It's Time to Get Seriously Angry

I've had it.   I could not believe it when I read this article this morning.  Unlike my Facebook page, I really try to keep my political views out of this blog, but what is going on in this country?

So now Illinois is dropping writing from its standardized tests,  apparently following Missouri's example. As we're seeing more and more, what isn't tested, isn't taught.  Fairtest.org claims (and I wish they had some statistics to back this)

In many districts, raising test scores has become the single most important indicator of school improvement. As a result... schools narrow and change the curriculum to match the test. Teachers teach only what is covered on the test. Methods of teaching conform to the multiple-choice format of the tests. Teaching more and more resembles testing.

To say the least, the past year could rank as one of the most depressing times on record to be a teacher and a librarian. While commenting on a library student's blog a few days ago after she linked to one of my posts, I actually caught myself thinking:  "Is she nuts?  Why is she going into librarianship at this point in time?"

We are bombarded on every side as being lazy, ineffectual and money-grubbing, then legislators make decisions crippling out best efforts to improve.

Who in their right mind would think writing,  which lies at the heart of good thinking,  is not important enough to measure?  Even in Horticultural studies, of all things, professors report

Quiz scores increased significantly for the students who completed the reflective writing assignments (average of 16.2 out of 18) compared with students who did not complete the assignments as part of the course (average 10.2 out of 18).

Maybe it's the English teacher in me speaking, but what is more important to who we are as a culture than the ability to write well?  What has shaped our national mindset more than the Declaration of Independence,  Paine's Common Sense, and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin?

We need to be furious.  More importantly, we need to stop blogging and tweeting and facebooking to hit the streets and make our voices heard.  Blogging and all the rest (including this post!) only preaches to the choir.  I doubt there are many of you out there who seriouly disagree with what I'm saying.

The thing is, what are you doing?  This is the time for action.  It is easy to be frustrated and in despair; it is hard to know exactly what to do.  As educators, we are used to just shutting our doors and getting on with the task at hand.  However, those same doors are now not just shutting us out, they are being slammed in our collective faces as legislators with little or no educational experience tell us how to run things.

So what can you do??  Begin with joining the Save our Schools movement.  If you can't attend the national event, find a local one. Spread the word.  Sign up your friends, your family.  Bombard your state and national legislators with letters, emails and phone calls.

Quite bluntly, it is time to put up or shut up.  If we aren't willing to take the time to turn our words into action, then we probably deserve whatever happens.

Ah, the Irony!

If you haven't read it yet, take time to read Tom Friedman's editorial in the NYT two days ago. He discusses the necessity for fundamental educational reform--i.e. 21st century skills--if the U.S. is to remain competitive.

Where does the irony come in? I was reading it just as one of our teachers came in to ask if I could unblock YouTube so students could complete a history assignment. We called the appropriate people and were told 'no.' Yet we're a laptop school with a strong mandate for technology. Go figure.

And so much for educational reform. I've blogged about this before, and probably will again. While I think Friedman's column ignores several factors (take the time to read the comments--some were incredibly thoughtful and insightful), he's not wrong. I work with an amazingly talented faculty, many quite tech savvy.

As always, however, there are those who not only resist using technology, but see it as detrimental. They use tools only in the most shallow manner: watch a YouTube video, but we won't take the time to actually create our own. Keep a blog, but only as a personal journal, no comments, no linking. And heaven forbid we go public!

Friedman is wrong to declare we need a country entirely made up of innovators and creative thinkers. That is never going to happen, as not everyone is wired to think that way. Multiple intelligences alone tells us that. Nevertheless, we can do better at teaching students to work and think more collaboratively and use technology in meaningful ways.

Case in point: About a month ago, we finally opened up the education version of Google Apps for the school. I think three teachers are using it. I was teaching (another!) workshop on Google Docs, and a couple teachers basically said it was too much work to use it, when they could just have students work on peer-editing in class.

I agreed, but pointed out that once students were trained in peer-editing, weren't there better uses of classtime? I don't think I convinced them.

Similarly, too many assignments use technology for its own sake. Students in a school where I used to teach worked on rockets, which was fun for them. But there were few curricular ties--no work on propulsion, trajectories, etc. They just put together a kit. How much more meaningful would it be to have them design and test their own rockets, determining which factors most contribute to maximum lift?

We in the library have a special responsibility to guide both students and faculty towards more analytical engagement with content and technology. I'm not even sure my own work with students is all that innovative. As I teach the research process, I basically have two weeks with students (in 9th grade)--not a lot of time to engage them in thoughtful lessons, though we do some useful stuff on working with primary sources and analyzing websites.

Ideally, I would like to see all students in a semester long class. But that's another job in and of itself! How do others deal with this?

Of course, education alone won't solve our job and financial crisis. If education needs fundamental change, so does our national and corporate culture. When did we become a nation that looks only at short term gain? When did we stop caring about general welfare, focusing selfishly on personal profit at the expense of..well...everything else?

Educational change is AN answer, not THE answer.

Move Over iTunes U

Last March, Google/YouTube launched their own version of iTunes university, called YouTube Edu. The search engine includes content from over 100 universities and colleges, and allows searching by university, most subscribed or most viewed, as well as the usual keyword.

Content ranges from complete courses such as UC Berkeley's Physics for Presidents to informational videos such as this funny little clip promoting the Indiana University Library.

Creative or Catastrophe?

The Mayor of Nashville announced the merging of public and school libraries in Nashville a few weeks ago. Obviously this is a Big Story in the library world.

According to the mayor’s letter, the intention is to begin the merger with high school libraries, a move that Bengel says is intended to “strengthen the schools."

I suspect the library community at large sees this as the opening salvo in a plan to abolish school librarians altogether. Fortunately, for Nashville this is the school board's decision, not the Mayor's; nevertheless, that it's even being discussed shows, once again, how little the public understands the nature of school librarianship.

I was even talking to my Dad over the weekend about helping students with documentaries. He looked at me kind of puzzled and asked, "But aren't you the librarian? Are you doing this for fun after school?" AARRGHH!

Here are the questions that leap to mind regarding the Mayor's decision:

1) Is this merely a co-ordination of resources? Will the general public have access to the school collection? Public collections contain considerably more 'questionable" material than a school collection might. Are they now open to more frequent challenges, since they're part of the school library system? And will the general public mingle with students in the school library? How does that affect safety issues?

2) A supposed "benefit" is longer library hours during the day and in summer. Does this mean the school library will be open? Who will supervise? And aren't there increased costs in keeping the buildings open and staffed longer, defeating the original purpose? If it just means students have access to the public library, don't they already?

3) Assuming this is all a way of ultimately removing the school librarians, who will instruct? With all due respect to our public sisters and brothers, they are not trained (or certified) teachers. Of course, anyone who can conceive of this as a reasonable act, doesn't see school librarians as necessary to the instructional process, anyway.

4)How will libraries collaborate with teachers if they're not even in the same building? It's hard enough when you are!

Those are just the questions that leap to mind. I'm sure I'll think of others. This is definitely an issue to watch closely.

Google Educator Video

Here's the video for my Google Teacher Academy application. It's supposed to be a one minute video on the topic of Innovative teaching OR Motivation and Learning. You'll notice I combined the three. Are they really separable?



Uploading it really made the voice sound weird--not sure where that tinny sound is coming from!

BTW, if you're in the New York City area, the closing date for applications is October 10.

Student Research: It's Not What You Thought

First Monday has a very interesting report by Alison Head, who conducted a study focusing on the research habits of college students. If college students' search behavior reflect what they're learning in high school, there's good news and bads news for those of us teaching information literacy skills in secondary school.

According to the study, college students' first choice for information gathering is NOT Google, but either course reading or library-vetted sites such as databases (see diagram). Contrary to the much-quoted Pew findings that 71% of students use the internet as their only source for research, Head's study found that only 10% of students accessed Google or Yahoo! as their first step in the research process, and 20% as their second step. Intriguing, since the Pew study focused on 12-17 year olds, while Head studied college students. Can one draw the conclusion that students, or at least those who are college bound, actually do learn to seek better sources of information by the time they graduate from high school?

Unfortunately, the bad news is that while students recognized the need for "good, citable stuff," they had considerable trouble finding and recognizing it. I found especially troublesome the comment,

The issue of credibility came out in the discussion groups where students expressed their difficulty in determining authority and credibility of some public Internet sites. One participant, longed for what he called, “stamps of approval,” where none existed, and desired “some sort of symbol that all sites could use to show that their content is professor–approved and that the source is credible.”

To me, this sounds like a student spoon fed on NetTrekker, never learning how to critically analyze websites for authority or credibility, and adds evidence for the ever-increasing claims that filtering does students a HUGE disservice. Instead of creating confident, intelligent managers of internet resources, who are able to use and adapt information to their needs, they create students reliant on pre-vetted sites who lack the skills to a) find relevant information and b) determine its credibility.

Equally worrisome, "Students faced certain obstacles, including how to begin assignments, meet professors’ expectations from one class to the next, and narrow down a topic and make it manageable."

Where are we failing here? Where are the various research models not preparing students for independent research, whether Eisenberg or Kulhthau or whomever? Or is it that not enough schools are embedding these models across the curriculum?

Or, from another angle, are our research projects too teacher focused, rather than learner focused? Do we walk them through the steps, never allowing students to actively engage in task analysis and problem solving? Head's study claims that students consistently complained about not enough guidance on research projects. Have they become too used to the step-by-step handouts we tend to use in secondary education (much like the one I attached for the documentaries?)

These are questions I've been wrestling with the past few months, and they're important. We need to find the answers if we're going to prepare students not just for college, but for life.

Read, Write and Ruminate

Will Richardson's blog from Wednesday is causing quite a stir among the ed tech blogosphere. In it, he states teachers, on the whole, use technology as an electronic version of pen and paper show-what-you-know pedagogy, rather than allowing the process to take over and engage students in authentic experience and learning. (At least that's my take on it.) Now most teachers don't want or need to hear another claim that we're failing to do our jobs; yet sometimes the last thing you want to hear is most what you need to hear.

I'm no tech guru, but my classes usually integrate technology more than other teachers'. Looking back on some of those assignments, however, I recognize their somewhat rote nature: they were online essays. Ironically, the best tech assignment I ever gave was the one I knew least about. The first video documentaries I did. I was clueless about the technology, or even much beyond the basics of how to put a documentary together, so the students had to figure it out themselves with some rough guidance from me. As you can imagine, their product wasn't all that great (with a few exceptions), but they learned so much about collaborating and teamwork and planning and, yes, even persuasion in its various forms. I learned from this experience that sometimes the best way to teach is to simply get out of the way and let students learn.

It's not that traditional books and essays don't allow this. I wrote a paper while working on my Master's in English that, quite literally, change the course of my life because of what I realized as I wrote it. (It's a long story) But I do think its a more solitary event and happens less frequently with traditional methods. It takes a certain willingness to immerse yourself in language that few people possess. Technology facilitates those connections--whether through the literal linking of pages/ideas or through the collaboration process and "wisdom of crowds" phenomenon, or both, or neither. That's the thing about technology--it embeds you in process. Writing this blog has been an act of learning for me even more than one of sharing/teaching. (grin--fortunately! This start-up lack of readers thing can be a bit disheartening!) It forces me to make some sort of coherent whole out of the chaos of my reading, then allows me to directly link to those readings and draws it all together, so I start seeing relationships. Traditional writing does that, too, but in a much more abstract way.

Where the real difference lies, however, is in David Warlick's profound response to Richardson's column. He wrote (in the comments):

I would rather not look at the production of a video or a podcast as the end of an assignment, but as the beginning or continuation of a conversation. We are so focused, as educators, with what is learned. I wish we were more focused on learning.

That blew me away, because he's absolutely right and describes what is so absolutely wrong with NCLB and standardized tests and the general way we educate students. We focus on content, not skills. We focus on product, not process. We focus on teaching, not learning. It's not that the product isn't important: Imagine trying to tell your boss, "Oh, I know the presentation wasn't very good, but I learned SO MUCH putting it together!" However, we tend to rush students through those beginning and oh-so-necessary phases in our efforts to get something to grade so we can move on to the next bit of content we need to cover. We don't give them enough time to explore and engage, because we have to finish Chapter 13 by January.

More importantly, we're so overwhelmed with the minutiae of the job, that we seldom allow ourselves the time to learn ourselves. This independent study has been a real god-send for me. I floundered the first few weeks, trying to figure out what I should be exploring, but as I searched and probed and dug, out of that mess process grew the roots of a solid understanding not only of the technologies, but of how they can be used to best advantage. Well, the beginnings of an understanding anyway. More importantly, I'm excited. Truly and honestly boring everyone around me with my enthusiasm excited. I haven't felt that way about teaching in a few years; I can't wait to try out my ideas this fall. And don't we owe it to ourselves (and our students) to do everything we can to encourage and nurture that passion? To move beyond covering content and into enthusiastic engagement?

I think so.

I actually had more to say, including an article I read about being a "Techno-Constructivist," but I'll save that for my next blog!

Toon Time

I'm on the Teacher/Librarian Ning, and a a member there (Lesley Edwards) posted that she'd been playing around with ToonDoo. I'd never heard of it, so thought I'd check out this interactive site that allows you to create your own cartoons. Now, I have an artistic deficit (stick figures are a challenge) that has been screaming for such a tool since Bill Putter, in 5th grade, looked at my picture of a deer and commented, "Nice dog."

The program allows you to choose from myriad characters, props and backgrounds, then type in your own speech bubbles, then email it, save it to your blog or del.icio.us, or myriad other options. The cartoon below is a great example of using this as a classroom tool. You could:

• Make cartoons about classroom rules/procedures
• Have students make cartoons about novels they're reading or historic events, or
  
• Create their own graphic novels (or novelettes)
  
• Make cartoons to summarize scientific ideas or research, or
  
• Demonstrate vocabulary (the 'toon needs to be an example of the word, not just used in the speech bubbles).
  
• Foreign language scenarios (it supports special characters)

Other Ideas?

Best E-Tool Ever!!

Forget iPhones with $600 price tags. If you want to have some fun with technology (and you use Firefox) download a great little browser extension called Wikialong. (It's free) This app is the coolest thing I've ever seen! I got so excited, I forced my fiance move from his comfortable position lying on the sofa to come take a look.

Basically, Wikialong turns the browser's sidebar into a wikipage. As you move from website to website, you can leave notes and comments. If someone else with Wikialong happens upon that page, they can read/edit/add to your comments. I kid you not! It's like Post-It notes for web pages!









The uses of this for the classroom astound me. Students working on a wiki could post a list of links for other group members to examine. At each of the links, they could leave questions, comments, suggestions for use, to which other group members respond.

Teachers could build a web-quest/ Treasure Hunt a la The DaVinci Code, with clues at each web page, which students then piece together. (Good netiquette would require you to go back and delete the comments afterwards, of course!)

Those are just two I can think of off the top of my head. If you can think of others, please post in the comments! (And, once again, thanks to Will Richardson's book for mentioning the extension.) Too cool!

Ed Tech and the MLIS

I read Joyce Valenza's Neverendingsearch blog this morning. Joyce is my other guru, and she's been great about helping me plan the library website for my new school. I want it to be very cutting edge--though it makes me laugh now to think that I thought I could "finish" it this summer. Between researching the technologies, researching best practice websites and trying to learn Joomla to create the site, I'll be lucky to finish a few pages!

Anyway, this morning Joyce posted a Library 2.0 Manifesto that was nothing short of brilliant and inspiring. If Joyce gives me permission, I plan to use it to open a two hour workshop I'm giving in one of my classes in August. It's an overview of the read/write web, with suggestions for using classroom and library use. We'll discuss blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, a couple great resources I found and will discuss in my next post, and library websites. In two hours. I considered narrowing it to just blogs or wikis, then I realized: I'm at one of the top library schools in the country, but we've never learned how to use these technologies. I'm researching them this summer as part of an independent study, because the required tech class was too easy for me (she said, smugly). So, really, aside from mentions in class, my little workshop is the only time these technologies will actually be taught in the curriculum. That's disgraceful, in this day and age.

It's even more disgraceful because it leaves graduating students, who ought to be on the cutting edge of what's new, unprepared for the job market. At the interview for my new job (which was six hours long!), I was asked almost nothing about running a library. Instead, the questions leaned heavily toward technology: what I could do, how I'd train staff and act as technology leader, etc. The high school principal commented that they'd interviewed several people who knew "old school" librarianship, but almost no-one had the technology background needed. He said when they finally found the right person, they'd pounce. I guess I was it. Another friend who just accepted a position similar to mine said he had the same experience. The questions were all about technology, and nothing about the ins and outs of running a library.

Now, while I suspect that's partly because most people don't really know what goes into running a good library program, it also shows how the job is transforming. If the school's job is to educate students to succeed in the digital information world, the librarian's role--excuse me, media specialist--grows exponentially more important as we train students and staff to manage the infoglut in thoughtful and meaningful ways. Library schools must do a better job of preparing their graduates not only to meet these needs, but to lead the way.

Googlephobia

You know, I've been thinking about education's (in general) and the library's (in specific) anti-google and anti-wikipedia rallying cry. I bought into it at first, and during my practicum would bore students with my "wikipedia and google are bad" rants. But I also realized I was being a complete hypocrite. I'm a student at Pitt, so have access to some pretty incredible databases. Yet the first place I often look is Google--in fact, I often find it easier to find what I need on Google than trying to scour the mess that is Ebsco.

Now, I completely understand the reservations about these two services, and the read/write web. The majority of students use them in a fairly brain-dead sort of way. But they use their texts in the same manner, and we work to re-educate them about active reading. Shouldn't we be doing the same with Web 2.0 tools? I spent hours teaching students the difference between a journal and a diary. Why shouldn't I spend equal time teaching the difference between a journal and a blog? (Will Richardson's book suggests some excellent scaffolding for this.)

Fighting Google, Wiki and My Space is a losing battle. They're quick; they're easy. Rather than telling students not to use them, shouldn't we be training them to use them WISELY? Go ahead and look up your topic on Wiki, but only as a way to find further information. Find information on Google, but you better check the databases, too. The easiest way to do this, of course, would be to require certains types of references. A two books, two database articles, one web page kind of thing. With millions of webpages generated each day, students must learn to assess the infoglut for relevance and authority. Banning them from it completely will never achieve this.

OCC2007 - Day 2 - Will Richardson

This presentation was recorded at the Online Conectivism Conference 2007. The topic, which Will Richardson presents, is "How the Read/Write Web Challenges Traditional Practice". This is a great bit on ed tech and pedagogical change. Also see blog below!

Lost in the Tech Speak

I've been burying myself in Web 2.0 the past few weeks, and trying to figure out best practice for integrating it into the classroom, especially since my new job requires me to teach it to other educators! With that in mind, I purchased two books, one published last year and one published last month.

Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is a god-send. A fire up Amazon and BUY THIS NOW!!! kind of book. If you are AT ALL interested in educational technology, this book will not only answer your questions (or questions you never thought of), it also gives you practical, start-to-use-it-on Monday advice and ideas for classroom use. It explains not just the what, but also the why and the how. I've never had a clue how to really use RSS feeds, but Richardson not only explained the technology in easy to understand language, he gave great examples of how to get set up and ideas for using RSS feeds in the classroom (and why every teacher should). I'm convinced! He gives plenty of examples K-12. As an ex-English teacher, he makes a strong case for building the read/write web into the English classroom, with fewer compelling cross-the-curriculum examples, though he does try. My strongest praise would be that my school offered to let me teach an English class along with the library duties, if I wanted. Originally, I planned to turn that down so I could concentrate on the library (English teacher burn out!). Having read Richardson, I'm now so excited to try these techniques in the classroom, I not only WANT to teach a class again, I'm excited about the possibilities.


Less compelling (as a practicing teacher/librarian) is Gary Bitter and Jane Legacy's Using Technology in the Classroom (7th Edition), just published a few weeks ago. Written as a textbook rather than a practical "how to,' the book serves more as an introduction to educational technology for the neophyte ed student. While I knew what the technologies were after reading this (well, I knew before, but I'm speaking as a tech-tyro here), I really didn't have a clue how to get started using them, or what to do with them if I managed to get up and running. Some chapters offer a few teaching ideas, but I found them limited in scope. The book comes with a DVD and an companion website; frankly, what working teacher has time? What were incredibly useful (and almost worth the $90 price!) were the plethora of links and and resources at the end of each chapter. This alone will save you HOURS culling the web for content.

I'm Not Unorganized; I'm Miscellaneous

I bought Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous the other day, though admittedly I've only had time to read the first chapter so far. However I did spend a good part of the morning watching his discussion on Google Video , that I highly recommend. What he has to say relates directly to a lot of my concerns and ideas regarding Library/Web 2.0, with strong implications both for education in general and the LMS in specific.

Technology and the world wide web are fomenting a major paradigm shift in education. Gone are the days of Dewey, Hirsch and Bloom, the idea that knowledge can be categorized and compartmentalized, that the "educated" person knows a core set of facts/ideas carried through time by series of experts charged with enlightening the masses and initiating the unknowing into the heady atmosphere of intellectual elitism. This world is run like the Encylopedia Britannica (or the OED), where a core set of editors decide what is important and significant, then pass that information on to the rest of us. With the WWW and 2.0, our neat, graphically organized flow charts of knowledge became a whole lot messier. Social tagging and wikipedias break down the direct, linear flow of ideas into a far more randomly connected (and interconnected) web of relationships. In fact, Weinberger posits that, in the digital world at least, cataloging, as such, is pretty much dead, as who can actually anticipate all the ways people want to connect and group items/ideas? It's like all those worksheets we did as kids--which item doesn't fit? You have a picture of an apple, an orange, a pear, and a baseball. Well, maybe it's the pear that doesn't fit, if your category is round things, not fruit.

While working to understand more about wikis, blogs, and Education 2.0, I've increasingly realized that as we adopt and adapt these technologies, the earlier movement towards student-centered education is no longer creeping along, but running madly downhill. While the "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side" pedagogical controversy has been around for yonks, technology is forcing educators to give up control and allow students to construct their own meaning through collaboration and social interaction. The introverted, Hamlet-like scholar, immersed in learning the Trivium, is a thing of the past. Textbooks, if not obsolete, are merely the jumping off points for students to explore and engage in active learning. For example, WashingtonWatch just started a wiki that "allows public editing of information about the bills pending in Congress." What a great opportunity for Civics classes! Ironically, this comes at a time NCLB puts increasing stress on meeting standards and traditional methods of teaching. I just read that a member of Congress is trying to ban the Wikipedia and other social networking sites from schools. Now, I have problems with Wiki, but it's a great teaching tool and denying complete access to social networking tools seems not only backwards, but draconian.

This increased randomness and student-centered learning makes the LMS more important than ever before as education struggles to catch up with technology. Face it, students (and many adults) are clueless about information problem solving. Thus, as teachers struggle to adapt to changing pedagogical strategies, we need to be ready with ideas, support and enthusiasm. Now, I'm old fashioned enough to believe there are some things an educated, literate individual needs to know. Though I'd be hard-pressed to give reasons the average teenager would accept! I was trying to explain the dichotomy to my fiancee (core knowledge vs. individualized learning) and he wisely asked why I was seeing them as oppositional. Good point. Yet I think that, in the educational field, we DO see them as diametrically opposed. ( I can teach content, or I can be touchy-feely with the kids, but I don't have time for both!) However, we need to MAKE time for both and work out solid strategies for students not merely to learn core curriculum, but to synthesize it, creating their own meaning.