Why do we bother with library orientation?

OK, I understand not everyone will agree with me, but really, why?

I'm not talking about elementary school or about real library orientations ... where stuff is, how to access it, who the staff is, what we can do to help.  I'd even like to pursue a little "shocker" lesson to earn students' attention - something to display either, how little the majority of our students know about research, or how we are able to help.

What I am tired of, at the high school and possibly even middle school level, is the multitude of creative and not so creative ways we try to re-package and push "library rules" down our student's throats.  They got the same basic list of rules every year in elementary school.  Perhaps students listened to them then and, developmentally, probably needed to learn in this way.  They get the same basic list of rules from every teacher in every grade the first few days of school and probably from a principal within the first week or two.  I am not so naive as to believe that every teacher has the same expectations but the tone for the school should be set before most of us get an opportunity to do library orientations.

Are we really asking for anything more than common respect in the library? Respect toward others, respect for materials, equipment and the common space, respect for ourselves, and student respect for themselves . . .  If we are asking for more than this, is it really necessary?  More importantly, if our focus on rules, regulations and punishments lasts more than ten minutes, is there any evidence that students will adhere to the standards any more carefully?  Is it possible that excessive discussion about rules, fines and punishments actually deters visits to the library or even provokes inappropriate behaviors among a larger set of students?

I have not done my research on this topic.  No literature review, no combing of the Web or other blogs.  Perhaps I am out of line.  But, in my humble opinion (IMHO to the text savvy), if I expect students to respect me and my space, I need to begin by respecting them!  I need to assume they have a basic understanding of library expectations and, with minimal review and appropriate delivery, they will act appropriately.

What is appropriate delivery and will this really work?  It certainly will not work all of the time.  But then again, reviewing the rules ad nauseum doesn't work all of the time either.  Appropriate delivery?  It definitely begins with respect and modeling appropriate behaviors.  Perhaps a bill of rights that indicates things that are allowed and expectations / responsibilities?  Perhaps a short list posted discreetly around the library and handed out on library orientation day, but overshadowed by the really interesting "shocker" lesson discussed above.

I did not do my homework.  Please help by commenting your feelings regarding library orientations, alternative options, or perhaps suggestions for that "shocker" lesson.  Feel free to post also if you think I am off my rocker and traditional conduct and procedure orientations are still necessary at the high school level.  Please let me know what you think!  Thanks, in advance for feedback!

How Google Works!

So . . . I'm taking the Power Searching with Google certificate course.  Hoping to learn a few tricks and really hoping to pick up a better vocabulary and teaching method to describe the tricks I already know and use.  Right out of the shoot, in lesson one, I am very excited about the video by Matt Cutts, engineer in the quality group at Google, who describes how spiders and page ranking lead to the results we see.

It is an "unlisted video" on YouTube, and as such, am not sure if they will let me re-post, but until they tell me I can't, hope it will stay here for my future reference as a teacher and dedicated Google searcher.  I hope it is helpful to others as well!

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."

Tactile, physical, real and beautiful

Can you really imagine our world without books?

Check out this amazing video, made by booklovers at a bookstore in Toronto.  It explains what the books do at night . . . . .

"After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto (883 Queen Street West, (416) 366-8973).

"Grayson Matthews (http://www.graysonmatthews.com/) generously composed the beautiful, custom music."

Interesting AND accurate . . .

Halloween Collaboration

Love Prezi almost as much as Google Docs. Groups can collaborate in real time to create presentations that pack a punch! Check it out. (Quick text version available here.)



Check out collaboration in action -- Google Style. Not sure what the true spirit of Halloween is but these folks sure look like they had fun and demonstrate a collaborative spirit we can all aspire to.

Hacking hinders human happiness

Dateline: Washington Post; October 6, 2011

An Associated Press-MTV poll finds 3 in 10 teens and young adults have had people get into their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other Internet accounts and either impersonate or spy on them. That’s nearly double the level seen in 2009.

The poll found solid majorities saying they knew who was behind it . . . . . . [Often] It’s meant to be funny . . . . . . . . . But sometimes the hacking can be malicious. (Link to full article)

I went to YouTube to find a video clip to make light of this situation and was inundated with hundreds of videos promising to show me how to hack my friends email, Facebook and other accounts.

According to the article much of the "hacking" reported was done by friends who take over a computer that has been left unattended or who have "stolen" an obvious or previously shared password. Even the "funny" intrusions can often be interpreted as bullying “It’s supposed to be obvious that this is something I would never say,” and these are often things that embarrass or bother the owner of the hijacked account.

Professional hacking of social networks appears, based upon this study, to be the least of our worries. It is our "friends" who are out to get us!

With tools and techniques available to teach interested "friends" how to hack our accounts, it is these "friends" we need to guard against. I have not taken the time to research these tools but assume the best guard is, as the professionals warn us, changing passwords frequently and using combinations of letters, numbers and even characters.

What about the "friends" who take over the computer we left logged in or who borrow our laptops or smart phones that save passwords to automatically log in to all of our favorite sites? What about these loyal friends who look over our shoulders (figuratively speaking) to read our most private correspondence or who, "being funny," send email or post to Facebook things that we wouldn't ever do or if we did would never share?

I love technology! I love what it can do for us, and I love sharing the best it has to offer with students, teachers and friends. I offer and suggest. I do not preach (or at least try not to). Those of us who live in glass houses have no right to preach. On this point though, I see an urgent need to caution all around me to be cautious about passwords and about open accounts.

We cannot count upon our friends to have our backs on this one! It is up to each individual to protect their online privacy as much, perhaps more, than we work to protect our real, physical privacy.

This will not prevent purposeful, malicious bullying, but it will prevent us from feeling the barbs of a "friend's," supposedly "funny" jabs. As we encourage our students to develop an ever increasing online presence with blogs, discussion boards and an increasing volume of Web based application and those same students develop their own social and in some cases professional and financial networks outside of school, it is imperative that we encourage the safest possible behaviors.

Check this article about Google Apps for Education and community fears. What the Internet hath giveth, thy community (or district) can take away if fears outweigh perceived benefit.

Explicit instruction limits learning . . .

I often teach technology to students quickly. I often start with the comment, "I know many of you already know how to do this but if you'll give me a few minutes I might remind you of something you've forgotten." Once started, I try to keep things interesting and fast paced and will say as I skim rapidly over very important tips or techniques, "If you need help figuring out how to [get here / do this / take the next step] let me know and I will be glad to help you."

I have found that this method causes students to try harder to figure out how to do things they may have struggled with if I taught in greater detail. I think we (all) tend to rely on as much assistance or guidance as we can get and only when pushed to extend ourselves does our creativity and motivation to learn by doing engage. This seems to me like the basis of constructivist learning and the model we should all pursue as educators.

I watch teachers repeat basic instructions again and again until, "everyone in the class gets it," but notice that it sometimes takes forever and in following lessons students need the explanations again and again. With my method, after the first time, when I tell the students, "This is easy and I know nobody will have a problem with it," if I have to revisit later it is done individually or very quickly to the group with a preface like the one above.

A recent MIT study seems to confirm my rationale and support my opinion that sometimes to promote learning, when it comes to teaching, explicit instruction, less is more.

Suppose someone showed you a novel gadget and told you, “Here’s how it works,” while demonstrating a single function, such as pushing a button. What would you do when they handed it to you?

You’d probably push the button. But what if the gadget had other functions? Would it occur to you to search for them, if your teacher hadn’t alluded to their existence?

Maybe, maybe not. It turns out that there is a “double-edged sword” to pedagogy: Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery. A study by MIT researchers and colleagues compared the behavior of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, finding that children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.

According to Laura Schulz, . . . Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT, this is rational behavior, as teaching is meant to impart skills quickly and efficiently. The danger is leading children to believe that they’ve learned all there is to know, thereby discouraging independent discovery.

The rest of the article is available at MIT News.

Scare tactics aren't working

Great refresher for teachers, librarians and parents on how to teach cyber-safety. Time to pull back from the scare tactics and focus on the facts. Scaring kids from drugs and sex hasn't worked since the '50s and scaring them about cyber-bullying isn't working today. It's time to treat kids like adults, give them the facts and the concerns, and assist them in finding safe and honorable choices.

Do fear and exaggeration increase risk?

Does this mean I have to loosen the reins on my own children's digital lives? Jury will remain out on this one . . .

Larry Magid, co-director of Connect Safely.org created another slide show a while back that is more detailed and explanatory and perhaps suitable for middle school students.

Digital Citizenship & Media Literacy: A presentation for students

School Days . . .

Wow! Has it been that long since my last post . . .

New school year underway and lots going on. Teachers are excited about Google Docs, specialized searches, Web reference evaluation and focused database research. I am busy making new and affirming old contacts to grow my collaborative network.

I made it to final round of interviews for several librarian positions over the summer only to be edged out in the end by laid off librarians also in the interview pool. While this is financially crippling, I am holding head high and am confident I will find and accept a perfect position.