Not So Distant Future

A video promo is a great way to publicize your library. A group of librarians in our district are meeting tomorrow to work on some video messages for our programs. But videos like these could be used on campus websites as well. Imagine energetic, amusing, enthusiastic video messages that convey what your campus is all about and create more of a dynamic sense of your campus on your website.

If we are excited about learning and about libraries, shouldn’t we show it? And shouldn’t we enlist our students to be a part of creating that message?

Here are a few idea starters, mostly from Gale’s Librareo contest submissions on YouTube. Quite a few of these use humor to make their message “sticky.”

This clever video is a way to demonstrate (humorously) the impact of a library:

Green Gables Elementary School Library–a former student sends a video love letter

Herrick Library–they don’t just tell about their services–they show them.

Library movie trailer–using humor to convey your message.

More humor from Irving Library

from Patrick Henry Library –students carry the message

This video below (my favorite) from Love Library in Jamestown, NY is brimming with energy:

And I had to include this classic –the Betty Glover Library Workout (this is strictly librarian humor )

I failed some teachers the other day.   I failed to recognize a potential problem ahead of time and didn’t dedicate my best practices towards resolving it.

After the fact, I realized it was a difficulty I see with research assignments fairly often.  (Even when I do recognize the difficulty ahead of time, it’s not always something I am able to resolve because it depends on collaborative planning sometimes.)

I’m always pleased when teachers ask students to investigate topics instead of teaching the topic themselves directly because I think it puts students in a more active role in the learning process.  

But my issue lies in approaching students with pre-defined topics.   I think there’s some important scaffolding we need to do to make assignments like that more effective.   And I think I fail when I don’t approach teachers with ideas for how to do that.

On frequent occassions, I find myself helping students who are attempting to research a topic that they fundamentally have no clue about, to be blunt about it.  It is like the time a student came up to me in the library years ago, and said to me in a somewhat exasperated tone of voice, “There is just nothing in the library on my ‘guy.’”  Having heard that comment many a time before, I asked who she was researching, thinking we might have to do some deep investigating.   Her answer was  “Frude.”  

After puzzling over it for a minute, I found out that this gentleman was actually “Freud,” so naturally we did have plenty of information about him.   But the fact that she was assigned a topic about which she knew absolutely nothing and that didn’t grow out of her natural curiosity in the course, meant that the name had no context for her, and so she had nothing to go on except a misspelled name.  I don’t tell this story to ridicule this student at all, by the way.

I just think too often this happens to students.  Sure, some of them are proficient in Google or Yahoo or using a library catalog online.  But if they don’t understand what they are looking up, when they hit a roadblock, they have little in the way of alternatives.  (Of course, they do have their own networks who can sometimes help them unmuddle the question.)

To me, this is the fundamental problem with assigning one or two word “topics” to students or having them draw them from a hat, or whatever the methodology, rather than having students select topics from the unit of study themselves.   And by select I don’t just mean pick from a list, but perhaps by skimming ahead through the next chapter of their history textbook and picking out something that picques their interest, or  brainstorming questions with their class that they might be interested in, or clipping articles out of the newspaper that catch their interest and then building up a file of things they are interested (or do this on del.icio.us or Google reader or Diigo or whatever online tool they choose).

On the other hand, I do think there is value to letting students start out with a question or topic of their choice (within parameters) and not defining the steps too specifically at first.   I think there is a balance to challenging them to investigate and inspiring them to be detectives and scaffolding them.   Are we modeling for them what we do when we are stuck?   Do we show them how we ask our network for help, our librarian, our friend down the hall–do we model for them what sites we start with when we are puzzled?

We want to model good sources and strategies for them to an extent, but we also want them to learn to follow leads and be independent learners, and I think that balance is tricky.  I don’t think just tossing them out on Google with a vague topic is the answer, but I think we can also squelch their investigative curiosity by making a research process too “step by step.”  

Wes Fryer and Scott Weidig have been having an interesting exchange about this idea of “procedural” learning versus “navigational” learning in regards to teachers, but I think it applies to students as well.   (To summarize and oversimplify, Wes defines procedural learners being those that want to have a series of steps to follow, and navigational learners as being those who figure it out by “doing” it and experimenting.)

In their conversation, Scott asks:

“I guess that I am thinking that if we look at how young children, who very much want to learn and I feel are a great model of what an investigative thinker/learner is/should be, learn (navigationally) is there a point in the education cycle where we teach that out of them and create a procedural learner in its place? Are we creating this cycle by in essence teaching goal setting and breaking of topics/ideas down into more manageable ‘goals.’”

I think an area often neglected in teacher training (and in staff development) is about the whole nature of research and how we teach it and use it in the classroom.    Even if the assignment is fairly straightforward–I want students to investigate “x” and share it with the class–How do we strike that balance between covering the content we need to, and helping students be investigative and curious?  How do we tap into their curiosity?  Can we engage students better by giving them some choices?  Can we arouse their curiosity by our own passion for the subject?   Can we connect it in to what they already know, or ask them to make those connections before beginning?  

And as they move through their research,  do we model how to problem solve?  And have we created a situation where they are invested enough in it to even WANT to problem solve?

As guides,  how do we know when to intervene in their process and provide them some context during their investigative process so that they are more successful–what Carol Kuhlthau calls the “zone of intervention?”   Can we make assignments defined enough for our curricular needs, but open-ended enough that students can follow what I think of as the serendipitious paths of information that might arise along the way during their search?   

And how can we use tools that allow us to see what students are thinking as they move through a research process, so we can even understand the barriers they are encountering–journaling on sites like Tumblr?  using blogs as reflective tools during their research process?  Twitter for micro-reflections?  Skype or IM in the library so students can just instant message a clarification question? 

The simplest things can trip any of us up.   The notion of “have to” versus “want to” can slow any of us down in our work.  The questions of invitation, of context, and of exploration seem significant ones if we are to inspire student investigation and curiosity, (or teacher investigation, for that matter.)   If we want to create curious and investigative adults as Scott writes about, how do we support those traits in our own assignments and interactions with students?

In their book, Innovation, Carlson and Wilmot remind us “customers aren’t virtual.”  They remind us of the importance of watching customers use a product, rather than just asking them about them. 

As they point out, “The sooner you get out and interact with customers, the better.  They will give you critical information about the marketplace and customer needs.”  (p.120)

I’m frustrated with the way our databases work, and with selecting choices that students will really use.   So, for one, I need to listen to our customers (students and staff) about which ones are useful to them.

And as a customer, I need to do a better job letting vendors know when I have issues with how their products work.  So in the interest of communicating with vendors, I’m opening a dialogue here.

No matter how useful some of our databases are,  I still find most of the interfaces a tremendous obstacle for students.  For one thing, it’s too cumbersome a process in most of them for students to click through the beginning screens to get to the search mode.   Why can’t databases create widgets like Google’s search box that can sit on the front page of your website?

 Why do they sort the information into so many lists of choices?  That’s fine to do for the advanced screens, but why can’t the front page of most databases have a clearer, simpler design for students?  They just want to do a search and their first efforts are fairly straightforward and simple, and there’s no need for so many choices and bells and whistles.   Why can’t they look for those as they need them?

Why can’t library catalogs work more like Amazon, for example?  Why can’t students review books they like or rate them at least?  The interfaces are starting to improve, but are students being asked their opinions and needs?

But the larger question is, are database companies out there observing students using these tools?  Do they ask libraries with heavy use of databases about how they work often enough?  Are they following the tenets that Carlson and Wilmot recommend and observing end users enough?

 I want to offer our students these resources, but they should be much easier to use.  This has long been a problem, but pre-Google, we could still encourage students to use databases for the best results.   But many times, even as a librarian, it takes me a great deal of time in a database to find what I need.   And I’m an experienced searcher.  Google and other search sites have made it so easy to find information, that no wonder students are reluctant to use databases, even if the information they contain is unique, important, and factual.

Based on Carlson and Wilmot’s suggestions, I plan to spend more time simply observing students using these tools, so that I can make some very specific recommendations to vendors about their products.

So, if you were going to improve databases or catalogs, what suggestions would you have for their designers?  

I’ve been thinking a lot about a session at  TCEA’s Library Sig group meeting, where Barbara Jansen and her former principal Marla McGee did an excellent presentation about ‘five things librarians would want their principals to know about their programs’.  (See Dr. Mary Ann Bell’s excellent summary of the session).  

Barbara emphasized the importance of identifying what your ‘five most important things’ about your program are, and then not only telling your principal, but “showing them.’

Ok, this gets to one of those complex trackbacks, but worth it. A recent thread on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog about librarians and technologists working together to implement 21st century information literacy skills (which tracks back to a series of posts by guest bloggers Justin Medved and Dennis Harter on Dangerously Irrelevant) led me to think about Barbara’s “five things” in relation to other aspects of our roles as librarians.

I’m thinking that part of improving our partnerships with teachers or with our technology departments is identifying those “five things” that we want each of those constituents to understand about our programs.  Having a focused message is part of making it “stick.”  

We need to, as Barbara and Marla did in their presentation, join forces to understand one another better.

But, we also need input in order to do that–not just telling our own stories but hearing the stories of others. 

So maybe we should be asking teachers five things they want librarians to understand about their work, or asking technologists five things they want librarians to understand about theirs, or asking students five things they want us to understand about their use of the library.

Finding ways to open dialogues with our customers through surveys, questionaires, and face to face discussions is a way to enhance and grow our partnerships.

Because we are instructional partners, all of us.  Our goal is helping students learn.   When we all understand our piece of the partnership and how we can best contribute, the whole school is stronger because of that.   What can we do to support one another more effectively?    Because ultimately, good partnerships end up helping students learn more meaningfully.   

  So, teachers, students, technology coordinators, principals–what are those five things that are most important to you?

What do we need to know about your jobs, and how can we partner with you better?

And in return, how can you partner with us better as well?

(Much thanks to Barbara Jansen for the idea.)

Image credit: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/101655312

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12368550@N06/2068779988

Literally.   And figuratively.

  This is the question I’ll be trying to answer for the next year or so, because this is our library.  

Is a library defined purely by just its “stuff” or  by the services the staff provides? 

The time for thinking a library is just a warehouse has passed.   We can deliver services to where our customers are(the classroom), deliver it via the web, deliver it via Skype, deliver it via video, because the library is also the staff IN the library.

So, those of you who aren’t librarians–do you ask your librarian for “stuff” or for services?  And if you don’t ask for services, why not?  

  Tomorrow our library move is over and the renovation of our library begins. For a year, I’ll be housed in our ninth grade center, floating to classrooms, and functioning as a “virtual librarian.”   During lunch periods, we’ll be manning an internet cafe in our main building, providing laptops, research help and new books to students there. 

I’m hoping to harness the power of web 2.0 tools, as well as working more collaboratively with teachers by visiting classrooms and taking our services into student spaces.

I’ll be sharing that year with you as we go.  It will be a fascinating learning experience that I think will stretch my skills tremendously.

What would you do if everything you did had to fit on one cart?   For a librarian who is used to managing a physical space, it’s a challenging and interesting question.  I hope what happens this year sets the notion on its head of a library as “a warehouse.”

What will be missed about our space–students are already missing the sense of community, having a gathering place, and having access to what they need–can’t really be replaced virtually because they are at school and want to work together, read our Anime books, or come in and ask for help with something.    

I don’t know that we can entirely replace that aspect of a library with a virtual space–in fact, I know we can’t.   But, we can build a better virtual space–so that students can have exchanges of ideas there, get help, and interact with us.   One thing I’m eager to roll out is using Skype to communicate with teachers on our main campus.   With a web cam, they or their students can talk to me, ask me questions, share a book–and I can conduct “virtual” reference, so to speak.  

We’ll be improving our website too, so that there are more interactive features on it for students, and more pathfinders so they can find what they need.   We already have a student blog, but I’m hoping it can become a more active vehicle for communicating with students while we are physically closed.

I’m brimming with ideas–and in a way, it’ll be great to have the freedom to move about our building, observe teachers, and embed my role into the curriculum even more.

So, as we start this journey, I would love to hear your ideas–what would you do if you had to be a virtual librarian for a year?  What if everything you did had to fit on a cart?

We’re almost finished moving out of our library.  So I just wanted to say goodbye to a comfortable old friend.  When you’ve been in a library for 17 years, you know it backwards and forwards.  Almost every book on the shelf you were responsible for purchasing.   You know the history of the school, and all the teachers and staff you’ve worked with along the way.   When you look at the library, you don’t just see a library–you see all the students, teachers and librarians who walked through there for 17 years.  You see all the things you hosted–like Dylan Day, and Poetry Cafe, and authors, and teacher breakfasts, and retirement parties.   A library isn’t really about books–it’s  about connections.  It’s about people.

So here’s a few farewell photos from the last day we were open.  Good bye, comfortable old shoe.  It’s time for some new ones!

With increasing pressures for AP courses, standardized testing, and college prep curriculums, we struggle to assimilate the different types of students in our schools, who we sometimes find are treated like widgets in a factory, instead of finely hand-crafted wines.  

Nationally, we determine their success by the output of the factory, rather than the depth of their thinking or the quality of student work and or the school’s fostering of their creativity or innovation.   The emphasis on this assembly line model can cause schools or state governments to think of programs like libraries, technology programs, or arts and career programs as frills, to be cut away to provide time for testing, or to be relegated to being considered “add-ons.”

In Out of Our Minds:  Learning to Be Creative, Sir Ken Robinson pushes for a new paradigm, one that views academic abilities as just one part of what schools do(which we all know is quite true).

He writes:

“What are academic standards, and why do we have such faith in them to deliver the future?  Like the medieval astronomer we continue to believe, despite all the evidence that the system is failing us and the people in it. . . .We ask how to promote creativity and innovation but stifle the processes and conditions that are most likely to bring it about.”

“The world economies are caught up in a genuine paradigm change.  The new technologies do not simply mean that we have new ways of doing things we did before: businesses, organisations and individuals everywhere are faced with entirely new forms of work, leisure and ways of being.  We are trying to meet this new social and economic paradigm using the assumptions and proccupations of the old intellectual paradigm of education.”(p. 92)

Robinson points out “academic abilities” are only one function of education. We work with students on social and community abilities as well as supporting abilities that relate to the work world.    Yet the focus remains on the “academic” abilities.  In his TED talks video, he talks about how we think of our body as some sort of thing to carry our heads/brains around, neglecting the whole person.  

Robinson questions our belief in the linear nature of learning and career planning, pointing out the zig-zaggedy way that most people find their career paths.  But that very “linear” thinking causes us to weigh some courses (academic) as more important than others(career based and arts), because we believe that taking academic courses is the way to prepare a nationally competitive workforce. 

Libraries are an academic part of the curriculum, but in many schools they are relegated to being thought of as a luxury–a place to drop students off for some leisure time, or as something required though no one quite knows why.   Library journal articles talk about librarians learning to make themselves useful in the 21st century economy so they’ll still have jobs, as though reading enjoyment, enriching students lives, supporting their thinking and investigation is a “frill” that won’t be needed in the 21st century school.

The library and arts programs and creative writing programs particularly support something that few other programs on campus do–we encourage students to explore what they are interested in.  Our programs exist to scaffold their thinking, make the world of ideas available to students, and let them follow the serendipity of their own interests and thoughts.   We try to inspire them with the works of others, connect them with ideas that will push their thinking, and show them the history of what has come before.   And we allow them simply to explore the world of ideas.

Where else in a school do students(or for that matter staff) come of their own free will to just explore, look around, read, investigate the internet, or talk about books or ideas with someone?  It is their personal learning space on the campus, their own space for “research and development,”  learning at its essence.  (and libraries that have 24/7 capabilities with websites, open online catalogs, etc. can provide this at all times of the day or night).

I’d love to see a campus grow out of the concept of the library, building a campus around learning as  investigation and exploration, rather than “attach” the library’s mission to the campus as an add-on.  That would be a paradigm shift.  

Want to design a youth library in Nairobi, Kenya?  Check out more about AMD’s Open Architecture Challenge to design a library and media space, internet cafe, and research center for SIDAREC, the Slums Information Development and Resources Centre.

Their proposal astutely points out the problem of the digital divide:

“Today’s world prosperity is technologically driven. The world has become a global village where the issue of distance is no longer the case. People interact and do business at the click of a mouse.

Currently people living on less than a dollar a day in the slums must pay the same rates as those with means to access the internet. The high costs of accessing internet means that many people living in the slums would continue to be out of touch with the rest of the world and poverty will continue stalking them. . . .Young people would like to be trained in computer skills that will allow them to compete in the job market, communicate with each other and with the world.”

Prosperity and connectivity are intertwined.  Information is becoming the knowledge economy around the world, and children without access to that are at a disadvantage.

If you’re interested, check out the guidelines page–deadlines are coming up soon!  Submissions from any age group are allowed.

Another interesting school building project, Build African Schools, is being supported by HP to bring accessibility to rural African schools using computers and solar power.

So, what would your design look like?

image credit:  http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/challenge/africa

My role is about to change.  After 17 years of being a librarian with a physical library, our library is undergoing a major renovation and we’ll be closing in about two weeks.   At that point, we’ll be rooming in with our ninth grade library, and have to navigate a construction zone to work with the grade 10-12 students.  

I’ve been thinking this may be a unique opportunity to become a virtual librarian for awhile and explore what that is.   Recently we discovered that instead of opening back up in September, as I had anticipated, we won’t be able to open until December.  The thought of not having a physical space for a year has been rather daunting, and I know it will offer a lot of challenges for our whole campus.

So I’ve been putting a lot of thought into our virtual services and how I can “take the library to the students” rather than the students coming to me, so that we can still provide good service to our students and staff.    Since Cathy Nelson was so very kind enough to comment about this in a recent post, I thought I would expand on some of the ways I hope to do this.

One thing that’s important in virtual learning is a good web presence.   We need to make sure things we do are clickable, and that support and help are clickable, so deepening our website is something we’ll be working on.   Adding more e-books to our collection, identifying more virtual ways to access information, and building good pathfinders will all help with that.   I’m hoping this will also be my chance to take time to really learn html and enhance my web design capabilities (anyone interested in helping me with that project?)

Other than working with classes on research projects or multi-media projects, a tremendous amount of what we do each day is troubleshooting technology needs with students or making book recommendations.   So I want to find ways to provide help with that remotely, when I’m not able to reach a class directly.

We’ve been piloting using Skype on our campus, and this may be a perfect opportunity to test its power as a live reference and book recommendation tool.  What would it be like to have a open “Skype” line for teachers or students to message us with questions, book requests, etc?   Can we use a webcam to humanize our services even when they are from a distance?

The other opportunity I really see here is the chance to teach side by side in the classroom with teachers.  Now that our campus has added mobile laptop labs in anticipation of our closing, I’m planning to go to them to work on information literacy lessons, projects, etc.   I’m thinking this may really open up some collaborative opportunities to create more of a partnership with our teachers.

 I know I’m really going to miss the students in our space, together.  Although the 9-12 students can all access the ninth grade library where I”ll be, it’s much smaller, and so I know there will be a limit to the number of students who can be there.   Our seniors who are currently in the library every day will be graduating and another class of seniors halfway through before we reopen, and that will feel like something we’ve missed–those familiar faces in our familiar space.  

I’ll miss having everything I need at hand–miss having the variety of literary choices we’d normally have, miss all the activities we host in our space like Poetry Cafe and Dylan Day and teacher breakfasts and workshops, miss it being a gathering place for teachers and students alike. 

But in the interim, we are going to open an “internet” cafe type of space in our interior courtyard, and be there during lunch periods to provide service, answer questions and issue laptops, as well.  So that create times where we’re readily available to students, and running the internet cafe will open up new understandings I’m sure.  

And I’m sure we’ll find many ways to take the activities to the students in the classroom while we are without a physical space to host them.  I’m looking forward to seeing how we can use web tools, classrooms, and outdoor spaces to provide library services in the interim! 

We’ll also really have time to build some professional development opportunities and collaborate with the ninth grade staff, which I’m looking forward to.

So, as Cathy says in her post, wish us well in our virtual journey as our new physical 21st century “Research Center” comes to life.

Library services are changing tremendously.   I recently wrote about an article by Bob Hassett in which he eloquently writes that the library is “everywhere,” takes place all the time, and is composed of every student and teacher.

And as the Grinch says about Christmas, maybe libraries come without ”ribbons” or “tags,” maybe they come without bookcases or walls–maybe now libraries  “mean a little bit more.”