In the sweet spot!

Joyce Valenza hits it on the nail again!  "Co-presenting a session at educational technology leader Alan November’s 2012 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference on July 19 with Shannon McClintock Miller, district librarian and technology integration specialist at Van Meter Schools in Iowa, Valenza outlined five areas in which K-12 schools should turn to their librarians to empower learners with valuable 21st-century college and career readiness skills."  Librarian's ability to support teachers and students with digital curation, citizenship & compassion, creation, connections and the Common Core place us squarely in "the golden age of librarianship."

Goldenview Middle School mashup with the library at Melk Abbey

Read the article in eSchool News for full description of the five C's that place librarians "in the sweet spot of education." My apologies to Valenza, McClintock Miller and Michelle Luhtala of eSchool News for the wholesale quoting of her article in this post.  I have done so because these concepts so closely match my own mantra that students must be motivated by the task in order to take ownership for the learning and that they will tend to achieve more when creating content that can be shared with others in real time or through the channels of 21st century media.

Curation: "Notebooks, bibliographies, and research papers, [are] inadequate for the digital landscape."  "School librarians, with their specialized training and background in collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating information, must now teach their patrons—students and educators alike—to" "use emerging technologies to showcase their progress as they acquire, organize, contextualize, and archive both existing content and new learning. Transparency is a critical component in growing what media scholar Pierre Levy calls knowledge citizens. The presenters stressed the value of teaching learners to purposefully contribute to society’s collective intelligence."

 Citizenship/Compassion:  “'With great power comes great responsibility,' said Valenza. Building society’s collective intelligence requires contributors to respect its infrastructure. This is the essence of digital citizenship.  Students must be taught how to publish their work for the real world, with their real identity (not anonymously), to build their digital footprint with purpose."  They discussed importance of accountability, compassion, awareness and potential repercussions along with the need for supervision and guidance.

Creation:  "The participatory nature of 21^st-century culture emboldens students to create and publish content—all kinds of content, but particularly multimedia content. Given the opportunity, students will transform work into play. Audience fuels their creativity, not standards and rubrics." "Valenza and Miller described the importance of granting students permission to experiment and explore, and the time to reflect and process their learning, to make it into something new. Students need to take ownership of their learning before it becomes relevant to them. Librarians, who have always served as matchmakers of sorts—pairing books with readers, resources with research questions, and, more recently, problems with tools to solve them [digital and multimedia options for publication]—should be the “go-to person(s)” to support learners as they construct their knowledge."

Connections:  Twentyfirst century literacy is incumbent upon connections and the development of personal learning networks.  Ideally these connections include a blend of experts, collaborators and audience.  While not all connections are reciprocal, collaborations can occur in real time or asynchronously as needed and available.  Collaborations can be built within classrooms, between classes within a school or around the world, or, as students become more motivated and involved with their own learning, with experts and collaborators they seek out on their own. 

Common Core:  "According to Lauren Davis, senior editor at Eye on Education, there are five things every educator should do to meet the Common Core State Standards. Her list includes focusing on process, publishing for real audiences, and engaging in discourse. Valenza and Miller explained that curation, citizenship & compassion, creation, and connection embed experiences into instruction that make the CCSS gel for learners. They make learning authentic and relevant. They are the Common Core."

Curation, citizenship & compassion, creation, and connection also fit exactly into the definition of information literacy with it's focus on students' ability to locate, evaluate, ethically use, create, share, and synthesize information.

It has long been recognized that many of us learn by writing and teaching.  The process allows us to synthesize topics that may at first be confusing.  These focus areas are only the progression from writing in a vacuum or a box for an audience of one or two to writing on a stage with an audience of many.  Today's students who can communicate with the entire student body and friends and strangers around the globe instantly, see little value in writing or even learning without an audience.  

Note:  "The following curation tools were referenced during the presentation: Diigo, LiveBinders, Paper.Li, Pinterest, PearlTrees, Posterous, Scoop.It, Sqworl, Storify, Symbaloo."

Perspective on my preparation: My "lightbulb" class

I am very excited to be nearing the beginning of my career as a librarian! I am equally saddened that I am nearing the end of the formal education process.

I have learned a tremendous amount in the last couple years in the program and am well prepared to continue learning on my own in the future. I have made great contacts and found (and learned how to find) great resources for continuing my education and research in the years to come.

The teacher who led me to start this blog for the class, Computer Applications in the School Library Media Center, has been the highlight of this education process! I’ve not asked her permission so I will not mention her name, but will complement her for teaching real world topics at the appropriate level for professionals entering a career defined by these topics.

Though incredibly satisfied with the totality of my education, I have, occasionally, suffered with ill prepared, unfocused, and antiquated adjunct professors and theory-heavy, practical-application-lacking tenured professors. Sadly I would estimate that half of my classes were not preparatory for the real world experience of school librarianship in the 21st century.

This class has force fed us many tools we will use in our libraries and will hopefully use to communicate with one-another and stay in touch with the library community. We have learned how to integrate technology into the curriculum, how to facilitate professional development, and how to teach Internet safety. We have debated real world copyright issues and, most recently, been shamed into updating our resumes.

The workload has been heavy; ridiculously so for those of us who strove to overachieve! Yet the takeaway has exceeded the effort!

I still have many weaknesses; some in areas that I feel should have been addressed in this program. To achieve my goals, I will need to continue the informal aspects of my education for years to come – as, I have learned, all high performing librarians do as a matter of habit and conscience. As we conclude this class, for the first time, I feel prepared to take on the role and responsibility of school library media specialist.

Readers please note that I am not bitter about any failings of this program but am in fact jubilant over its successes. If half of my classes were inadequate, then the other half, by definition, have been very good. I have long believed that the primary goal of the collegiate experience is to teach students how to learn and adapt so that they may succeed in their chosen profession. I know in my heart that this program has succeeded, because I now know how to learn and adapt in the arena of school librarianship in the 21st century.

I am prepared and excited and looking forward to the future!

Information Literacy Education

Week 4: I have read to the end of the Web! As a serendipitous librarian, I am used to scanning and surfing the Web in search of both topical information and serendipity. Following links from the Information Literacy Webquest this week and following links from those links and following links from those, etc. opened my eyes to the expanse of literature on the topics of IL and collaboration.

Someone in our discussion group noted that IL is “education for life!” Wow! Well put! Certainly much of the subject area content is valuable but if the sign of an educated person is one who is capable of learning, then IL is arguably one of the most important lessons a student can learn!

I see a teacher population divided: some, who want the librarian to give students basic database instruction, a very few who want information on source evaluation, and many who are willing to accept poor quality sources and citations. Very few are interested in true collaboration to teach information literacy.

The causes of this disconnect appear to be many, from the lack of a research or information literacy requirement for teacher certification to the lack of state mandated IL requirements for students and many, many more. This array of barriers needs to be the targets for our attacks.

Many of us have suggested that we need to win over teachers “one at a time” to teach IL. The problem with this is that only subsets of students have opportunities to learn strategies. Even within these subsets, it often appears that some students receive duplicated segments of instruction but never receive other valuable tools & instruction. Too often even teachers who appear cooperative do not want real collaboration to teach information literacy.

The question I posed to our discussion group was regarding the possibility of developing a curriculum, at the school or district level and hopefully one day at the state or even national level, whereby information literacy strategies would be taught in chewable chunks through the years and across the curricula. The strategies taught each year would build upon those already learned and would be tied directly to subject area instruction.

Things like this don’t just happen. They will not happen if motivated parties do not act. The lobby groups that will make this happen some day will involve librarians as leaders, motivated teachers who have seen the value of IL education, parents and students who have seen the benefits, and even business leaders defining the competencies required for employment.

While we may have to win teachers over one at a time, I believe it is imperative to set goals and make plans toward this greater goal. If we do not keep our sights on the goal of true information literacy education as described by the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner and do not focus our efforts toward reaching every student with progressive instruction toward IL competency, we will never achieve this goal.

By no means an exhaustive list, but listed below are a few starting points I discovered from the Webquest.

http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu/ -- Great tutorial on information literacy
chs.smuhsd.org/community/information_literacy.htm -- a great list of links to sites discussing information literacy
www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/webeval/index.htm -- one of many starting places for website evaluation.
http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/consult/collab/ -- Fantastic tools / information for & about collaboration. Also check out sections on the “The Ethical Researcher” and “21st Century Literacies”.