Most organizations need a good reason to do something new.  All they need is a flimsy excuse to not do something for the first time.”

As we are trying to rethink our library design and service, or are trying to rethink “school” in general, how can we avoid being that “guy from Verizon?”