LIBE 467: Post 8

While subscription-based online databases available to students through their school's library tend to be one of the best resources for authoritative content, another praise-worthy--and absolutely free and easily accessible--resource is the Internet Public Library (IPL).

IPL describes itself thusly:

ipl2 is a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment. To date, thousands of students and volunteer library and information science professionals have been involved in answering reference questions for our Ask an ipl2 Librarian service and in designing, building, creating and maintaining the ipl2's collections. It is through the efforts of these students and volunteers that the ipl2 continues to thrive to this day.

Similar to Open Access (OA) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) (which I discuss in another blog), the IPL exists as a great first-choice online database for students to refer to when researching. Available by simply visiting the site from any computer (as opposed to perhaps using passwords to log into a school library's fee-based subscription database), the IPL describes itself as featuring "Information You Can Trust" and should be a first-look resource for teachers of all subjects in the secondary education world. My English students are regularly directed to it for information on such topics as author biographies, literature by time period, and schools of literary criticism.

While not meant to take the place of subscription-based online databases offered by such companies as Gale and EBSCO, the IPL does stand out as a reference source that offers a refuge of quality, authoritative information in the midst of the big world wide web of information on the Internet.

LIBE 467: Post 7

I have been intrigued for the last few years by the way in which Wikipedia exists: it is, in many ways, a wonderful example of the inherently organic nature of language. Language changes over time to reflect the times, and that is what is occurring with Wikipedia--that is, really, how Wikipedia is possible: the technology provided by the Internet allows a phenomenon like Wikipedia to exist in the first place. So, in that way, Wikipedia is, for lack of a better phrase, a "neat artifact" of our time. I like to think that in 100 years people will look back and say, "Oh yeah, right: in the 1990's the old Internet was born and one of the things that came out of that was the whole Wikipedia thing...I can't believe that that was ever a 'new' idea. Did you know that before Wikipedia they actually hired people to write articles on encyclopedia topics?"

At the same time--and though I have done some reading in this area for the past 18 months--I still can't totally wrap my brain around the idea that any Wikipedia-esque project is reliable and totally valid: at the end of the day, without a "standard" in place (an expert in charge of a particular topic in the encyclopedia), I have a hard time putting my personal trust in "the collective human brain" as an author that can be trusted (what does this say about my trust in humanity?).

One of the interesting voices writing today regarding the notion of "the collective human brain" (i.e., corporate authorship) is Jaron Lanier, specifically in his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, in which he outlines some of the ways in which web 2.0 tools and practices--while, yes, convenient, and while, yes, offering up some neat features and products in the "whiz-bang" realm of slick, candy-coated stylings--actually diminish our capacity for originality and creativity in that web 2.0 users are more prone these days to create a "piece or art" (a new creation) using essentially a templated, pre-programmed slice-and-dice gadget or app rather than creating a thought-out, personalized, original piece of art. He challenges readers to make a digital creation that takes at least 100 times longer to create than is the running time of the end product.

As a reference--and, as many people in class have mentioned, as an initial source of information in the research process--Wikipedia "has its place" within the realm of learning. While I do not think that Wikipedia is necessarily diminishing the creative capacities of its users or creators simply because of the fact that it is a templated, web 2.0 product (was there ever much room for creativity with regards to form when authoring new encyclopedia entries?--the author knows that the entry is going to be printed alongside thousands of other entries, in alphabetical order, with perhaps an illustration), it is certainly very worthwhile to be aware of how form always affects function, how form always affects understanding, and to remain cognizant of this fact when using Wikipedia. Always think to yourself: This information could be presented differently...and as such, how might a different presentation make the meaning or impact different?

LIBE 467: Post 6

Google Lit Trips is a fantastic application of the reference resource that is the atlas...in an online-, web 2.0-friendly format.

This resource is great for a number of reasons:

--It appeals to learners who naturally enjoy the visual aspect of learning that occurs with maps.

--It is accessible to students at any place and at any time (so long as a computer and Internet connection are available).

--It takes the classic resource of the map and applies it within the context of literature (something that I think literature teachers sometimes think would be neat to do, but balk at following through on applying the idea because the educational payoff does not always seem to warrant the (at least perceived) amount of work that might go into preparing materials and lessons for an activity centered around mapping a piece of literature). In doing so, it is a nice example of engaging students in the stuff of "21st Century Learning"--using, building, and sharing work online.

--It allows for students to recommend a title that they would like to see featured on Google Lit Trips.

While some works lend themselves better to utilizing maps than others, there are some neat exercises that can occur. I use maps when my students read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because the novel is centered around a trip down a river, and a visual representation of this movement provides a helpful sort of context that serves to concretize the narrative in the reader's mind. A book like Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer would be another example of a book ready for mapping; it, in fact, displays individual maps throughout the text, but a cohesive, complete map of Chris McCandless's entire journey could assist some students immensely in terms of gaining a clear understanding of plot movement.

LIBE 467: Post 5

As a literature teacher, I love databases. I love the fact that students can have their eyes opened to a whole new world of content and ideas that they never knew existed.

For my senior-level students, the simple act of locating and reading articles from respectable journals relevant to an author, work, or topic that we are studying fills them with the sense of doing "serious work." Students are intoxicated by the idea that they are doing "university-level' work, researching and reading articles from journals (not "magazines") that tend to feature at least a few "dictionary-worthy" words in each piece. In this way, databases provide a quick and easy doorway into the early realms of the world of academia; for students who are keen for this, databases become their best friends. For students to reach this state of "best friendship," there must be some front-loading on the part of the TL or teacher in terms of learning the skills to successfully search, navigate, and locate information--I find that perhaps the biggest impediment to students developing a positive affect with regards to databases is early frustration: if the first few attempts to use databases yield no or little fruit, then--like with many endeavors--the easy reaction is to quit. "Why bother?" ask students, "when I can just keep accessing (albeit suspect) information on the Internet?"

My school subscribes to the following databases:

-World Book Encyclopedia
-Britannica Online
-Thomson Gale suite, including: "Biography in Context," "Gale Virtual Reference," "CPI.Q Canadian Periodicals," and "Global Issues in Context"
-EBSCO

With all these great tools literally at students' fingertips, it bears repeating: TLs and teachers need to spend more time explicitly teaching digital literacy skills to students--help them first experience success, and then watch them continue to experience success.

LIBE 467: Post 4

Classmate Lenora makes an important statement about our goals as TLs when our jobs are becoming more and more complex due to the multitude of media that students use on a regular basis:

“It is still questionable whether students are ‘technically literate’ and other skills such as problem solving/thinking skills may have been neglected.”

At issue here is the notion that students “use computers” all the time, but that a couple of problems tend to arise in the process:

• The computer use that students engage in may be very limited in scope—limited to games, social media, and basic Google searches, for example. When students use computers often but only for a very few repetitive tasks, we might be under the impression that the student is “technically literate”—because we SEE the student engaged in computer use so frequently—but to do so puts forth a very limited definition of “literacy.” One of the dangers of this situation is that teachers may assume that students have a deep and functional understanding of computers in general when that is in fact far from the case; the danger, then, would be that teachers and TLs would neglect to teach students the important technical and technological skills that they need because the teachers and TLs assume the students “already know it.” What we don’t want to do is produce a generation of human beings capable of turning on a computer…and only using Facebook, Skype, World of Warcraft, and a Google search that lands them on Wikipedia for 90% of their queries.

• The type of computer use described above does nothing (or very little) to encourage and develop the critical thinking skills necessary to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information. Such skills are essential when dealing with any mode of literature or information, and likely even more essential today and in the near future as the ways in which students access and interact with information are becoming more varied—the challenges students face today are around how to navigate through and assess the quality of the figurative piles of information available online, and how to successfully evaluate the provenance of each information source. What we don’t want is a generation of human beings who assume that information that is “relevant” according to Google’s standards—a match based on perhaps one facet of a keyword search that crawls the entire Internet—is information that is also valuable, reliable, or marked by wisdom in any way.

LIBE 467: Post 3

For many people, it is difficult to remember a time before Google. I certainly do, but most of my students do not; all of their memories of computers, at least, are fairly inextricably tangled up with the notion of Google. These students are from a generation that has grown up with a powerful tool that—because they have never experienced computers without it—they struggle to accurately gauge: how “powerful” is Google? How “dangerous” or “tricky” is Google? These questions are difficult to answer when the user has no reference point by which to compare: Google is powerful compared to what? Google is dangerous or tricky...why? How could surfing the web be either of those? While this powerful tool is an obviously valuable and central part of our culture, part of the process of inheriting Google as a culture is recognizing and reacting to the pitfalls that accompany it. For every pro in life, there is always a con. For high school aged students today, Google is not unlike a young carpenter first picking up a powerful electric drill: the machine is incredibly useful—strong, efficient—but without the appropriate safety training and without ever having used a screwdriver, the young carpenter could easily damage his working materials or injure himself.

Since first engaging with students in projects that involve any online work whatsoever, it immediately became clear to me the challenges associated with becoming information literate. Since these first student-technology encounters years ago, it has increasingly become evident to me that one of the most pressing issues we face as teachers—and, at the risk of hyperbole—and as a society. Literacy has always been important and has always caused clear divides between those who are literate and those who are not—benefiting, of course, those with deft literacy skills. Nothing has changed in this regard, except that now literacy is even more important: it is more important because the types of information and the sources we receive our information from are so multi-faceted: books, newspapers, magazines, radio, the Internet, via any number of handheld gadgets. People today must be literate in a vast number of different types of media and modes of communicating. Being able to wisely analyze, synthesize, and critique a multitude of information sources—determining how and where to use them and whether they are valid—is a skill that is becoming consistently more vital. (This reality strongly suggests that the need for wise and engaged TLs and language teachers, ready to move information literacy education more toward the center of their curricula, are now more important and needed than ever [it turns out that computers are not, after all, eliminating the need for human teachers and librarians!]. However, this is another conversation to be had at another time.) As such, I continue to see how increasingly important information literacy is for me in my role as a language teacher, a future TL, and how important it is in the lives of my students.

Classmate Hilary Montroy hits on some of the central challenges faced by teachers and TLs when guiding students towards achieving information literacy:

It is so important to teach students how to use whatever databases are available, and yes, students are very reluctant to use them. One of the comments I get from students when asked why they are choosing to search using Google only is that it is easier, and when prompted further, it's because they don't get the answer right away when on a database. The latter may be true, but if taught how to use them effectively, they will get the info they need, it just takes a little more work and time, and students today want answers quickly and easily.

The comments by Hilary’s students shed light on the fact that relativity is important: when mostly only Google has been used by students, of course it is “easier” to use than a database. Learning a new skill or doing a new task is always more difficult at the beginning. Without much experience using other databases, the desire to break away from what is known and familiar is difficult to muster. Further, it could be that many students today have been allowed to use sources found using solely a Google search engine. Google as a means to finding information is fine, of course, but there are databases available to students that provide wholly trustworthy and valid information, and these databases should be more often used. In this way, teachers should move toward creating research projects that accept only sources found via a database—and this should be repeated enough times so that students become proficient at using these databases (too often information literacy is seen as a “skill” to be “checked off the list” after a single assignment is completed that focuses on such skills).

On page 11 of Reference Skills, Riedling presents the nine information literacy standards for student learning taken from AASL ande ACET 8. “Information Literacy” Standard 2 notes that “the student who is information literate evaluates information critically and competently.” Hilary’s students’ comment that it is simply “easier” to Google indicates that such students are not thinking critically or competently. Further, the “Social Responsibility” Standard 8 states that the information literate student “practices ethical behavior in regard to information and information technology.” It could be argued that using Google simply because it is “easier,” as Hilary’s students state, is itself an unethical use of information; one of the hallmarks of ethical behavior often has to do with acting in a manner that is in fact not the easiest choice—being ethical is rarely thought of as doing what is easiest.

One of the next steps for me—an ongoing step, really—is to continue to seek out conversation with people experienced with teaching and promoting information literacy, and to seek out quality resources to help facilitate the process. In previous TL Diploma courses, I have come across a few resources—checklists or rubrics—that are first steps toward establishing classroom-ready, usable criteria for assessing students’ information literacy journey. However, I often feel that there must be better resources out there that I have not yet seen, or that I myself need to focus on creating such resources.

LIBE 467: Post 2

I have always known the importance of research projects and, to accompany them, research processes. Such projects do a number of things that we know are valuable for students:
• Personalize learning (student choice regarding topics and resources)
• Engage students with multiple perspectives
• Focus learning on inquiry-based models of education
• Engage students with multiple forms of media and technology (encouraging aspects of many of the hallmarks of “21st Century Learning”—for example, quick student publishing, student interaction online, use of multiple types of technologies)

We know intuitively as teachers (and as former students who experienced some wonderful research projects along the way from kindergarten throughout our graduate school experiences) that research projects are valuable for a number of reasons.

And yet, what amazes me is the number of research-based projects that are NOT happening in high schools. Apart from social studies classrooms, I see very few research projects happening at my school—a secondary school that, according to all external measures (read: The Fraser Report), does well from year to year. One concrete reason for this lack of research-based projects in my high school stems from this specific issue: mandatory Provincial exams (for English classes) and Advanced Placement exams tend to be the ultimate focus of teachers who teach courses where these exams exist, and there is no direct connection between research-based projects and doing well on these exams. When working within a system that publishes a limited amount of qualitative data regarding the “success” of schools or performance of students—student marks and Provincial Exam scores—there is limited incentive for teachers to invest time in research-based projects if the teachers do not see a connection between their efforts and their students’ measurable performance indicators (I discuss some of the complexities of this systemic situation in this blog post).

So then: the above comments serve to illustrate some of the large-scale issues that I see affecting teachers’ engagement with—or lack of engagement with—research-based projects (and, by extension, teachers’ interaction—or lack of interaction—with TLs). As someone interested in general in librarianship, specifically in teacher-librarianship, and as someone who has been taking teacher-librarian courses, I more and more notice how—relative to my colleagues around me—I live in an idealist teacher-librarian bubble. One of the features of this bubble is that I clearly see and understand the importance of the work of TLs and their role in collaborating with colleagues, facilitating research-based and inquiry-based learning, encouraging the application of technology, etc. However, it often seems the case that many teachers are already fully engaged with and entirely busy with their own curriculum, their own demands, and view the efforts of the TL to engage in collaborative work as nothing more than a nuisance. So then, I find myself these days reading and studying about things like research-based projects with a sense of the absurd: will I enter a future job as a TL with idealism, enthusiasm, knowledge, and skills, only to be met by kind but dismissive smiles from colleagues that serve to suggest, “Thank you for the effort, but I am already fully busy—and don’t really have any more time—in my life as a teacher.”

However, despite the niggling notions mentioned above, some of the detail-oriented issues that I have learned about regarding research-based projects have helped sharpen my understanding of how to successfully navigate the details of implementing research-based projects. Some of these understandings have come in the form of confirmation of things I already: specifically, Riedling notes that “students have little knowledge of the information-seeking process, have fragmented understandings of subject knowledge, and...do not understand that their information seeking knowledge depends on content knowledge and vice versa” (10). While I have always intuited these conclusions myself, Riedling was the first to, in the arena of the published book, confirm these intuitions. I also appreciate Riedling’s assertion that, through the scaffolding and teaching of research-based projects, the TL creates “self-directed learners [that] lead themselves to knowledge from that information” (12).

Detail-oriented issues regarding the implementation of research-based projects that I have learned about from colleagues in this course are many. With regards to the details of quality student research, Hilary Montroy suggests this: students design a piece of paper with 16 squares on it, and each square can only contain 3 key words on it from the student’s research. In this way, students do not copy full sentences and are forced to put ideas into their own words. This helps encourage students toward genuine analysis and synthesis of ideas that will lead toward equally genuine understanding and insights—rather than arriving at the end of a research process and staring blankly and worriedly at a pile of information that feels disjointed.

Another valuable tip for promoting the success of research-based projects is to share the basic ideas and benefits of research models with parents. Anica, Hilary, and Chris collectively do a nice job of overviewing the benefits of such an act: with parents aware of the existence of, benefits of, and logistics of research models, we start to bend toward creating a culture that knows about and expects inquiry-based research to be at the heart of—or at least included in—what happens in the lives of students.

With the above collection of large-scale and small-scale ideas around research-based projects swimming in my mind, my next step is to more actively talk to the TL at my school, teachers at my school, and other TLs I know with regards to successfully navigating all the potential pitfalls I have identified. I feel like I need to see some concrete examples of schools that have instituted research models and inquiry-based education at the heart of their curriculum and have had success doing it—how did they do it? What were the big challenges? What have been the benefits?

LIBE 467: Post 1

In response to the question: Do you see the need to promote an "Information Skills Framework" in your school? If so, how might you accomplish this?

There is certainly a need to promote an information skills framework in my school. Over the past couple of years I have come to see information literacy skills as perhaps one of the biggest and most pressing needs facing secondary school students today. At the same time, implementing an effective information skills framework into an existing secondary school curriculum/culture/schedule is a task fraught with difficulties and complexities (at my school specifically, at least).

One of the difficulties is the basic human resistance to change. Teachers who have a curriculum or system that works often—and understandably—ask the question, “Why change?” The basis for this question often comes out of the fact that—assuming that a teacher’s class is engaging and produces students are succeeding on Provincially-mandated exams that cover Provincial Learning Outcomes—teachers do not want to change just for the sake of changing (and any sort of changes that teachers are asked to make often feel this way). When TLs start presenting the need to integrate information literacy skills into a central part of a school’s curriculum—even if the need and the benefits for the students are obvious—then TLs often start sounding like so many administrators, superintendents, school board officials, and education consultants who, year after year and in cycles that tend to repeat themselves, talk of the vital importance of changing from what are generally in some form labeled “the old ways” to any of a number of “new ways,” which might include such titles as: “individualized instruction,” “differentiated instruction,” “21st century learning,” “6-Traits writing instruction,” “collaborative learning,” “student choice,” “virtual classrooms,” and so on. While each of the educational elements previously noted are important—and an effective teacher will likely integrate small pieces of each of them into his or her classroom over the years—they also serve as examples of the sort of educational buzz words that represent trends that come and go, or trends that gain prominence and popularity for a number of years and then fade away into the back of the education world’s collective consciousness when the next buzz-worded trend blows through the educational atmosphere. The point here is this: information literacy skills are important, but one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of successfully implementing them on the school level is the way in which they are presented to a staff of teachers. If “information literacy skills program” becomes another “change” or “thing to do” that already-successful teachers are tasked with implementing, then the buy-in at the teacher level will be minimal at best. I touch on this idea on my blog Reflections on Literacy, Libraries, and Learning in a post titled “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where I discuss the sort of tension-filled educational intersection that teachers work in at the moment—an intersection of enduring teaching methods that work and new ways of communicating, delivering, and interacting with information, ideas, and content.

I am not altogether sure how to promote an information skills framework in my school. It would need to achieve at least these things for it to have any chance of getting off the ground:
• Positive connotations associated with its title as well as positive connotations associated with the person (in all likelihood a TL) who is promoting its place and worth in the curriculum
• An “ease of use” or “ease of implementation” on behalf of the teachers
• Active buy-in by teachers, administrators, and students
• Sustained focus on the practice so that it becomes part of the “school culture”
• A sense that the skills are genuinely valuable and enduring, so as to avoid the overwhelming sense by teachers that information literacy skills are “just another breeze blowing by in the educational environment” (and therefore not of enduring worth for students and curricula, and therefore not worth teachers exerting time and effort to modify their classrooms and curricula to include information literacy skills)

I feel a strong desire to see information literacy become a more wholly-integrated facet of BC students’ high school experiences. I also know that I feel that desire based largely on the fact of my own teaching niche and my own personal-professional interests: as a senior-level English and Literature teacher who is also a “TL-wannabe,” my perspective makes perfect sense to me and is informed by years of experience as a literacy teacher and years of reflecting on the library’s role in secondary education. The big problem that I see right now is this: most other teachers do not share this same background, and most teachers are already immersed in curricula and classrooms that are overflowing with content to teach and demands to meet. How, then, do I successfully integrate an information skills framework into my school’s working culture without wielding some sort of Harry Potter-esque wand magic?

Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Jack Shoemaker @ lannan.org

Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder with Jack Shoemaker, Conversation, 10 November 1999 from Lannan Foundation on Vimeo.

Wendell Berry @ lannan.org

Wendell Berry, Reading, 10 November 1999 from Lannan Foundation on Vimeo.

TL 2.0: Vision of the Future

A symphony of “wows” and “yuks”

reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”

“However, people’s dependence on multimedia, rather than on traditional text-based sources of information, could make them particularly susceptible to what scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords Professor Susan Greenfield calls “the ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors”. The more exciting the presentation, the more likely they are to be impressed by it. So, for an obvious example, young people using the net to get the truth may decide between creationism or evolution not on the quality of the arguments but on the cleverness of the web designers’ pyrotechnics. But healthy amounts of adolescent skepticism (“whatever”) kick in at about the same time as acne. So, if we are able to equip young people with the skills to evaluate different sources in the context of a media-rich world, pupils will know how important it is to take everything they find online - however wicked the graphics - with a huge pinch of salt.”

Sometimes I include the random PowerPoint slide of a rabbit in a football costume or of Darth Vader teaching grammar to young students. It’s fun stuff: I see how long I can carry on the ruse as if the slide is actually part of the real lesson, and make wild connections and long, drawn out, and detailed anecdotes that give credence to the notion that, “Oh yeah, after the Star Wars series Darth often appeared in elementary schools to teach the past participle to ten year olds,” or, “Yes, definitely the first mammal besides homo sapiens to get drafted into the NFL was a rabbit—of course, they are both fast and can change direction on a dime with those sturdy hind legs—and rumor has it that this rabbit was a distant, if not direct, descendant of the hare that was the inspiration for Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny.”

I am not really very funny, and the kids know it. I am only funny because I am not funny, and I generally apologize on the first day of class in September for all of the unfunny hyjinks I will drag my students through over the course of the school year. I don’t even use flashing lights or music (very often) to get a reaction out of my students—I just insist that my story/PowerPoint slide/random video is in fact true and entirely related to the task at hand—and yet they still remember such jokes at the end of the year (or the end of their high school careers) much more readily than they remember the symbolic significance of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn (much to my chagrin). Action research for my master’s degree thesis involved investigating the correlation between the use of humor in the classroom and levels of student engagement. It turns out there is one, and the trick is to try and infuse that humor with images and ideas that are also relevant to the lesson/idea/task at hand so as to ensure better and longer-term understanding for students.

But I’m just one person and, again, not very funny—nor am I bestowed with expensive tools and expertise in the areas of persuasion. Nonetheless, students believe my most ridiculous claims when coupled with a mere (ridiculous, at that) picture. And this concerns me.

If a noticeable number of my students are gullible enough to (time and again) fall for Mr. Fuller’s in-class song and dance, just imagine what they might be susceptible to believe online—when actual marketers with actual agendas and actual tools and actual expertise place a well-aimed and actual advertisement in front of them on the internet. “No problem,” you say, “young people can tell what is a commercial and what is ‘real.’” Yes, perhaps. Most of the time. But how about when those same “marketers”—or “designers of content,” as seems a more apt description of today’s online authors—deliver information within a context that is seamlessly integrated with other, seemingly important and legitimate content? What then?

At its most basic levels, the ability to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent, sincerely wise and merely flashy—whether in an online environment or a very real physical environment, say, at the grocery market (are online environments “real” or not?)—is the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, between truth and hoax. I sometime wonder in what ways P.T. Barnum might have leveraged the internet. Certainly, he would have been master orchestrator of wows and yuks.



What kind of symphony do we want our future-adult students to play in? What kind of symphony will they play in? Who will be the conductor, and who will be willing to call out the conductor when his directions are, well, just wrong?

I try to keep me out of it, but I’m both smack in the center and just a link in a chain

reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”

"When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalised to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process? Answers to that question - and let’s hope there are hundreds - will help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material."

I try not to write in the first person, and I think this is because as a teacher of English whose Advanced Placement curriculum is heavy on analysis, the old rule of thumb in conventional academic discourse is that first-person “I” is not used; rather, an objective, persuasive narrator maintains a person-less hold on the text that admits to no “I,” to no sense of infallible human error, but only is concerned with the ideas and analysis embedded in the text itself, as if those ideas simply and incredibly exist—no need for the feeble reassurance of a human author.

Obviously, I have already broken my own rule. But you knew that way up at the beginning of the previous paragraph.

But sometimes when we struggle to make sense of something (OK: “Sometimes when I struggle to make sense of something”), I need to say it simply like it is: “I think that….” This phrasing suggests more honestly where I am truly at in a given situation as a learner: I don’t yet know anything about this topic well enough to make a bold statement infused with certainty, but I am willing to venture into the realm of ideas, play around for a while, and try to figure some things out.

So…

I think that futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…” is entirely spot-on when it comes to outlining one of the big challenges faced by students today—that students less and less need a curriculum based on content and more and more need one based on digital literacy skills. Absolutely. (I also think that I should be making my statements in a less first-person-esque fashion, but—as noted by such notable figures as Body Dylan and the folks at futurelab [actual, honest question: Who wrote this article anyway? I assume it is corporate authorship, as no author or authors are mentioned]—“the times, they are a changin’”). And I’ve thought this for years now, and I’ve thought this even more so every single week this winter and spring of 2010. Is it something to do with starting a new decade that seems to encourage this thought that our technological world—our education world—is really changing as fast as we often predicted it would? Or is it really, actually starting to change as fast as we often predicted it would and we can no longer ignore the signs?

It is very difficult (impossible?) to know whether it is really true that “things are changing faster than ever before” today, as that sort of statement has also presumably been true at any other moment in our—at least recent—history. And yet: there is this underlying feeling, as a person today living in a technologically connected first-world country, as a teacher of ideas and writing, that my life—and particularly the life of my students—will operate in entirely different ways when it comes to information and meaning-making in the…quite near future. Does anyone else feel like a clock is ticking?

I didn’t want to use “I” to begin a discussion of this article’s quotation because, well, I wanted to make a well thought-out, analytical claim about the above quotation rather than “talking about it.” But the truth is I feel like any statement I make about the statement that “teaching students digital literacy skills is important and growing more so each day” is just another statement that I’ve already made. A number of times. Very recently.

So it feels like the only place there is to go is “I.” To me. To connect up thoughts, feelings—personal and professional—in a way that makes sense.

And the irony here is that—ostensibly—this is exactly where web 2.0 tools are taking us, each user: to a place where information, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and meaning are no longer consumed and analyzed in a discourse involving three people—teacher, student, and author—but in a way that involves every single person who might be connected to the student, who might stumble upon or be guided to the student’s reactions to the information, and in a way that is—because the student’s name (and often times picture, too) is stamped right on every single comment or reply she makes on her blog or class wiki or Blackboard learner management system. Learning—the interaction of ideas and meaning—is becoming both more personal and more social at the same time: more personal because the individual is now encouraged to put her spin on information and recreate it and rebroadcast it in a way that is intimately and distinctly hers, and more social because this broadcasted recreation—this mashup—will come back to her with comments and critiques from an audience that, well, exceeds her former educational audience of three by factors of ten, hundreds, thousands….

Strangely, the web 2.0 experience is “all about me” and “all about everybody else”: when I sit here at my computer and arrange the world on it in exactly the fashion that I want to, it feels very much like I’m at the center of an ordered information universe that I created; at the same time, I realize that the galaxy orbiting around me is the very thing that made it possible for me to create my own “information universe,” and that every other person like me out there in cyberspace is having the same experience. It is at this moment that I glance up at the “Hyperlink” button on my blog and am reminded that a much more accurate description of my reality online is as merely one link in a long, long, long chain. A "web" of chains.

Library 2.0 mashup--an animoto video

An animoto video illustrating librarians Lilian Trousdell and Sharon Doyle's vision of library 2.0.

OA and OJS--making quality accessible

In his article, “Open Access and the Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over,” UBC School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies Assistant Professor Rick Kopak puts forth a positive review of Open Access (OA) and the Open Journal Systems (OJS), discussing ways in which OA and OJS can serve as wholly positive technologies in the effort to encourage our students’ critical thinking skills.

A serious issue facing K-12 teachers and TLs today is the pressing need to teach digital literacy to students, and the rush to find quality resources and tools to do so effectively has this teacher, at least, scrambling. Because cultivating the ability to successfully search for, find, evaluate, and use quality information is a skill that I regard as so important for students to master, I feel a genuine sense of urgency around teaching this skill and teaching it well. Kopak hints at the genesis of this sense of anxiety that I feel as a teacher: “The increasing availability of information via the Web brings much of good quality, but also much of less discernible authority, trustworthiness, and provenance.”

The good news offered by OJS technology, then, is that it offers greater access to “the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article.” In this way, my students researching particular topics for personal or group projects would now have a new option for their first source for information searching rather than that current—and relatively long-standing—favorite, Google. Essentially, OJS give students easy access to quality information. Granted, this quality information may also be available on databases that the school library subscribes to, but OJS has the obvious advantage of being free and accessible to all—not just students enrolled in my school with passwords to access my library’s database subscription. As a result, OJS, in some ways, helps skirt one of the big issues that many students (and teachers, horrifyingly witnessing the result of student research) face: successfully locating quality information on the Web. This one detail looms large in the lives of some students: some of my students feel so overwhelmed by the thought of sifting through Web-based information in order to locate usable information that they sometimes procrastinate in their efforts on what should be a fairly simple assignment; when simply finding acceptable content is only the first step in a project, and even that step seems consistently insurmountable—to overdramatize the situation in distinctly teenage fashion—“Why go on!?”

The above is not to say that OJS are a panacea with the effect of teachers no longer needing to teach digital literacy to students. OJS are, however, powerful tools that enable students to have a first place to look—at least one de facto “wise choice” that can be made before diving into the information sea—or crawling upon that information web?—that is Google.

As an additional benefit, OJS include an interface—known as Reading Tools—that provides a number of items that enrich the learner’s experience with the online scholarly article, ideally leading to great critical engagement. The Reading Tools space for any article includes links to such things as the following:

• “Abstract” provides the abstract in a second window
• “Review policy” provides information about the journal’s policies for receiving and reviewing submissions
• “How to cite the item” includes quick information on article citation
• “Supplementary files” include downloadable supporting materials associated with the article
• “Notify colleague” provides an instant email client with the title of the article in the subject line
• “Email the author” provides the same but with the author’s email address inserted

These features have obvious potential for increasing students’ critical engagement with an article, and serve as excellent examples of productive applications of the web 2.0 hallmark of information-sharing and collaboration.

[image attribution]

High school students, Google, and the Wild West

“That there is a crisis in scholarly publishing, few would disagree. But what exactly is the nature of the crisis? For academic librarians it is, among other things, the skyrocketing costs and growing number of many of the must–have journals; or perhaps it is the so–called serial breakdown, which describes a practice by which students turn to Google and the open Web for all their research, neglecting the high–value (and often expensive) publications, mostly serials, that libraries have licensed.”

--from “The Devil You Don’t Know” by Joseph J. Esposito

To this list I might add online databases that are subscribed to by school libraries (such as encyclopedias) that are rarely used by students.

As someone more familiar with high school libraries than a university academic library, I am not so familiar with the reality of the growing costs for must-have journals—though I imagine the numbers are likely astonishing.

However, I am someone who is very familiar with the “so-called serial breakdown” at the high school level: the internet as it is now (and particularly as it was a few years ago) is sometimes compared to the Wild West—a world of “anything goes” governed by few laws…where the wildest and the strongest often rule, and the wisest are left in the shadows. One of the features of the Wild West is that it presents a certain allure; though we have grown accustomed to and fond of our lives today that are defined by social rules, even as adults, we also can’t help but wondering what it might feel like to rob a bank and ride off into the sunset with the loot. Enter into this digital Wild West teenagers, who dive into the world of the web (read: Google) ready to read, believe, copy and paste, and report on the wildest of web information discovered in this digital world.

Though I don’t know exactly whose “fault” it is, or what is to blame, but high-value (and yes, often expensive) publications—whether online or not—are not only not used by my students, but not even known of by the vast majority of them. And the truth is I am not even looking for who or what to blame; what I am looking for is a solution. As a teacher, I do have opportunities to introduce students to my school’s package of high-quality library resources, though I find that I rarely do that. Our teacher-librarian, of course, has more opportunities for such direct instruction, but she is a very busy person as well.

While I don’t want to keep my students out of the Wild West just for the sake of keeping them out of the Wild West, I do want them to be aware of quality: what is quality, and what is not. Throughout this course, a common, recurring topic has been the importance of students having such skills. With ever-greater amounts of easily- and freely-accessible information (that is only growing all the time), it is painfully clear that my students—and most all high school age students, I think—desperately and literally need such skills. Imagine waltzing through the Wild West and not being able to differentiate between the bank robber and the bar tender: “No sir, I didn’t want THAT kind of shot.” That kind of mistake could be fatal. While attributing the novel Of Mice and Men to a certain Mr. Cliff Notes is not quite as serious a crime, in the realm of the high school English teacher, it is nearly as dangerous.

LMSs: quintessential web 2.0 tools

Learning management systems are perhaps a prime example of a web 2.0 tool: it exists for users to both read and write content within the actual system, and the design and functionality of the system itself is constantly improved via input from users and designers each time the system is used.

LMSs, like other web 2.0 tools, are works in progress: there are plenty of stories of hardship and frustration for students and teachers using LMSs, and there are also plenty of success stories facilitated by LMSs.

LMSs as tools, not revolutions

reflections on Esther Shein's "One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems."

In her online article, “One-Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems,” Esther Shein quotes Matthew Waymack, a virtual school director in Georgia: "The climate of the classrooms is better," he says, "the attendance of the students and teachers is better, and the overall feeling of being engaged is better." Waymack, of course, is referring to his school’s use of a learning management system, or LMS. Waymack is part of a new group of educators who, ten years ago, seemed to be light years ahead of the educational curve with visions of what online learning could look like. In the year 2000, my thoughts around any kind of non-lecture courses were something like this: “Correspondence courses? Sure: do some readings, do some writings, mail papers back to an instructor via the post. But online courses? Too problematic. Not really happening.”

Now, in the year 2010, I am recalling a decade-old idea of the insurmountable complexities around online learning…for my online learning course—which takes place on an LMS, but also includes key assessment pieces utilizing other online tools.

Waymack’s above quotation catches my eye because I think it embodies the highest ideal that might be represented by online learning: the notion that technology and strictly virtual realms of learning do not take the place of traditional learning scenarios, but that—rather—there is the possibility that with the aid of tools like LMSs, we might simply take moderate steps toward achieving better classroom climates, better attendance, and better overall engagement.

I can’t imagine any teacher—tech-savvy or not—balking at those aims.

Podcasts for the classroom (classcasts?)

A selection of valuable-in-the-classroom podcasts for the secondary school English teacher:

GRAMMAR GIRL'S QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING

"In under five minutes, you'll get a fun and friendly dose of writing advice. Grammar Girl covers everything from punctuation and grammar to style and voice."

http://grammar.qdnow.beta.libsynpro.com/rss


THE MOTH

"The Moth features people telling true, engaging, funny, touching and eye-opening stories from their lives."

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themothpodcast


NPR's STORYCORPS

"At recording booths across America, everyday people interview one another about their lives. StoryCorps creator Dave Isay showcases these first-person stories in this weekly podcast."

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510200


THIS AMERICAN LIFE

"Official free, weekly podcast of the award-winning radio show 'This American Life.' First-person stories and short fiction pieces that are touching, funny, and surprising."

http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast


WNYC's RADIOLAB

"On Radio Lab, science meets culture and information sounds like music. Each episode of Radio Lab is an investigation -- a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea."

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/index.xml


CNN STUDENT NEWS

"CNN Student News utilizes CNN's worldwide resources to bring each day's top news stories to middle and high school classrooms. The 10-minute, commercial-free program encourages student participation and provides classes with context for understanding current events."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cnn-student-news-video/id179950332


TED TALKS

"16 great TEDTalks that could turn you into a lifelong TED fan in 18 minutes or less."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-taste-of-tedtalks/id333575566

The mass amateurization of information--and what it means for teachers and students: the podcast