Not So Distant Future

I decided this fall to move my school’s library website to a blog, and decided to embed different user polls once a week; initially just for fun and to make the page more interactive.

But lo and behold, I’ve discovered that the polls are a great way to see what student preferences are.   And though instinctively I can guess what students are doing, it’s helpful to have that confirmation of my instincts.

A sampling of recent polls shows that students overwhelmingly prefer Google for searching–I thought more of them were using Yahoo, but it gets left in the dust.  And who would have guessed more of them used Digg than AOL–I wasn’t even sure they knew about Digg. (see below for chart).

And a second poll showed that students clearly prefer Facebook and Youtube far above other applications.  Not a big surprise there, but again, these statistics can prove useful when trying to address filtering issues in the district as well.

See the samples of a couple of our polls below.  We use polldaddy, which also allows you do to a brief survey and embed it on your website or blog.

 A great deal of discussion about filtering regarding Skype and Facebook has been filtering through the blogs lately.

Wesley Fryer has an excellent post on the subject, as do Jeff Utecht, Pat Hensley and Paul Wood.

This isn’t a new issue of course.  Two years ago at Educon 2.0, I presented a session on Best Practices and Internet Safety.  It’s not that we don’t have a lot of very good rationales for reducing filtering that are educationally sound.   But this struggle between IT departments and curriculum staff is an unfortunate but ongoing one in many districts.  We just need to understand each other better. 

But how do we bridge that gap?

I wonder if part of what we need to be doing is working with those who have the ability to effect change in this area. Of course within our own districts many of us try to do that.  But even beyond our district we can help effect change (sometimes more easily than within our districts because of the ‘prophet in our own home land’ issue).

How–?   By going to where the staff is who needs to hear this discussion.  We can do it by:

• Writing articles for journals read by IT staff, by administrators and superintendents
• Speaking at conferences they attend.  What conferences are IT staff attending?   What conferences are our administrators attending?
• Creating YouTube videos because some administrators find video more accessible than reading blogs or articles.
• Encouraging our conference organizers to invite not only edtech staff, but IT staff at schools–making sure that those staff get emails and flyers about upcoming Ed Tech conferences, scholarships to those conferences, etc. so that they have some exposure to ideas there.
• Encouraging professional journals that administrators or IT staff read to include articles on some examples of schools with great working relationships and how they have achieved that.
• Listening in on  IT department workshops.  Their concerns are legitimate and they are the ones left ‘holding the bag’ if a controversy erupts in a district.  Where can we go to listen to their concerns/discussions so we can come to some common understanding?  Too often our fundamental approaches are completely different and perhaps understanding is the first step.

And in our own building, I think we really need to invite the IT staff and administrators in–invite them to see us using that new tool with a class–let them see that excitement on the student faces and the constructive ways the tools are being used, live and in action.  Because perhaps what we each want is somehow a reflection of the other, we just aren’t seeing it.

I don’t know that any of these are new ideas, but I think we have to take this discussion out of the blogosphere “choir” and into the offices and meeting rooms and journals and conferences of the people who work on the filter on the daily basis.

One thing I was trying to do in my presentation at Educon was develop some type of Best Practices wiki with a list of resources that all of us could draw upon.  Sometimes filtering is just a matter of lack of knowledge about what the law actually says.   And it’s helpful when any of us are faced with difficult discussions in our own districts regarding filtering that we have resources to draw upon, rather than reinventing the wheel. 

We also have to remember that there will be early adopters and late adopters.  Like the mice in Who Moved My Cheese, there are districts that will be eager to change, and districts like the mouse Haw that will eventually figure it out and be glad for the change, and districts like Hem, that may not ever get it.

I know much of what I suggest is already happening, but I do think for those of us who haven’t tried writing an article for an IT publication or a principals’ journal could give it a try.  Think of the voices we could get out there if so many of us who write in the blogosphere committed to doing ‘one thing’ to communicate in another forum, like an IT conference? 

The first step towards opening doors is beginning the conversations with the players involved.  No change can occur without that  first step.

What else can we do?

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/seagers/1805045379/

In one of my favorite movies, Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn’s character, a whip-smart librarian, faces off with the EMERAC computer that Spencer Tracy is bringing in to replace her and her staff.  (She does short circuit the computer by befuddling it, by the way.)

The movie has been on my mind lately in relation to an ongoing  discussion about the future of libraries.   And particularly what this film reminds me of is the ongoing tension/missed opportunities between librarians and tech staff.

I know there are many instances where building tech staff and librarians work side-by-side to support the curriculum (and I’ve been fortunate to work in that sort of situation the last few years).   But more often, there is a tension between the two departments.

It breaks down into a few different categories in my mind:

• Librarian sees tech as no part of their job and relies on tech person for support, or has little to do with tech.
• Librarian is very involved in tech, but tech department views them as invasive or stepping on their territory.
• Librarian isn’t involved in tech, and tech department wishes they were more involved.
• Librarian attends tech meetings but tech doesn’t attend library meetings/conferences.
• Tech shares with librarian but librarian doesn’t share with tech staff.
• Librarian and tech share information and work collaboratively together, attend conferences together, and share materials/projects freely.

Does this fit any of your situations?   At the bottom line of our work is of course, students.  Perhaps we should ask ourselves which model would best serve our students.  I would warrant it would be the last one, of course.

But how do we get there?  There are many obstacles–entrenched opinions, attitudes, differing beliefs about our roles, etc.

I’m throwing down the gauntlet here to some of my edtech friends and colleagues (who I feel just as connected with as with my online library colleagues).  Do you read librarian blogs, listservs, attend library conferences, check out the latest in library trends by following a library journal like SLJ or American Libraries?

Did you know that librarians, according to a recent study highlighted by SLJ (A Survey of K-12 Educators on Social Networking and Content -Sharing Tools), are the highest joiners of social networks on a campus(70% compared to 62% of teachers and 54% of principals)?

I applaud those of you who are blogging and twittering about libraries and are curious about how all of us in schools are evolving together.  You’ve added so much to the conversation.  (@ddraper @karlfisch)

But do many ed tech staff attend library “discussions” on Elluminate, attend library conferences, or post on library blogs (very often?)   A few of my colleagues do, regularly, and engage us with wonderfully insightful questions and posts.   But what about everyone else?  Where is the dialogue we could be having?   Your insights would be helpful to us, both in the blogosphere and at conferences.

I do have to stop here and  acknowledge and applaud organizations like ISTE and TCEA for including and supporting librarians/media specialists in their organization and offerings.  (They are doing a better job than library conferences are in this regard).

Librarians and our organizations have a part to play in this as well.  I want to throw down the gauntlet to challenge library organizations like TLA and ALA and AASL to include more school tech staff in their offerings/presenter lists/invites, etc.   (TLA actually IS bringing in Scott Floyd to speak on filtering at their annual conference this year–kudos to them!)   These library organizations could set the tone of inclusiveness and model that partnership as well.   Send out invites to ed tech staff in schools about these conferences and invite them to be part of the conversation.

And as librarians, do we invite our tech staff to library conferences so they can hear/see our progressive leaders, learn about our issues, and connect with our mission?  Do we listen to our tech staff, attend their training sessions, or invite them in to see what is going on in our libraries?

So how do we work through those differences?   We can start by being models ourselves.

At the end of Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn’s character(with the peculiarly anti-intellectual name of Bunny) and Emerac the computer, along with  engineer Spencer Tracy,  begin working together to effectively serve the clients/customers in the office.  Likewise, how can we begin to bridge the divide between our two professions?

I’ve maybe pointed a few fingers–and I’m sure there are fingers to point in all directions here, but I just wonder why we don’t see this as a joint mission?  Helping envision libraries of the future and tech departments of the future is all a part of envisioning SCHOOLS and LEARNING in the future.

As Ronald Reagan(though I shudder to quote him) once said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down those walls.”   Shouldn’t we all be working together to tear down those walls?

My question is, how?

   Since today is Veteran’s Day, I wanted to share our improved edition of the Vietnam Wall project which our English 3AP students have created over the last four years.   Students research the lives of individual soldiers who fell in Vietnam, including interviews with family members, and then create video projects recounting the soldier’s life.   We have been compiling the videos into our own “virtual wall” here.

It’s been an excellent way to really engage students in the power of firsthand research–for many of these soldiers, our students are the first ones to tell their life stories online.  The feedback we receive from their family/friends is incredibly moving and real.  It turns research into a living entity for our students and into something meaningful for those far beyond the walls of our school.

There’s been a lot of talk lately around the blogosphere about the future of libraries from both within the library profession and outside of it. I think it’s been a great constructive dialogue about a complicated topic.

You can follow some of the discussion here:

The Uncertainty of Professional Persistence

Touching Some Nerves

Dangerously Irrelevant Libraries

I have more to say about the discussion, but first, I thought it would be enlightening to take a look at statistics about library use. There are presumptions I make, working in a very busy school library, that might not reflect the trends as a whole, for example.  I’m not sharing these to be defensive, but more to inform the discussion and out of my own curiosity about what the research is showing.

A library use survey  of teens conducted by Harris Interactive (2007) sheds some light on the subject.   While the survey is two years old, another study of youth use of libraries shows that young people  have been a significantly high portion of library users for the last 75 years or so, which implies to me that the study is recent enough to consider.

Some interesting details I gleaned from the Harris study:

• only 12% of those surveyed had NOT visited a public or school library in the last year.
• about 60% visit a library website at least once monthly, ( 16 %  of that visit one weekly.)
• about 80% visit their school library at least once a month, while a whopping 40% surveyed visit a couple of times a week or more.

Another report, the 2009 State of America’s Libraries, illumined these statistics:

• “Children are among the heaviest users of public-library resources. Children’s materials accounted for 35 percent of all circulation transactions, and attendance at library-based children’s programs was 57.8 million. “

• “Individual visits to school library media centers increased significantly at the schools that responded to both the 2007 and 2008 surveys: up 22.7 percent for the 50th percentile, up 12.5 percent for the 75th percentile, and up almost 25 percent for the 95th percentile. There were no major year-to-year differences in the responses with regard to the other variables. “

    So, whatever is happening with the future of libraries,  children and young adults are clearly using both public and school  libraries frequently.  So before we conclude that libraries are a dying breed, or going the way of the “buggy whip makers”(grins to Scott McLeod), the statistics do have significant things to tell us about that perception.

I definitely do not deny that we need to be doing serious thinking about what libraries will look like and how we will serve children and young adults as our libraries evolve, as I wrote about in a post a couple of weeks ago.   I think it will be fascinating to see what evolves, what sticks, and what transforms.  But I also want to ground some of the discussion in the present–again, not in a defensive, “libraries will never change” mindset, but just to acknowledge the vivid usage that libraries have by children and young adults currently.

Our roles are already transforming, of course, lest there be some perception that librarians have sat idly by in their buggy while the world whips past them in sports cars  

And in the midst of that, I find myself more of a hybrid these days,  but that is fodder for my next post.

Photo credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/bertha/13433635/

  Tech Forum panel on issues regarding web 2.0 tools.

    If you’re a fan of the Office, you may have gotten a good laugh out of Jim’s “Facebook” Halloween costume in this week’s episode.  There’s something refreshing about applying a sense of levity to discussions about using Facebook in schools.  Not that there are not serious considerations about the issue, but sometimes we need to step back and take a different view.

Coincidentally, today I ran across this excellent resource for 100 ways to use Facebook  in the classroom thanks to a link from Stephen Abram.  It includes ways to use it safely and wisely, a great list of apps for Facebook use for students, ways for educators to network on Facebook, and advantages to using it with students.  While the article is directed at college level educators, many of these tips would apply to use in secondary schools also!

Maybe it is time we join ‘book face’, think outside of the box,  and have a different type of conversation about how to use Facebook in the classroom.   Our campus is getting ready to do a pilot to have Facebook available to some teachers on our campus to initiate just such a conversation.  Piloting sites like this to troubleshoot the pitfalls and experiment with the successes is an excellent way to approach those “spooky” sites and to find solutions rather than just slamming the door on them.  We’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

photo: http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/

What does this photograph and this beach at Asilomar have to do with libraries, you might ask?  It’s from a place that I find irresistible.  Taken during a conference I find irresistible–a conference that keeps me coming back for more.

Ever since Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson wrote their intriguing article in School Library Journal, I’ve been pondering what the 21st century school library can or does look like.

In listening from afar in to the keynote address at Internet Librarian West (brilliantly entitled “Libraries of the Future: Places of Desire”) by NYPL librarian Paul Holdengraber  I heard him give the key answer to my question–that he wants libraries to be irresistible.

And that’s all you could want for a school library–for it to be irresistible to the students and teachers you have at your campus–whether that means read-alouds, book groups, online presence, twittering, facebooking, gaming events, a beautiful space, etc.–whatever the means, the end goal is making the library an irresistible learning hub.

And it’s not just because that will help us be more viable, or help us “survive” budget cuts–or any of those fear-based things.  It’s because it’s what we are here for.  We’re here to offer services in the best way we can that invite our customers/students in and engage them in learning and creating.

Rereading Chris Brogan’s much commented upon post about services public libraries offer, he pushes the envelope for public library services, like offering geotagging of sites outside the library, for example.  Many readers chimed in with their ideas, praise, kudos, or wishes for their libraries.

At Internet Librarian West today, I followed tweets discussing ways to take libraries mobile.  I wondered afterwards why our vendors couldn’t design  iphone apps for our services that we could offer to students.  I heard David Lee King talk about using meebo chat or other tools for instant communication with customers(and on the spot, I decided to set up my own library twitter account so I could be “tweeted” questions, though I don’t know how many students are really on twitter yet.)

While I love trying these tools, I wonder how many of these services would get used by high school students–?  And I think the answer is, it depends.  It depends on what we build in terms of relationship with our students–how “living” a presence our library sites are for our students, and how well we promote what we do/offer.  Marketing is a big part of our role.

Some teachers I talk with are reluctant to share online because they feel that perhaps they are ‘tooting their own horn.”  But coming from a library perspective, I tend to think of it more as marketing.  We are marketing to our customers, who are students and teachers in our building and beyond our building.  We are not only marketing our own services but the idea that libraries are helpful places with helpful and creative people.

We always need to be mindful the core idea of making our very space/staff/services ‘irresistible’ to our users, whatever tools we use to do so.  We need to know our students and what “floats their boat” so to speak. (And we need to know the same about our teachers–how to reach them, and what “floats their boats” as well.)

As Bodanger asked in his keynote, ‘What if  librarians thought their role was to oxygenate the library?’  That, to me, is the evolution of the 21st century library–an oxygenated library.  And one that, like that beach in my photograph, keeps our students coming back.

In the last few days I’ve been following the simmering discussions that spun off of work by Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson, eminent librarians and leaders in our field, about the issue of 21st century librarians and what responsibility we all have to embrace new technologies.

It’s been fascinating reading the excellent blog discussions that have ensued, and reading subsequent blog posts by Joyce, Buffy Hamilton and Doug Johnson, among others.

But still what resonates most with me is Doug Johnson’s question–”How can we give a voice to those who choose not to network?”   (I would perhaps take issue with the word “choose” because I do think it’s possible for someone to be somewhat unaware of all these online networks of librarians–remember that in our profession we encompass a variety of librarians–from those in tiny rural schools to those not certified and struggling to run a library program, etc.)

It’s not that I disagree that as librarians we need to be leaders, innovators, and models for our teachers–I believe we do.  Buffy makes an excellent case for that in her incredibly articulate blog post.    But like Beth, whose comment to Doug’s post led to some of this lively discussion, I wonder what we are doing to mentor other librarians, and like Beth, I worry that we are driving people out of the conversation–it is very easy to become insular, self-referential, and overly steeped in 2.0 language to the exclusion of those we would like to join us in conversation.

If you look at surveys of  internet use by Pew Internet and American Life Project and other work on internet use, early adopters total only 5-10% of the population.  Given this, clearly not all of us can be early adopters although we can be leaders.

So my question, following up on Doug’s and Beth’s is this:  What can each of us do individually to bring more librarians into these conversations who might not be there currently?

I would posit that we need to watch our language–in our enthusiasm, we can overwhelm others with all the bells and whistles and options.  And I question if that is not counterproductive to our aim.   Yes it is amazing to show what is possible, but if we don’t also show a step-by-step roadmap for getting there, then it is just so much ‘pie in the sky.’

I think a sign of leadership is also being able to break down the details in a way that they are accessible.  I liked Joyce’s attempt to do this in her article, How to Retool Yourself, (though I found a little too many options there for a beginner, to be honest)–but I really and truly applaud her leadership as always in realizing that this sort of specific post is what is needed.

I know we all do  things everyday to help our colleagues along and many of us have done that for a long time. But I think it’s important to renew our efforts to reach out to those who are interested but don’t know where to start, or who haven’t even broached the idea because they are too overwhelmed, or are not currently we think the conversations are happening.  But then again, maybe we aren’t where their conversations are happening either.

Rather than debate whether or not people “should” be somewhere, let’s help them get there by our individual and joint efforts.  That may mean we have to get out of our own sandboxes once in awhile but I think our profession will be all the better for it–we all have something to learn and we all have something to teach.   I thank Beth for her courage in raising these challenging issues.

So, my question is, what can we do?  How can we connect with humility, open arms, and understanding with our colleagues at all levels of  technology adoption?

Time for a utilitarian post–and to clear the decks of some handy web apps I’ve run across via Twitter lately.

One of my favorites is fur.ly. (thanks for the tip, David Jakes!)  This site is a teacher/librarian’s dream when making a pathfinder.  It allows you to consolidate a list of websites under one url.  Then you just have one address to share with students. Here’s a fur.ly I created for this post. Use the small arrows at the top of the screen to flip through each site.

I revisited VoiceThread recently and found a lot of handy new features there, plus a downside.  They have added a “call in” feature so that you can use a cell phone to add your commentary on a slide.  Handy if you are working on some sort of oral history project with someone who doesn’t have a computer, for example–they can call in their narration of the slide.  Also handy if you don’t have a webcam or microphone available!   You also now have the long-awaited ability to purchase an archived version of your VoiceThread, which is an excellent way to preserve a project.  The downside is that it seems you can only have three VoiceThreads in your account unless you pay for the account;  downside if you are using it very often.

A last handy site I found via twitter was bitty.com. (thanks to Aschmitz on twitter!) It allows you to embed another webpage within your website.  The webpage is fully functional within the frame,  or you can click on it to launch the page.   Very handy and a nice way to garner student interest in a site, unless it gets blocked by your district’s internet filter!

Here’s an example of Bitty at work–with fur.ly’s home page.