Not So Distant Future

In her presentation at NECC on information fluency, Joyce Valenza  described how she sees herself as “version 1.8,” in perpetual beta, because she is always learning.

What a great way to project to your students and staff that you are always in the process of “upgrading” and exploring new things.

She pointed out that students often settle for a “good enough/why bother” point of view when it comes to searching and using information, and that both teachers and librarians need to “own” this problem, and ask more of our students. 

One way she tries to do this is by always providing them lists and pathfinders of the best resources.   We do this for some assignments by creating pathfinders, but the number of pathfinders she has created or has on her site is simply inspiring.   They set up a wiki for each pathfinder and invite teachers and some students to help create it –which is a wonderfully collaborative way to gather the best resources and to bring together the best practices.

She also includes resources in the pathfinders that make sense, but that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of, like wikibooks that have been created on a topic or blogs about a topic.  

She suggests asking students to do more original research–at least using a survey tool like zohopolls, surveymonkey, surveyscholar, zoomerang or responsomatic.  At her campus, when they ask students to use these tools, they guide the student in creating appropriate research-based questions and preview the poll before the student publishes it, so it is a guided experience.

Another type of guidance the library provides is creating evaluation tools for each different type of site–like she has tips on evaluating a blog, or on evaluating a wiki.  Interesting idea.

I think one of the most powerful things in all of this is how the library and the teachers provide more guided experience for students, so that they are using the the best sites and using best practices for their research process and for creating their work.  I think too often we assume students know all there is to know about the internet or production and so don’t provide them enough guidance.

I really want to approach this as a team at our campus and need to sort out how to do that better.   I am putting this out here for my campus to read and to be honest, I want to know that teachers think of me as a partner when they are creating a research assignment, not as an add-on, or a barrier, but as someone who can help their students and help them as a teacher create the best practices for research for their students, because it’s in the students’ best interest.   Our schedule has more planning time this year so I think that will facilitate connections as well.

     I’m going to have an interesting opportunity this year (since I am trying to think of it as an opportunity, as Vinny Vrotny mentioned at NECC, not as an obstacle) — our library is being gutted and renovated(which is another post altogether as it has been an exciting process).   I foresee my role changing in ways that maybe it already should have–and I foresee that while the library is closed, I can be an “outreach” person–and go to where the students and teachers are–the classroom.

I am planning on going to the classroom to do booktalks, help with research guidance, collaborate with teachers on projects, and it may end up totally transforming my practice and their practices as well.  That is my hope–that in the end, this renovation will have transformed our library from the inside and the outside, so to speak.

Joyce has an excellent resource wiki with links to many of the tools she mentioned,  including the NECC powerpoint, and I blogged the presentation that she and Ken Rodoff did as well.   Ken also mentioned some fascinating projects they did in the English classroom, and the links can be found on the wiki.

    I’m wondering about other ways libraries can provide that support and guidance and be collaborative.   There are so many web 2.0 tools that we talked about at the conference and I’m going to be spending time thinking about how to put those to use effectively, and to reflect to students that our program, too, is in perpetual beta.

Technorati Tags: n07s765 Technorati Tags: necc2007

Images: 

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ansleystaton/431000280/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/saveena/218668190/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ariesandrea/273871692/

I’m distressed.  I just finished reading this article in the New York Times, which is on the front page of today’s print edition–“Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops.”

I’m trying to imagine a similar headline:  “Seeing no use for them, Google drops laptops”….or “Seeing no purpose for them, NyTimes drops laptops.”

When are we going to get that laptops, internet, and technology are here to stay and becoming more and more part of our lives and our students’ lives?

I was very disappointed in the reporting in this article.  I’m sure some schools have had problems or have chosen to drop them.  But on the other hand, some schools like the Science Leadership Academy have had success with laptops, and have worked through the problems in a meaningful way.  At least the reporter could have bothered to interview some schools with successful programs, and written a headline:  “Laptops have mixed results” or “Laptop successes differ at different schools.”

If you read almost to the end of the article, there is a caveat:

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”

After reading the article, the same thing hits home to me almost every time I read an article about technology implementation.  It isn’t the tools that are at fault, it’s the implementation, training, and support of staff use of the tools.

Schools need to have the teacher buy-in, the support staff or lease-agreement to quickly repair the laptops, and the training on classroom models where laptops are used successfully to make it work well.

But the time is coming when every student WILL have a laptop, PDA or some device with their textbooks on it that is their personal productivity school, so I hope we are preparing for that day–it’s not too far away.

I wish articles like this also talked about the difficulty of desktop computers on campus.   Students who are working on projects at school have hordes of compatibility issues as far as sending files back and forth from their own computers to campus (if they have a computer) and if they don’t have access at home, they are disadvantaged because their fellow students do.   Desktops mean the students have to come to the computer rather than the computer being a readily available tool in the classroom, lunchroom, or library. Schools are limited to the number of projects per period that they can provide computer spaces for, putting restrictions on how many different uses of online sources can happen at any given time, due to the sheer number of available desktops.

Yet we rarely see articles debating the value of desktops in schools.

Another thing that irked me about the article was that it brought up the Ed. Department study of math/reading skill drill software, as though that was proof that technology is ineffective.

I guess we should tell Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dell that technology is an ineffective tool and that they will never make money marketing it because it’s not useful, doesn’t give us tranformative abilities, or provide us access to anything much of use.

Lastly I want to point out that many of the problems mentioned here were the schools’ implementation.  Not to criticize these particular schools, but I noticed remarks about the repair issues(the school should have the infrastructure for that if taking this on), the network bandwidth(again, the school should have provided that if they were embarking on this project), the teacher training or lack thereof, issues about library databases and students not using them(which staff and librarians should be helping with), kids playing in the classroom when they should be working(is this a technology issue or a classroom management issue?), etc.

I know there will be challenges with implementing laptop schools, but I feel educators and districts have the ability and responsibility to consider what those are and plan for them, and adapt.   As institutions, we have to improve our ability to implement projects like this, and learn from them.

We need to get prepared, because the $100 laptop is going to bring this issue into our schools sooner rather than later–soon it won’t be about the money because they will be affordable.

I worry that articles like this make it all too easy for those who are afraid of technology advances to, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” instead of asking what will be best for our students who are graduating into a technology-infused workplace and life.