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."

Tech Integration -- Expanded definition of digital divide

In a review of embedded curriculum and the potential for student success, Patrick Higgins at Chalkdust101 identifies the apparent failure of his (and many) schools with regards to technology integration.

"In our district, every teacher from grades six through twelve has a laptop . . . Our teachers are very wired, but our kids don’t have the same access. . ."

He gives credit to a job candidate in an interview for enlightening him,

"the next big hurdle for schools [is] to put the power to learn back into the hands of students."

In pursuit of this goal, he concludes his post,

"We have to start tipping the scales in favor of the question “what could they do if they had…” and go from there."

I am lucky to work in a district that has spent generously on computers, software and peripheral equipment. I get to work one-on-one and with large groups of students, collaborating with teachers to embed this technology into individual lessons and the curriculum. When I graduate (this spring) and accept a job in another district I will assuredly look back at this experience as, "the good old days."

As well equipped as we are, I cannot help thinking about the opportunities that we miss: lessons we could improve, social networking or blogging opportunities that are unavailable to us, and classes that can't (equipment not available) or won't (technophobe teacher) take advantage of the available technology. As a parent and citizen, it saddens me that there can be so much variation in the level of technology available from teacher to teacher, school to school and district to district.

I understand that funding varies and even understand that local environments are different but once they graduate, the vast majority of these young adults will be vying for the same opportunities without regard for background or level of technology integration in their high schools. Whose responsibility is it to prepare these students, if not ours? It may be a long and winding road but it is one that is definitely worth traveling.

Luckily, as time passes, lower cost hardware solutions are constantly being developed from the newly popular NetBooks to the SmartVine virtual monitors that allow up to 11 users to share a single computer. There are many, many very stable FREE software solutions available and constantly being developed (Audacity, GoogleEarth, Camtasia, and many more). While these solutions may not be acceptable in many districts, we should celebrate each success and improve upon each failure. Hopefully true technology integration will continue to grow across our country, continent, and world.

As we proceed, in addition to students, teachers, and administrators, we need to build relationships and with our network administrators. I have seen too many articles and blogs recently discussing the failed marriage of educational tech integration and the network administrators or IT departments. Among them, Higgins wrote on the subject in August drawing from a related article with a suggested solution by Jim Moulton in his Future of Education blog. Tech & Learning magazine published a brief article on the topic, focused primarily on the positive, in their September print and online issues.

I certainly don't have the answers but know that whether in a school with 20 computers or one with hundreds, until every student has access in all schools to computers, software, web based information and appropriate web utilities, our journey will not be complete. I'm so glad to be back at school! Sorry to take on such a loaded topic so early in the year . . . .