The librarian edge

OUT OF THE DRAFTS FOLDER: (2009) An Injection of Ideas on Library Design

2011-10-05T10:19:00.000+08:00

How many draft blog posts do you have sitting around? Here is one from two years ago -- on library design. I never got around to publishing it, so am doing so now - with the intent of posting a recent update of thoughts and resources, especially after hearing of a recent Kevin Hennah consultation in Kuala Lumpur with international school librarians.

On August 22nd [2009] about 30 international school librarians from around Asia gathered at ISB in Bangkok for a one-day workshop on library design by Kevin Hennah, a retail merchandising consultant and designer who has done a lot of work with libraries in Australia.

(While he seems to have worked with many major companies, it was this advertising campaign in his portfolio that made the biggest visual impression on me: Australia Post: If you really want to touch someone, send them a letter. I should also mention his featured section in the Australian book, Rethink! Ideas for Inspiring School Library Design -- and I think he said he's working on a book with Opening the Book in the UK. )

The success of the workshop can be summed up by Barb Philip's comment as she walked out: "I feel like taking a sledgehammer to my library."

What did he say? Well, others who attended the workshop have been much more efficient in sharing about it online. Within 24 hours Kim Cofino, one of the event organizers, had blogged about it and Tara Ethridge, the other event organizer, blogged about it on Monday the 24th. Anthony Tilke posted information about it on the ECIS iSkoodle forum for librarians (registration required to view), and Beth Gourley made public her Evernote notebook on Library as Space and Place, which includes her notes on Kevin's presentation.

What can I add? A few extension links, perhaps...

Kevin's value was in his slideshow presentation -- talk about visual learning! We saw over 600 images, illustrating retail principles in practice in libraries. He talked us through before-and-after shots, good examples, bad examples, interesting examples. (And, no, for copyright reasons, he said he couldn't give us copies of his presentation.)

As Kevin spoke, I kept scribbling down the names of the libraries being shown (mainly Australian and more public than school ones) -- see the list of libraries here. I tried to find images of them on the internet, without much success -- except for The Idea Stores in London (UK), e.g., search of Flickr for "idea store" and "library".

Instead you might have a look at some of these libraries:

The Robin Hood project in New York City, where prominent architects went in and re-vamped poor school libraries. See "The Library Book" here. See also Maira Kalman's video clip of how she created one library's alphabet display.
DOK

InfoToday: Discover Innovations at DOK, Holland’s 'Library Concept Center';
DOK Delft's Flickr photos showing their library's design and interior'
DOK Library Concept Center -- Flickr photos from The Shifted Librarian

I was familiar with the retail design approaches in libraries -- as Paco Underhill's book "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping" became popular with librarians in the US several years ago, e.g., see the Library Journal article "Power Users - Designing buildings and services from the end user's viewpoint transforms access for everyone" [2005], as well as "What libraries can learn from bookstores: Applying bookstore design to public libraries " [2003]. But it's always good to have it re-iterated.

He recommends a "What's Hot?" display (see how Barb went back and immediately put that up on the wall in her library).

Kevin is all for ditching Dewey and using more user-friendly, bookstore-type categories to organize books. He cited the Palmerston Public Library (NT, Australia) as an example of a library choosing to organize the collection in terms of 17 "living rooms" or categories (read this 2006 white paper "Where's the Dewey?" for background on the process they went through).

Similar attempts:

It's Fine To Drop Dewey - 7/15/2009 - Library Journal -- article re another US library ditching Dewey;
Rangeview Library District, CO, First System To Fully Drop Dewey - 6/5/2009 - Library Journal;
Behind the Maricopa County Library District’s Dewey-less Plan - 5/31/2007 - Library Journal
Library Matters: To Dewey or not to Dewey . . . -- re a NZ library considering it;
Arizona Library Ditches Dewey - 7/1/2007 - School Library Journal
Freeing Dewey -- a blog from a US public library in the process of dropping Dewey;
LibraryThing's Open Shelves Classification (OSC) Project -- a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System;

The National Library of Singapore has its own variation on re-grouping Dewey, supposedly to help the public find books, but I find it confusing -- as the catalog just gives me the Dewey number - so I have to wander to find the section that Dewey number is stored in.

One thing I do like about the NLB shelves is the use of ColorMarq, a library shelf ID system where each letter of the alphabet has a different color. It makes it easy to see when a book is mis-shelved. (I do have a problem when NLB shelvers only bother to sort by the first three letters of the authors' names.... especially in areas like BRO or WIL.)

[Photos by me]

The disturbing thought of the unknown, or, what is learning? teaching? education?

2010-11-20T08:38:00.021+08:00

As part of a self-study accreditation process, our school has invited staff to consider the question of what learning is -- for three hours on a Saturday morning. Reps from each grade/area should be in attendance -- and each person is asked to bring along a book, article, or reference. I know what mine will be.

Engaging Minds: changing teaching in complex times -- 2nd ed, 2008 -- by Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler.

Here are some bits.... taken from my notes.....

Learning is about becoming attentive to things you never noticed before -- becoming conscious -- becoming aware.

Teachers play a pivotal role in orientating attentions in ways that prompt transformations in personal perception and consciousness -- helping people to notice what they haven't noticed.

Education is not about compelling others to see the world in the ways we see it, but in terms of expanding the space of the possible.

The notion of shared labor -- social learning -- highlighting how complex knowing is distributed across a web of individuals.

The learner is the collective. Knowledge cannot exist independent of the knower -- it is a potential to action both embodied and situated. Bodies know, and that's what makes them part of grander knowing bodies. Knowledge, then is about relationship.

The metaphor of the teacher as "the consciousness of the collective" -- expanding the space of the possible and "creating conditions for the emergence of the as-yet unimagined".

Prompting change or learning is a matter of disequilibrium.... with the teacher in the middle, mediating, mentoring -- giving voice and advocating... opening up spaces for collective action, not defining the action.

Teaching is not about what the teacher does, it's about what happens to the learner.

Learning is complex, full of recursive elaboration... iterative processes and nested systems.

"A complexified conception of curriculum would suggest an image more like a phase space or a fractal tree, in which each event opens up new possibilities for action, which in turn open still other divergent possibilities. There is no particular direction -- except, perhaps, toward the expansion of the space of the possible."

A teacher is constantly perturbed and being perturbed.

Teaching is an event that prompts a complex system to respond differently.

The lesson plan is a thought experiment.

I'm fascinated with the idea of the unknown unknowns*. E.g., see my blog post on Roger Schank. His definition of learning bears repeating:

"Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking that is the crux of intelligence."

Piaget said intelligence is what is called on when an agent doesn't know what to do, i.e., discerning what really matters in a situation.

Karl Hostetler, a professor interested in both philosophy and education -- (download a PDF of his article << What is "Good" Education Research?>> (2005)), quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1989) :

"Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites. Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities.... [So] only a person who has questions can have knowledge. [However] there is no such thing as a method of learning to ask questions, of learning to see what is questionable. On the contrary, the example of Socrates teaches that the important thing is the knowledge that one does not know."

This potential knowledge is what we as teachers must value -- in ourselves as much as in our students.

Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, did a 5-part series of articles on knowing and unknowing in the NYT earlier this year -- "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is" (Part I) -- in which he interviews David Dunning, a professor who is known for his elaboration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is when our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

Dunning:
"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible. This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like."

When I read that, I realized why I love TED Talks so much -- it gives me easy access to seeing what smart looks like. It also gives another angle on the role of the teacher. People like to say 21st century learning demands teachers shift from "the sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side". I think there are times to be the "sage on the stage" -- to exhibit "unnatural acts" of thinking (a la Sam Wineburg -- more re him in a future blog post) -- though overall, I prefer the concept of the teacher as "the meddler in the middle" (Erica McWilliams, 2005).

In an interview Benjamin Barber reflects on the positive aspect of disturbing thoughts:

London: It occurs to me that you are not at all afraid of controversy — not in your statements here and not in your books certainly. You say somewhere in An Aristocracy of Everyone that "with good teaching, as with good art, someone is always offended." Is that really true?

Barber: I think so. I think that if you don't offend someone, you haven't even woken them up, let alone gotten their mental energies going. One thing that does bother me about so-called political correctness — I don't like the term PC — it's really an unfair word, it's kind of a slur in the way that it's used. But the true part of it is that there are some people who seem unwilling to be offended and provocative speech, free speech, and most importantly educational speech — speech that makes people think — has to be to some degree offensive. That's how you get people woken up, that's how you get people caring, that's how you get them reacting.

Another vision of the teacher as a constructive mediator is the grandmother -- in Sugata Mitra's sense -- in his SOLEs (Self-Organized Learning Environments). The person who stands behind you every now and then-- who is there to support you in your own learning.

Isn't that the role of our own PLN (personal learning networks) -- for us as teacher-learners? We just need to make sure we are allowing ourselves to be disturbed. That is the danger for adults... that we move into spaces (mental and physical) which do not regularly perturb us.

* Yes, "unknown unknowns" brings Donald Rumsfeld to mind -- and my favorite packaging of him is in the 2003 Slate article on "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld":

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Building Digitally Literate Communities, or, what I learned at IASL/SLAQ 2010

2010-10-08T16:00:00.014+08:00

"Building literate communities" and "Supporting the digital education agenda" were two of the four strands of the IASL / SLAQ (Int'l Assoc. of School Librarianship / School Library Assoc. of Queensland) 2010 conference held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Sep. 27 - Oct. 1.

Over the course of the week the two themes merged into an essential question for me:

How to build digitally literate communities?

Our school is embarking on a "21st Century Teaching & Learning" program (aka iLearn) over the next two years, part of which will involve going 1:1 with Apple laptops in Grade 6 and above (and 2:1 below that) -- and designing new library/information spaces.

Presentations by two academics - one an education/business/think-tank professor and the other a education/futurist -- gave me some interesting concepts and phrases to play with -- re people and spaces that will support the digitally literate community we want to become.

Michael Hough, Professorial Fellow at the Univ. of Wollongong -- Keynote: "In Schools that Face the Future, Libraries Matter" -- & Session: "The Role of the Teacher-Librarian in Developing Leadership Capabilities in Staff"

Erica McWilliam, co-leader of the Creative Workforce Program at Queensland University of Technology -- Keynote: "High Standards or a High Standard of Standardness?"

>>> See a vodcast and accompanying slideshow for each keynote<<<

Both explored the e-learning shift underway and confirmed the need for 21st Century Teacher-Librarians (see Joyce Valenza's Manifesto for the definitive description of one), with Hough claiming librarians should become the C.I.O. (Chief Information Officer) of their schools.

He highly recommended the recently published book -- Developing a Networked School Community -- and cited Chapter 9 (most of which you can read via GoogleBooks) by Lyn Hay (who was one of my online professors -- I wrote a paper on Gaming in Education for her back in 2005...).

Hough particularly liked her concept of the iCentre, which she defines as

"the central facility within the school where information, technology, learning and teaching needs are supported by qualified information and learning technology specialists. It is a centre that provides students and teachers with a one-stop shop for all resourcing, technology, and learning needs on a daily basis."

(See also the slides from a recent keynote by Hay: "21st Century Teacher-Librarian: Rethink, Rebuild, and Re-brand".)

McWilliam provided an interesting variation on the idea, by surveying the culture of the coffee house from raucous 17th century London up until erudite 20th century Vienna. A home away from home, a place you want to go to. She argued Hogarth's coffee house was an antecedent of the lifelong learning space -- a round table of communal resources (both liquid and intellectual) -- and that librarians would benefit from considering the various skills and dispositions of those distant coffee house landlords (arbiter, assembler, gossip provider, business manager, service manager, social broker of relationships, etc) over time.

She suggested today's online model might be nings, an iCafe for shared passions. I think Twitter is a fitter descendant.

#slaqiasl2010 was the Twitter tag for the conference -- and others in my personal learning network were far more adept at typing up the passing thoughts (special thanks to Stacey Taylor, Marita Thomson, and Jessica Jorna for their quick minds and fingers. You allowed me to concentrate on my own more expansive note-taking.)

The whole conference was a community experience, with an overlapping of school librarians, international school librarians, IBO school librarians, and academics.

In line with the same "building communities" theme, Barb Philip, the junior school teacher-librarian at Tanglin Trust School here in Singapore, and I did a presentation on "Building Internationally Literate Communities", based on our library network's efforts to expand the reading experiences of our students.

More blog posts re learning and connections made at the conference to follow...

It's Storytelling, Stupid!

2010-01-04T14:41:00.084+08:00

Clay doesn't stop. Luckily the blog entry he just wrote -- “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning -- fits in perfectly with where I want to continue from my last post (which was spurred by a previous post of his: Barbarians with Laptops).

It's about the importance of narrative in the teaching/learning process.

Okay, You Suck at Photoshop isn't "a grand narrative" (one of the three essential elements of teaching according to Michael Wesch (see my previous post)). But the format could be used to help convey one, incorporating "disciplinary knowledge" into a funny story with a good hook. And Clay showed us an example of a teacher, Lynn Hunt of UCLA -- a "sage on the stage" -- presenting a compelling introduction to the Enlightenment -- by telling us a good story. It's "chalk and talk" but effective. (See his blog post: New Tech Teaching Habits.)

Image via Kalkion

The power of storytelling is often lost in the ongoing debates over:

teacher-centered vs. student-centered learning
content vs. process focus
traditional vs. progressive
"sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side"
disciplinary knowledge vs. 21st century skills

Two theorists who consider storytelling at the constant heart of intelligence and teaching and learning are Roger Schank and Kieran Egan. Both have been around for a long time and are still producing work, e.g., see:

Kieran Egan's 2009 book, The Future of Education - as well as Learning in Depth: A simple innovation that can transform schooling, due out from the University of Chicago Press in 2010;
Roger Schank's upcoming book, Cognition! Teaching Kids to Think (see the first four chapters he's made available on his website)

-- and both deserve wider audiences, if only as interesting voices from the margins to test your own ideas against.

Roger Schank

The best historical introduction to Roger Schank is probably via the Edge.org website. You might read his article "Information is Surprises" (1995). Especially note the comments by other people at the end -- re him, not that article. I particularly like this one:

W. Daniel Hillis: The Roger Schank I knew was a thorn in everybody's side — constructively so. The interesting thing about Roger Schank, something he shares with Minsky, is the fact that he's produced an incredible string of students. Anybody who's produced such a great string of students has to be a constructive pain in the ass. He's always taken an adversarial stance in his theories. He doesn't just say, "Here's my theory." He says, "Here's why I'm right and everybody else is an idiot." He's often right.

Okay, now that you're primed for someone quite opinionated (I like that phrase: "a constructive pain the ass"...), go watch this Jan 2009 video, filmed in Barcelona where he is helping to open a new Institute for the Learning Sciences (as part of their Business Engineering program*) -- based on a Story-Centered Curriculum. He goes through everything wrong with existing schools and describes his ideal school:

In summary: "Every curriculum should tell a story... and the story should be one that tells what the life of the future practitioner is like (and it should involve lots of practice)." As he says, teaching doesn't mean talking -- people aren't good at listening -- we listen to be entertained, not to learn. Learning happens as a result of being hooked by good stories -- and by practicing goal-based scenarios that are fun or obviously useful.

Here are my notes on Roger Schank's 1999 book, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, a thought-provoking read for teacher-librarians as it's about stories, learning, and information retrieval (out of the brain, not the internet) --and so relates to fiction, non-fiction, and tagging/cataloging. (Google Books makes a lot of the book available online, as well as the foreword by the literary critic Gary Saul Morson.)

Teaching is the right story at the right time.

Good stories with lots of information allow listeners to derive their own conclusions.

We do not remember a whole story, but only the gist, indexed in different ways.

Listening is hard -- stories usually just trigger stories back and forth -- how does new learning occur?

Creativity is the adaptation of old stories to new purposes -- it arises not from the void, but from the drawer. And the drawer is only full by virtue of intelligent indexing over time -- the collecting of lots of stories in the brain. Understanding is the process of index extraction -- figuring out what story to tell.

Find an anomaly -- ask a question -- get a story. Anomalies are when we don't know the answer. When we have no story to tell, we look for one -- by asking ourselves questions.

Curiosity is about recognizing anomalies and having the ability to take pleasure in exploring them, which leads us to the value of the search process itself and to prefer answers that lead to ever more questions.

Or as Schank says on page 231: "Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking that is the crux of intelligence."

Re the failure to listen to failure, see this recent Wired article - Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The importance of having a broad input of stories -- and a broad audience -- is highlighted:

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
[bold added]

This is similar to something a former PhD student said about what he learned from Schank (quoted by Schank in his four-chapter preview of his upcoming book:

You taught me that often our theories get so complex that it takes a specialist with years of training to understand them. When we get our theories this distant from everyday life and everyday people, it is awkward explaining what we do when in conversation with our family, friends, the press, and even upper level executives, etc. You taught me to test to see if what you are doing matters and is of interest to the everyday person seeking distraction and some entertainment, but not entirely brain dead, with some curiosity left about life and what others think.

In other words, can you make an interesting story out of it?

Kieran Egan

Kieran Egan argues that students have access to plenty of information - the problem is getting it into them and getting it to mean anything to them. Knowledge exists only in people, in living tissue in our bodies; what exists in libraries and computers are only codes or externally stored symbolic material.

This is where powerful stories and metaphors come in -- as tools to engage students' imagination and emotions in learning about the world.

Egan insists that students' imaginations can only work with what they know, so a great deal of content knowledge is required. He's an advocate of students becoming experts, e.g., by studying one topic throughout their whole school career (in addition to the usual curriculum). (See his new Learning in Depth project.)

Storytelling fits into Egan's larger framework of cognitive tools and theory of Imaginative Education. These cognitive tools are the things that enable our brains to do cultural work -- and he likens to operating systems or programs in the brain, forms of which are running at all times in varying degrees at all ages: the Somatic (the body & its senses), the Mythic (oral language), the Romantic (reading and writing), the Philosophic (the meta-narrative of systems in the world), and the Ironic (multiple perspectives in the mind at one time).

For more details on Egan's framework, see The Educated Mind: how cognitive tools shape our understanding (1997); for a more practical guide to his storytelling ideas for younger students, see his Teaching as Storytelling: an alternative approach to teaching and curriculum in the elementary school (1986).

Egan defines education as "the process in which we maximize the tool kit we individually take from the external storehouse of culture." For me, libraries (whether physical or virtual) are primary portals to that cultural storehouse. (As they say, knowledge is free at the library -- bring your own container.) And librarians are there with embodied knowledge to help people find the right story at the right time.

More on Storytelling and Metaphors

Vivian Gussin Paley and her books are all about storytelling with young children -- and how story and play are inextricable in the learning process (which will be the topic of my next post -- stories, serious play and disciplinary knowledge)

These next ones are NOT specifically re education and you probably know most of them, but they're some of my favorite examples of storytelling and metaphors.

TED talks that exemplify a great story: Sherwin Nuland on electroshock therapy and Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight -- and a TED talk that gives a great example of being taught how to tell a story at a young age: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: on achieving your childhood dreams
PostSecret - each postcard is the tip of an iceberg of a story - (I can't help but think some were created as an exercise by a budding novelist...)
The Moth podcasts -- true stories told live on stage with no notes or props
Two connected books: Exercises in Style (1947) by Raymond Queneau, and its modern counterpart: 99 Ways to Tell a Story (2005) by Matt Madden
TED talk: James Geary, metaphorically speaking
George Lakoff is the expert on metaphors as far as I'm concerned - his Metaphors We Live By (1980) (co-authored with Mark Johnson) is the place to start, but don't stop there....
Speaking of metaphors, I can't help but throw in Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn on April 19, 2007 competing in the Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day?
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day?
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy
Last but not least, the metaphor I use to introduce information overload and the need for smart searching on the internet:

Image via Will Lion on Flickr

* re business schools, there's a debate in the NYTimes re the appropriate metaphor for how universities (especially business schools) treat students - as customers? as products? For a really unusual business school - one that is living 21st century skills, check out KaosPilot.

And for an example of graduate schools looking for applicants with creative storytelling capabilities -- or at least competency in metaphors, see this NYTimes slideshow of images meant to prompt applicants' admission essays: What Do You See?

Teachers, Meaningful Connections, & Mindful Information Consumption

2010-01-03T13:38:00.067+08:00

Clay Burell has been on a writing binge over the holiday -- and there have been long conversations in the comments of several posts, which, as Clay put it, have been the equivalent of college-level credit in terms of professional development. NB: Some of my contributions are re-formatted and expanded below.

First of all, see the original Beyond School blog posts (among others):

Clay expressed his fear that we are producing barbarians with laptops and challenged people to to provide good examples of learning that effectively enhanced content and the development of important skills -- and many did. (Check out the responses of Roberto Greco, Monika Hardy, Neil Stephenson, Hellen Harding, et al.)

I cited Michael Wesch's philosophy of teaching outlined in a video in 2008 as my guiding light.

In summary, to create students who make meaningful connections we need to

find a grand narrative and provide context and relevance (i.e., semantic meaning);
create a learning environment that values and leverages learners themselves (i.e., personal meaning); and
do both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment

Technology isn’t an end in itself -- it’s about leverage in the service of meaningful connections. So if it doesn't enhance the learning in the classroom and it's not authentic participation in the existing media environment (read: busywork), you shouldn't feel obliged to use it.

Cliff Stoll is someone who comes down squarely against computers in the classroom. See his 1999 book, High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian -- as well as his Feb. 2006 TED talk (which provides an excellent preview of how he would perform as a teacher in a classroom).

(And if you want an example of what it means to be a ruthless and natural inquirer, read his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg: tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage .)

Here he is talking about computers in classrooms -- from an interview in 2000:

Stoll: The one thing that computers do extraordinarily well is bring information to kids. Computers give kids access to vast amounts of information.

EW: Don't computers have a place in the classroom, then, if merely as a source of information?

Stoll: Is a lack of information a problem in schools? I've never once had a teacher say to me "I don't have enough information." Teachers say they don't have enough time. The problem in classrooms is not a lack of information. It's too much information. ......

Stoll: ... The problem is that the use of computers subtracts from the student-to-teacher contact hours. It directs attention away from the student-teacher relationship and directs it toward the student-computer relationship. It teaches students to focus on getting information rather than on exploring and creating. Which is more interactive -- a student and a teacher or a student and a computer? ...

Re the love inherent in classroom teaching and the importance of time with a teacher (technology aside), I can't help but re-recommend a commencement address by Margaret Edson, teacher and playwright. There's a link in this blog post (skip the first 3 min of her talk and get to the heart of it).

Umberto Eco in this interview also brings up the problem of too much information, but sees the teacher (in the role of master to apprentices) as instrumental in dealing with it.

Eco: ... These [Google] lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance. There, the masters may not necessarily have been able to explain to their students why a painting was good in theoretical terms, but they did so in more practical ways. Look, this is what your finger can look like, and this is what it has to look like. Look, this is a good mixing of colors. The same approach should be used in school when dealing with the Internet. The teacher should say: "Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information." If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others' mistakes.

Last year Clay Shirky pointed out It's Not Information Overload, It's Filter Failure.

In that light, Umberto Eco is proposing teachers as human filters** for disciplinary knowledge and practices, teaching students to discriminate.

Frank Schirrmacher recognizes this same need to question what we're consuming in the way of information.

He talks about humans as ''informavores" in this video/transcript: Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher.

I think it's very interesting, the concept — again, Daniel Dennett and others said it — the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you. ....

As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.

It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news.

Having introduced the metaphor of information as food, I can't help but end with a link to one of the essays David Brooks gave a 2009 Sidney (best essay) award to:

Is Food the New Sex? - Mary Eberhardt - Hoover Institution - Policy Review

Try reading it, substituting the word "information" for "food" or "sex"....

These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?

This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.
[bold added]

Here we are, for the first time in history with all the information we want. It's the "Informavore's Dilemma" ***. Now we just need to develop the discipline for mindful information consumption.

** Social bookmarking is a form of discriminating filtering and Roberto Greco, with over 17,500 bookmarks on Delicious is one of my richest human filters for reading material. As a librarian, I'm impressed with both his descriptions and his tags.

*** I thought I was being clever vis-a-vis Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma", but Google tells me findability.org used it first...

p.s. Wherever I've used the word "teacher", I obviously include "librarians".

Image of Umberto Eco via giveawayboy on Flickr / Image of bento box via Cowism / Image of Google log via the Telegraph UK

21st C Learning@HK: a team approach

2009-10-04T10:05:00.080+08:00

Keri-Lee and I are now the East IDL team.

IDL? you ask.

Take your pick: idol, idyll, idle, or, the correct answer: Information & Digital Literacies.

It's a tag I am more comfortable with than "21st century" (no matter what you put after it, whether "skills" or "learning" or "tools") -- because, as Dennis Harter points out, we're already in the 21st century and will be for the rest of our lives, and the adjective "21st century" (like "Web 2.0") may have instant recognition to those in the educational blogosphere, but induces either alienation or only vague comprehension in others.

It's understandable to want to stress the new and to avoid focusing on technology alone, but I'm voting for a return to Information and Digital Literacies as the label for what we are trying to spread and embed in the classrooms, which I think David Warlick captures in these statements:

"As I say again and again, it is not the computers that are impacting us as a society or as individuals. It’s what we can do with information that is changing things." (2008)

"... embracing tools that give all their student-learners and teacher-learners ubiquitous access to networked, digital, and abundant information — and the capacity to work that information and express discoveries and outcomes compellingly to authentic audiences." (2009)

Information & Digital Literacies also nicely combines the main characteristic of our respective subject areas -- me as the Teacher-Librarian and Keri-Lee as the ICT Facilitator.

What's new this year besides recognition of us as a team?

One, Keri-Lee is no longer an ICT "teacher" on a release-time, weekly fixed schedule with classes; instead she's a facilitator on a flexi-schedule, collaborating with classroom teachers on different units of inquiry, as I have been.

Two, we're using the ISTE NETS for Students as our roadmap and are working on a document for our teachers, translating the NETS Profiles into possible experiences/scenarios for our students based on our curriculum and taking the IBO PYP Transdisciplinary Skills (Communication, Research, Thinking, Self-Management, and Social) into account. In addition, we're looking at the NETS for Teachers, Administrators, and Technology Facilitators.

Three, we have some new technology toys, which teachers can book, just like they can book us: a set of iPod Touches and a set of video cameras.

In celebration of this shift, Keri-Lee and I attended the 21st Century Learning @ Hong Kong: Extending Tomorrow's Leaders with Digital Learning, held September 17-19, 2009, at Hong Kong International School (HKIS).

With over 500 attendees, many of us from overseas, there was a good mix of teachers (a lot of IT/ICT, but also librarians and others) - and the program had plenty to offer.

(NB: I presented a workshop with Beth Gourley, from the In ternational School of Tianjin, called Digital Gist: Harnessing digital content for learning and the library: an inquiry into texts online in audio, video, and e-book formats.)

One of the most useful sessions Keri-Lee and I attended, in terms of our goals for our own school, was Walking the Talk: 21st Century Learning in Curriculum Design and Learning by Greg Curtis, Curriculum Director at the International School of Beijing (ISB).

He started off with this video (from The Onion) re the "21st century skills" our kids are going to need.

Greg stressed that the 21st century movement (yes, they do use the term at ISB) is a learning one, not a technology one -- and therefore needs to be driven by the curriculum unit, not the IT department -- that it's about strategic planning and future visioning, not IT planning. (Read: management buy-in is critical.)

At ISB they are trying to create a "pull" culture, rather than a "push" one -- to infuse technology into learning experiences and explorations, not force it. A culture where technology is expected to be used and will be drawn in. Never technology for its own sake. Context is everything. It's all about the learning -- always about the learning.

He walked us through ISB's Learning 21 framework -- with Standards in the center, then moving out a ring to the Learning 21 Approaches, and then the outer ring of Learning 21 Skills. (I was pleased to learn they had blended the library and technology standards.)

All these are incorporated, along with Understanding by Design constructs, into their Curriculum Mapping system, which allows them to visually check the spread of assessment tasks and see how the Learn 21 Approaches and Skills are being integrated.

To implement this program, ISB has initiated an early release afternoon on Wednesdays, providing two hours a week of concentrated staff professional development time.

What a tremendous commitment to a program and a process. I look forward to following ISB's progress over the next few years.

See Greg's handout - scanned and uploaded to Google Docs

See also my rough notes on his presentation - in Google Docs

(By the way, I was pleased to see Sharon Vipond, the secondary librarian at HKIS, has posted her notes on all the keynote speeches from the conference.)

It was such a beneficial and collaborative exercise attending the conference together with Keri-Lee -- we were continually bouncing impressions and ideas off each other. We'll see how we get on with our own integrated standards, approaches, and skills initiative -- and our efforts to infuse information and digital literacy into our East campus classrooms.

And hats off to the conference organizers -- it was a well-executed event and I would definitely attend it again.

23 Things & Avid Online Learners

2009-04-22T11:14:00.085+08:00

Back in early January Keri-Lee Beasley, the ICT teacher, and I started an optional Web 2.0 professional development initiative for staff at our new little campus (400 students K1 through Grade 4)- copying the very successful and widespread 23 Things movement in libraries (see this background summary and all these Delicious bookmarks tagged "23things", if you've never heard of it).

Our pre-assessment was an online survey asking about our teachers' familiarity -- either Never heard of / Have heard of / Have used / or Use regularly -- with a wide range of "things" like social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, RSS, Twitter, photo sharing, screen capture tools, podcasts, avatars, Skype, Google Docs, etc. (as well as some software the school subscribes to -- like StudyWiz, Atomic Learning, United Streaming, etc.).

The results were quite revealing, especially as we had little knowledge of the existing digital literacy of our staff, this being the first year of a start-up school. (Note: the results for our counterparts at the other campus were similarly interesting.)

Our goal was to increase awareness of what's available online to improve teachers' personal/professional productivity and enhance their teaching. We could only tempt people to try new things -- hopefully stretching/scaffolding them to increase their ability to take more responsibility for their own Web n.0 learning. (It would be a bit ambitious to say we were aiming for the ISTE Educational Technology Standards for Teachers.)

I have never liked the digital native vs. digital immigrant distinction, as it privileges the accident of birth -- and I don't think age is the critical factor. Digital tourists vs. digital residents would be more appropriate. However, as a librarian I prefer a comparison with how people become an avid reader.

The "Magic Bullet" theory of reading says the right book at the right time can turn a non-reader into a lifelong reader. Sometimes all it takes is a strong recommendation or taste of a genre to become smitten.

Becoming an avid online learner is similar. For some people it happens quite easily, while others are still waiting for the "Magic Bullet" -- the right tool at the right time -- in order to understand the power of the experience. So, in selecting "things" (or Web 2.0 genres) for our Connecting East initiative and recommending examples to have a look at, Keri-Lee and I were hoping to expose our teachers to potential "Magic Bullets".

A recent article in Innovate identifies the progression of a 21st century online learner as first to link, then to lurk, and then to lunge. In deciding what we could -- and should -- cover in 10 assignments, Keri-Lee and I basically set out a similar path for our participants while offering four levels of differentiation: Novice / Apprentice / Practitioner / Expert

For example, we began with social bookmarking (i.e., linking), as 44% of our target audience had never heard of sites like Delicious and Diigo. Later we suggested blogs to read (i.e., lurking) and ways to collect their own personal learning online (i.e., lunging). Other assignments included more prosaic skills, like manipulating/creating images and using interactive whiteboards. See our Connecting East wiki for an overview. (NB: The links in red on the wiki sidebar also show what we didn't manage to fit in or get around to.)
E-mail was used to announce a new topic, introduced via a Connecting East blog posting, with task details described on a Connecting East wiki page -- plus weekly face-to-face time on "Fruity Fridays" where we were available before school in the joint library/ICT lab to answer questions, with breakfast fruit on offer as an incentive.

It's not over yet -- the last assignment goes out today -- a reflective exercise, of which this blog post is part. Participants then have until early June to complete all tasks to qualify for a prize draw of an iPod, wine, or books.

But has it been worthwhile? Yes, definitely -- at least for me and Keri-Lee. In fact, it's been a good example of meaningful work, which Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers defines by the qualities of autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. It's also been a case of collaborative fun -- for which my role model is Dan Ariely; I just read his book Predictably Irrational and I was struck by how many colleagues he regularly collaborates with in setting up his quirky experiments in behavioral economics. Keri-Lee and I put just as much time and thought into setting up the Connecting East experiences for our colleagues and analyzing the results -- and had (almost) as much fun as Ariely and his friends.

If our own learning has been the greatest reward so far, it's less certain how much others have gained. We have seen definite glimmers, but the uptake hasn't been as high as we, of course, would like.

Which reminds me of the advice:

Don't water rocks...

Be thankful for the teachers who did take us up on our offer and who have tried something new, whether it's starting to bookmark, to Twitter, or to play with Netvibes -- and put more energy into them. After all, it takes time for someone to turn into an avid reader/learner.

Networked teacher image via langwitches @ Flickr
Rock image via jasohill @ Flickr
Wine image via Joe Pitz @ Flickr
iPod image via Andrew* @ Flickr
Books image via librarybug @ Flickr
Butterfly bullet image via razZziel @ Flickr

Pulling it all together online -- LibGuides? Netvibes? Pageflakes?

2009-03-08T12:05:00.050+08:00

Research resources -- shared and organized in easily configured widgets/modules on tabbed pages -- that's what libraries using Web 2.0 tools like LibGuides, Netvibes, and Pageflakes can offer their customers. It's one of the quickest ways to create a library portal or home page.

LibGuides is not free, but it looks like it could be worth buying.

Check out the LibGuides Community page where you can browse for academic, public, and school libraries and see how they have used the product.

For example, see the library guides created by:

Elizabeth Abarbanel and Karen Phillips at the Brentwood School (USA);
Buffy Hamilton at Creekview High School (USA);
The Burlington County (public) Library (USA).

Buffy (alias The Unquiet Librarian) recently blogged about how much she loves LibGuides and she's someone who has been exploring the best means of providing students with research guides and pathfinders for some time now -- see her wiki: Research Pathfinders 2.0: Information Streams for Students.

Netvibes is the next best option -- and it's free. This is what I've been playing with for the past few weeks, inspired by these librarians:

Shanghai Rego International School -- Primary Library -- by Fiona Collins
Discovery College Library -- Dianne MacKenzie in Hong Kong
My Bloomin' Web -- by Leanne Windsor at the Tokyo International School [URL updated 27/4/09]
St. Dominic's International School Junior Library -- by Yvonne Barrett in Portugal
Campus des Nations Primary Library -- by Kathy Epps at the International School of Geneva
Campus des Nations PYP Programme of Inquiry --also by Kathy Epps at the International School of Geneva

The beauty of Netvibes is that anything I see on any of their pages, I can easily copy to my own by simply clicking "Share" on a particular widget. And everyone has both a private page and a public page, so you can play around with customizing widgets on your private page and then move them to the public sphere.

For example, I just copied over links to kids' magazines from Fiona, links on books and reading from Leanne, more book and reading links from Yvonne, links to audio book sites from Dianne, and dictionary websites from Kathy.

I like how Kathy has made a separate page for the PYP units of inquiry -- and I'll be doing that as well, but for now here's my initial effort:

Pageflakes is a similar tool that I have experimented with before, but then I recently read a blog posting which suggested Pageflakes might die (from lack of funding). So I immediately began exploring Netvibes and was thrilled to find so many good library examples out there to copy. But then just the other day there was an ominous blog posting about Netvibes! Well, I'm not giving up on Netvibes yet. But as a form of insurance I've also just requested a proper LibGuides demo (and formal quote). By the way, this is the official comment on costs:

The cost of an annual license depends on the size of your institution and the number of libraries involved. We try to customize the pricing for every client, to meet their specific needs (as well to fit within their budgets!). The annual license fee ranges from $899 to $2,999 ($549 for K-12 libraries). Most libraries would fall under the lower license range. Contact us with the info about your institution (FTE or # of card holders) and we'll give you an exact quote. Chances are, you'll be pleasantly surprised - LibGuides is a great deal, any way you look at it!

I haven't mentioned iGoogle personalized pages, though they're quite similar. You can also share widgets and tabs with other people, but they're designed more for personal homepages -- where someone is logged into their Google account. So if your students all have iGoogle pages, then you could publicize library-specific widgets for them to add to their homepages. And if you want to explore other options, see this list of "start page" tools via Delicious.

Speaking of library websites, there are two I've admired recently for their clean "Mac" look and layout, though only Leanne's was made on a Mac. The other was created using a free tool called Weebly.

p.s. Check out the screencasts/tutorials The Big House Library has made using Jing (a free screen capture/screencast tool) showing how to use their library catalog (Follett's Destiny). I plan to do the same (someday).

Improving the inquiry process

2009-02-15T13:51:00.023+08:00

Photos from Flickr: istlibrary

Learning from peers is powerful -- in the classroom and in life. I often get my share early on a Saturday morning, thanks to Skype and Beth Gourley, my friend and fellow teacher-librarian. When our video cameras come into focus, the difference in our locations is obvious. Beth, up in Tianjin, China, at this time of year is wearing a thick bathrobe and huddled under a duvet, while I, down in Singapore, lounge in sleeveless nightwear, cooled by a ceiling fan.

This week's treasures from Beth included an article she wrote last year for KnowledgeQuest called "Inquiry -- The Road Less Travelled" (Vol. 37, No. 1, Sept/Oct 2008) and some related photos. Unfortunately, the article is not yet available online, but should be eventually (and you could always write Beth and ask her to send you a copy.... )

In the article she describes the International School of Tianjin (an IBO school) and how the teaching team there has worked on improving inquiry in the classrooms and library, starting with a group exploration of inquiry and information literacy models.

The result was a model adapted from three major sources: the spiral of making personal meaning and understanding from Barbara Stripling (2003), guiding questions from Jennifer Branch and Dianne Oberg (2005), and language from Kath Murdoch (2005). The secondary school version is shown above, and they have a similar one with simplified questions for the elementary school.

I especially love how teachers use the model as a framework for documenting the units of inquiry. Here is an example from one of their Kindergarten classes (click to enlarge):

When Kath Murdoch came and worked with their teachers last year, they did a reflective exercise on their implementation of inquiry. Here is a summary of the remarks collected (also taken from the article) (click to enlarge):

They go on to create the list to the left (sorry it's a wonky image).

Nothing radical there -- everyone struggling to improve their inquiry will recognize the items as common goals. Still it's good to be reminded of them.

Beth is also working on a wiki called Research Story, based on their inquiry model (which I trust she won't mind me sharing). Like all wikis, it's a work in progress. But I know it's made me want to go back and re-organize my own grade-level wikis around an inquiry model.

Inspiring Libraries

2009-01-01T15:27:00.030+08:00

Libraries are a natural source of inspiration for the curious and creative.

Listening to Paul Holdengraber, the Director of the New York Public Library's Public Program Series, is an inspiration in itself. Here are my notes on an interview filmed with him in 2007.

His job is to "oxygenate" the New York Public Library -- to make the famous lions outside "roar" -- to create a library without walls.

We need to make people think it's sexy to think -- that there should be both information and inspiration. We have to free the books. To have a thought is to caress our brains. Thinking is exciting!

Inspiration comes mainly from arguments around the kitchen table. We need each other desperately as humans (e.g., you can't tickle yourself). A library is a space of conviviality -- which can help us get references in common. We all need something to talk about.

Curiosity is one of the most important things we can arm ourselves with in life -- if we're not curious at 20, we'll be boring at 50. We must inspire curiosity -- to be interested in the world -- to have interests -- something to replenish our minds.

The blog Design*Sponge has done a couple of videos showing how a librarian at the New York Public Library has inspired five different artists -- a glassblower, a letterpress printer, a maker of ceramic dishes, etc. -- with material from the library's collection, whether images in books or artifacts themselves -- maps, old postcards, prints, etc. See the videos on the NYPL webpage: Design by the Book.

Similarly, Jay Walker is a man who believes a library should have objects to inspire -- as well as books. There is a 7-minute TED video of him showing off some of the treasures in his amazing private library: Jay Walker: A library of human imagination -- including an Enigma machine, a flag that's been to the moon and back, and a real Sputnik satellite.

Wired did an article on his library not long ago -- Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library - with plenty of photos. Go check it out.

I'm going to end with a plug for the book I think should be in every library -- as a source of inspiration: Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways (2001), which has been described as "the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected. "

Fletcher, a famous British graphic designer, is now dead, but here's a YouTube video of him talking about his unusual book.

Flickr photo credits: lion: MacRonin47; library: jamesjk ; Jay Walker library

Curiosity: a close cousin of creativity

2009-01-01T15:16:00.006+08:00

photo: Maggie Appleton

Robert McKee, in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, presents curiosity as the intellectual need to answer questions and close patterns -- a universal desire which story plays to by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.

Olivia Judson, scientist and New York Times blogger, sees curiosity as the defining characteristic of the best scientists and as something that must be caught, not taught:

In schools, science is often taught as a body of knowledge — a set of facts and equations. But all that is just a consequence of scientific activity.

Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible. It is an attitude, a stance towards measuring, evaluating and describing the world that is based on skepticism, investigation and evidence. The hallmark is curiosity; the aim, to see the world as it is. This is not an attitude restricted to scientists, but it is, I think, more common among them. And it is not something taught so much as acquired during a training in research or by keeping company with scientists.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist and author who died a couple of years ago, argues for this same centrality of curiosity for historians and journalists (who are really just current historians) -- exemplified by Herodotus. Kapuscinski kept company with him by carrying around a copy of Herodotus's History throughout his years as a foreign correspondent, and he describes the influence Herodotus had on him in his 2004 book, Travels with Herodotus (which I highly recommend as an introduction to either Kapuscinski or Herodotus).

Here are snippets from the book:

In Herodotus's days, the Greek word "history" meant something more like "investigation" or "inquiry".... [Herodotus] strove to find out, learn, and portray how history comes into being every day, how people create it, why its course oftens runs contrary to their efforts and expectations. [p. 257]

What set him in motion? Made him act? .... I think that it was simply curiosity about the world. The desire to be there, to see it at any cost, to experience it no matter what. It is actually a seldom encountered passion. [p. 258]

To be a conduit is their passion: therein lies their life mission. To walk, ride, find out -- and proclaim it at once to the world. There aren't many enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world.... So when someone like Herodotus comes along -- a man possessed by a craving, a bug, a mania for knowledge, and endowed, furthermore, with intellect and powers of written expression -- it's not so surprising his rare existence should outlive him. [p. 267]

Seth Godin, the business/marketing guru, has a short video on the importance of being curious -- a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push the envelope. He also believes the curious are a minority and laments that the educational system does not (cannot?) promote it.

Can curiosity be described as having an agile mind? (like Cliff Stoll in his TED talk "18 Minutes with an Agile Mind")

Is curiosity the skill of being interested in the world? Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University, in a short video on learning and working in the collaboration age (which is definitely worth watching), talks about Pixar looking for employees with four attributes: 1. Depth, 2. Breadth, 3. Communication, 4. Collaboration.

Number 2: "Breadth" relates to being a curious person, though Nelson defines it as the skill of being interested. He argues it's easy to find people who are interesting, but tough to find those who are more interested than interesting. These are the people you want to talk to, he says, not because they're clever, but because they amplify "me", they want to know what I know -- they lean in when I talk and ask me questions.

Pixar is one of the companies highlighted in the book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win -- by William C. Taylor & Polly LaBarre (2006).

Nelson is quoted there on the same subject:

"We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we're developing people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with life-long learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people." [p. 230]

Isn't that what we all want?

The game of predictions -- as it's New Year's Eve

2008-12-31T19:05:00.016+08:00

I have always liked to play the game of making predictions on New Year's Eve. Everyone comes up with as many predictions as they like, in whatever category they choose -- whether personal (who'll get married, divorced, have a baby, etc.), work-related (change jobs, get acquired, expand, downsize, etc.), political, global, sports, cultural, etc. All are written down and put in a sealed envelope labeled "PREDICTIONS for 2009" -- and stored in a drawer, ready for the next New Year's Eve, when it is opened and the score is tallied -- how many right and by whom.

We never looked more than a year ahead, and you only ever got the honor of being right.

But I recently discovered a website which combines the challenge of long-range predictions with the option of making specific bets (i.e., predictions with potential rewards) -- from those clever people at the Long Now Foundation (Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, etc.).

Here is the first bet made, back in 2002 -- between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (who has made a famous prediction with his Singularity -- interesting aside: his Wikipedia page is labeled as one of those currently in dispute).

What does the future hold? Here's a possible map -- from Ross Dawson at Trends in the Living Networks (where he also has links to his previous Trend Blends for 2007 and 2008):

And here's the World Future Society's top ten forecasts for 2009 and beyond:

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible.

3. The car's days as king of the road will soon be over.

4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.

5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world's legal systems will be networked.

6. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will -- in the twenty-first century -- be what the space race was in the previous century.

7. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it's acquired.

8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.

10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

Numbers 4 and 7 support the need for developing flexible learners, able to continually renew themselves as experts. And Number 1 means we might be able to resolve those arguments over who said what when ("let's replay the tape from that morning....").

Must go make my own private predictions now...

Round Two: Creativity -- and Mathematics

2008-12-21T20:44:00.013+08:00

Just found some notes on an essay of Lewis Hyde -- "Two Accidents: Reflection on Chance and Creativity" (1998).

"The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for."

"Wandering is the trick, and giving up on 'loss' or 'gain', and then agility of mind."

Dumb luck = luck of chance
Smart luck = craft added to accident, i.e, "a kind of responsive intelligence invoked by whatever happens"

Louis Pasteur quote: "chance favors the prepared mind", i.e., a mind prepared for what it isn't prepared for...

Chogyam Trungpa quote: "magic is the total appreciation of chance"

creation (absolute newness) vs. revelation (accident as a tool of revelation)

Absolute newness = "in a civilization as complex and shifting as ours has become, a readiness to let the mind change as contingency demands may be one prerequisite of a happy life."

Also just read an essay on mathematics and creativity -- A Mathematician's Lament -- by Paul Lockhart -- a damning critique of the typical teaching of mathematics -- devoid of the recognition of its inherent creativity. I want every teacher who teaches mathematics to read this and justify their current practices to me (says the indignant librarian).

Everything he says rings true to me because I had a teacher like Paul Lockhart from 7th grade onwards in my little town in Maine. Thank god for Wally Hayes and Ralph (Danny) Small. They made mathematics come alive -- and made us exercise our mental creativity every day in the name of mathematics. It was pure theater at times -- how Mr. Small would enthuse over a new proof he'd thought up the night before. We believed him when he said he had the quadratic formula framed over his bedstead. We never doubted that he spent his evenings reading mathematics books, enhanced by a bowl of potato chips and a glass of milk.

He never used labels for what he showed us -- he just showed us his thinking and encouraged us to show him ours. I went off to college/university believing I'd never had calculus, because that word had never come up. So I ended up repeating almost a whole year, not really knowing where Mr. Small had left off. But I definitely recognized that what my college professor had to offer was lesser stuff -- it was all just "cookbook" mathematics, whereas I had been trained to do the real thing -- proofs and analysis and an underlying understanding all along, no matter whether I knew what the outside world called it or not.

In reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" -- and the luck of Bill Gates to have access to a computer in junior high in Washington state in 1967 or whenever it was -- I can't help but realize that I also was lucky. It was 1972 when I was a freshman in high school that I got to program for the first time. We had a time-share set-up with some computer in Portland and all of us had to write a computer program to solve the quadratic formula. That meant creating an oiled punched-out tape that got fed into the remote reader and loaded into memory. So at 15 I began my relationship with computers (okay, nowhere near the 10,000 deliberate practice hours of a Gates, but..). Maybe it isn't so surprising that in 1980 I ended up in Boston at a software development company, despite my major in Russian Civilization. (I always used to say, languages are languages -- whether natural or mechanical.)

Anyway, here's Paul Lockhart in full force on how math should be considered in the curriculum:

"The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such."

"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanet than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." [G.H. Hardy]

"Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary."

"Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity.... you deny them mathematics itself."

"Math is not about following directions, it's about making new directions."

"A piece of mathematics is like a poem, and we can ask if it satisfies our aesthetic criteria: Is this argument sound? Does it make sense? Is it simple and elegant? Does it get me closer to the heart of the matter?"

"Mathematics is the music of reason."

"The trouble is that math, like painting or poetry, is hard creative work. That makes it very difficult to teach. Mathematics is a slow, contemplative process. It takes time to produce a work of art, and it takes a skilled teacher to recognize one."

"Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest intellectual relationshiop with your students."

"How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract that any abstract."

Image credit: gadl via flickr

Common Genius and Creativity

2008-12-21T11:18:00.056+08:00

I've been reading and digesting several thinkers/texts/thoughts on creativity -- and the genius of the cultural commons.

(Image credit: lightbulbs by andydoro)

The individual genius is definitely a discredited idea these days.

Malcolm Gladwell addresses this issue in his May 2008 article, "In the Air: who says big ideas are rare?" -- where he uses the example of Nathan Myhrvold and his attempt to create a group capable of generating insights that might lead to scientific inventions and innovation. Gladwell asserts that "the genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

Gladwell's latest book, "Outliers: the story of success", similarly argues that those people who achieve extreme success owe a great deal to the fortuitous ecology of their lives. "They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy." And the success of late bloomers, like Cezanne, is highly contingent on the efforts of others surrounding and supporting them (he says in a New Yorker article on October 20, 2008, "Late Bloomers: why do we equate genius with precocity?").

"For Innovators, There is Brainpower in Numbers" ran a recent article in the New York Times, affirming that "truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don't always realize it." The article interestingly argues that brainstorming (or "idea showers" as some teachers I know prefer to call it -- eliminating that negative imagery), introduced in 1948, has been proved to be less effective than generally believed. Evidently, "individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert". Instead, "systematic inventive thinking" is better, where successful products are analyzed into separate components and considered for alternative uses. "The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem."

Clay Shirky, professor of new media at New York University and author of "Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations", argues the same thing, especially in regards to the internet and Web n.0. (See here and here for videos of him presenting the ideas of the book.) He refers to the two kinds of social capital -- bonding capital, best envisaged as the number of people willing to lend you a large sum of money without asking when you'll be paying it back, and bridging capital, the number of people to whom you would lend small amounts of money without much fuss. (In other words, bonding capital is more exclusive, bridging capital is more inclusive.)

Shirky asserts it's not how many people you know, it's how many different kinds of people -- that most good ideas come from people who are bridging "structural holes" in an institution -- because too much bonding capital in a group results in an echo-chamber of ideas. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability -- it's creativity as an import-export business.

Aside re school librarians: we are particularly well-suited to bring bridging capital (read: new ideas) to planning meetings, interacting as we do with all grade levels.

Gladwell, in an interview, also credits his own writing success with the breadth and diversity of his friendship base, when asked where he gets his ideas:

People tell me things. I have learned, I suppose, how to position myself to have access to serendipitous moments. I fill my life with people from diverse backgrounds. I have friends in academia, in business, in technology. Once you understand the importance of those contacts you can take steps to increase the likelihood of having them pay off. I never come up with things entirely by myself. It's always in combination with somebody. I exploit the entire resources of my friends very efficiently.

Charles Leadbeater, a UK consultant on innovation and creativity, came out with a book similar to Shirky's at roughly the same time -- We-Think: mass innovation, not mass production. Videos of him speaking about the book can be found here -- and there is a 3-minute animated illustration of the book on his homepage. (I must admit, I like his plain confession, This is Not a Blog.)

Leadbeater brings up Lewis Hyde, poet, essayist, and author of "The Gift", a book (first published in 1983) dedicated to exploring the gift economy, especially with regard to the arts, though also including the internet -- and the power of sharing and becoming aware of the gifts cycling throughout society. Hyde was recently the focus of a New York Times Magazine article -- "What is Art For?" -- in which he distinguishes his take on the artistic commons as more academic, abstract, and aesthetically nuanced compared with that of Lawrence Lessig, founder and guru of the (more legalistic) Creative Commons movement. (See Lessig's brilliant TED talk on How Creativity is being Strangled by the Law.)

Hyde's book explores the concept of the gift economy (contrasted to the market/commodity economy), roaming through anthropology, mythology, and poetry (Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, in particular) -- and likens it to our current understanding of ecology -- that every gift calls for a return gift in a large self-regulating earth system. He notes the traditional types of gifts -- separation gifts, threshold gifts or gifts of passage (birthdays, graduation, marriage, newcomers), and incorporation gifts (goodbye presents meant to give a piece of yourself to someone going away). Transformative gifts are less concrete, but no less important, and cover the situation of a young artist awakened to their life's labor by another's artistic gift to the world, with the paradox of the gift exchange -- that when a gift is used, it is not used up -- and how the only gratitude required is the act of passing the gift along. (I could go on and on -- read the book -- it's available from the National Library for those of you in Singapore.)

Speaking of gifts -- look at this mindmap someone (Austin Kleon) has put up on Flickr re Hyde's book:

It is obvious how this all relates to Web n.0. Here, for example, is a snippet about sharing from a blog posting by Mark Pesce, an Australian future-oriented consultant:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.

Speaking of giving things away, Seth Godin, major marketing guru, is giving away his most recent book, "Tribes" -- as an audio book. (I listened to it while doing housework one Sunday -- a perfect way to enhance menial tasks.)

His little book is about leaders -- and how tribes (the small units we're going to find ourselves belonging to) need them -- for the 7 C's: challenge, creating a culture, curiosity, communication, charisma, connection, and commitment. He defines leadership as the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. That leaders give people stories they can tell about themselves -- and that you can't lead without imagination (read: creativity).

Interesting aside: there's a new social anthropology book out by Daniel Miller which argues that in London now every household is, in effect, a tribe.

Another free download (pass that gift on) to note: Little Brother -- a popular young adult novel by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame. Re the creativity of young people in evading Big Brother's attempt to control them and the internet.

Back to creativity: I must, of course, mention a few other TED talks on the subject: Sir Ken Robinson -- if people know any TED talk, it's usually this one: Do Schools Kill Creativity? See also Amy Tan -- and Tim Brown.

I'm going to end with Alison Gopnik, psychology/philosophy professor and child development expert and her musings on why fiction is so attractive to children (oops, humans) in the 2006 Edge "World Question Center".

The greatest success of cognitive science has been our account of the visual system. There's a world out there sending information to our eyes, and our brains are beautifully designed to recover the nature of that world from that information. I've always thought that science, and children's learning, worked the same way. Fundamental capacities for causal inference and learning let scientists, and children, get an accurate picture of the world around them - a theory. Cognition was the way we got the world into our minds.
But fiction doesn't fit that picture - its easy to see why we want the truth but why do we work so hard telling lies? I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability....
So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.
I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds....

In fact, I think now that the two abilities - finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true - they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

Looking back at (the technology behind) our conference

2008-12-20T18:49:00.006+08:00

Our conference -- Hands on Literacy -- came off beautifully just over a month ago, with over 260 people attending, but it burned us committee members out so much that we have spent the rest of this term recovering.

In our de-brief we made many notes of things to improve on next time, the most important being: "start planning much earlier" -- like 18 months ahead of time. We really only started working on it in mid-August and it was held mid-November, so it was a miracle it all came off at all.

The use of technology to plan and present the conference was another area for improvement. Wiki and SurveyMonkey worked great for us, but not enough presenters took up the challenge to make their pages their own. Also need to go with online payment/registration, e.g., using something like EventBrite, next time. And in retrospect should have set up Google Group for the committee, rather than relying on just a Google Email account. Getting all committee members up to speed with chosen web 2.0 tools before crunch time is something else.

Several presenters have updated their wiki pages since the conference, including:

Marj Kirkland, the keynote speaker who also did workshop presentations on whole school literacy plans and literature circles -- her slideshows and her handouts are up on her wiki page;
Genet Erickson Adam and Nicole Kutschenreuter, who did a workshop on Literacy in the Mathematics Classroom. See their wiki page for PDFs as well as a link to a list of books they used available online via WorldCat;
Jan Stipek, who did a workshop on Using Free Voluntary Reading in Support of Mother Tongue Literacy, put a PDF of his presentation up on his page.

But wish more did.

Plastic, recycling, and the future of the book

2008-10-11T17:05:00.027+08:00

A question every school librarian must face is, to cover? or not to cover? In plastic.

For our new library, I choose to buy hardcovers whenever possible -- only adding a plastic layer to books with dust jackets where the jacket alone carries a front cover image (i.e., when the hardcover itself is plain). Any paperbacks I buy are being left as is. No sticky-back plastic -- of any kind.

It's a decision of cost -- of the plastic, of the labor spent attaching the plastic, and to the environment which must live with the plastic for its lifetime.

A similar question every school/teacher must face is, to laminate? or not to laminate? My friend Pam Duncan, a head librarian in control of the school's laminating machine, has single-handedly managed to significantly reduce her school's plastic footprint by insisting staff justify each and every act of lamination to her personally.

-- Poster by John Blyberg (CC-Attribution); hat-tip Michael Stephens and then LibraryThing;
FYI: created using Despair, Inc.'s Parody Motivator Generator

Does plastic convey authority? And does it allow users to abdicate personal responsibility? As Tim from LibraryThing comments (on the above poster):

I've wondered if lamination and similar protective techniques in libraries don't encourage the very disaster they anticipate—"Oh, the book has a plastic cover on it? I guess that means its okay if I read it while eating a meatball sub!"

I know I'm doing lots of talking with students about their responsibility to respect books, given that we're not exerting any extra effort to give books extra protection. (Responsibility and Respect are two key terms in the PYP.)

On the other hand, books may rapidly become completely recyclable so when that meatball sub falls onto it, you just pop it in the back of the "recycler/fabricator" that we'll have in our homes -- and produce a new copy (or print out a different book).

Witness the all-plastic, waterproof, completely recyclable book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking How We Make Things, a manifesto calling for ecologically intelligent design.

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things -- products, packaging, and systems -- from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.
(p. 104, Cradle to Cradle)

Intentionally recyclable physical books aren't that prevalent yet, though we do have the ability to print and bind paperback books from scratch in minutes, via machines like the EBM (Espresso Book Machine) -- at a cost of a US$0.01 per page.

Watch these two short videos and think how far we have come:

1947 video "Making Books" produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in collaboration with the Library of Congress -- a classic black and white informational video showing how books used to be produced -- from the author's manuscript to typesetting to lines to composed pages to copper plates, printing, binding, covering, etc. (Thanks to the graphic artist student Golden Krishna for discovering this precious piece of history -- and my apologies that I can't trace now who led me to his website...)

The Espresso Book Machine -- in action!

Which brings me to Brewster Kahle, the inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian, who is trying to bring everything ever published to anyone who wants it -- universal access to all knowledge. He's working to digitize all the texts of the world and, because he still likes the old-fashioned technology of "the book", he's experimenting with machines like the Espresso Book Machine in places like rural Uganda -- to bring books to people who need/want them. Listen to him talk about his various projects at TED in December 2007.

You can't talk about digitizing all the books in the world without mentioning the latest e-book readers, like the Kindle (thanks to John Blyberg for another photo). Kahle and others tout the $100 laptop as a great device for reading e-books. Watch Robin Ashford demonstrate it on YouTube below. (I don't think I'm going to be able to resist buying one....)

Want to read more about the future of books (and publishing and writing)? First, subscribe to if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Second, you might enjoy reading "The 21st Century Writer" and the accompanying interviews of Tim Reilly, Douglas Rushkoff, Stephen Abram, and Frank Daniels, published in The Futurist (July/August 2008 issue online).

I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather information and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process. What the Internet has done is bring us new methods of curation.
-- Tim Reilly

The Joy of Literacy

2008-10-05T23:27:00.021+08:00

"The single most important condition for literacy learning is the presence of mentors who are joyfully literate people."

-- according to Shirley Brice Heath, professor of linguistics and English and linguistic anthropologist.

What a wonderful phrase -- joyfully literate.

Which makes me think of books about literacy which have made me feel joy over the past year.

Fiction choice: The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett -- a short, humorous fantasy in which the Queen of England stumbles upon a mobile library behind Buckingham Palace and out of politeness and duty starts to take books out -- and how it changes her life.

Of course, at first she's not impressed, but slowly she gets hooked and moves up the ladder of literature. When she later goes back to re-read that first novel, she finds it quite easy and interesting.

And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed.

This is the point of my favorite non-fiction literacy book of 2008.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain represents a snapshot — to be precise, three snapshots — of what we now know about the origins of reading (how the human brain learned how to read); the development of reading (from infancy's influence, to expert reading adults); the gifts and the challenges of reading failure in dyslexia (what happens when the brain can't read). It's a triptych of our knowledge and a frank apologia to this cultural invention that changed our lives as a species and as individual learners....

I use Proust as a metaphor for the most important aspect of reading: the ability to think beyond what we read. The great French novelist Marcel Proust wrote a little-known, essay-length book simply called On Reading in which he wrote:

The heart of the expert reading brain is to think beyond the decoded words to construct thoughts and insights never before held by that person. In so doing, we are forever changed by what we read.

-- Maryanne Wolf summarizing her own book. (See also podcast interviews with her.)

The acme of the reading brain is time to think. So simple, so powerful.
A system that has become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think. This is the miraculous gift of the reading brain.
Time to laugh, time to hear the author's voice, time to listen to the voice in your own head.

As Wolf points out, the evolution of writing provided a cognitive platform for other skills.
It is not reading directly that caused all these skills to flourish, but the secret gift of time to think that lies at the core of the reading brain's design was an unprecedented impetus for their growth.
She touches a bit on the implications of online reading and changes to come, but not enough. It's a hot topic.

In July 2008 the New York Times published the first in a series of articles looking at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

To accompany it, they also set up a Web Extra: Further Reading about Reading, with links to other interesting articles, such as Slate magazine's Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online (June 2008) and The Atlantic Monthly article in the July/August issue,Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the internet is doing to our brains.

More recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education weighed in with Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming, which argues that "we must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning."

21st Century Focus at Conferences... near and far...

2008-09-20T18:38:00.027+08:00

Hands On: Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom and Library is the one-day conference our Singapore international school librarian network is putting on Saturday, 15 November 2008 at the Australian International School Singapore. It's modeled on the Teach IT conference of the IT educator network, which was offered in November 2005 and 2007. Note that anyone is welcome to attend, whether you work in Singapore or not.

We're still at the Call for Workshops stage (until Sep. 30th). Topics can cover all forms of literacy, whether visual, digital, information, critical, mathematical, historical, scientific, political, media, cultural, spatial, social, ethical, or the traditional textual. We especially welcome workshops with a "hands-on" component or practical application of theory.

Wish I could have attended the Learning 2.0 conference up in Shanghai this week, but with a new campus we were in lock-down mode for the month of September. Others, from our old campus, did get to go, e.g., Ben Morgan gave a workshop on Creating a 21st Century Learning Environment in Your School: From Strategic Vision to Reality (his slide presentation and handouts are available for download from that link page). As IT director, his take is the big picture and I appreciate we've come a long way, however, I still chafe at StudyWiz and its inability to let people roam around and see what other teachers are doing. It's structure is basically silos, or, what happens in your classroom stays in your classroom. It may suit secondary, but not primary. Though we at the East Campus are trying to find ways to be as open as possible, using the StudyWiz junior interface.

Roaming around the Learning 2.0 conference ning, "21st Century" jumps out as a major buzzword. Note these workshop sessions:

The Dimensions of Change within Schools in the 21st Century -- and -- Implementing 21st Century Skills: Steps to Build Momentum -- both by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach -- see her wiki 21st Century Collaborative
Leadership for the 21st Century: Awakening to School 2.0 -- by Blair Peterson -- see his wiki Principals of the Future
Students and Teachers Promoting 21st Century Skills and Social Networking on a Global Scale - Using ePals in the Classroom - Demonstration and Discussion -- by Mikey McKilip
The 21st Century Interactive Classroom -- by Cecilia Tsang
Best Practices in 21st Century Library Media Centers -- by Kimberli Gertz
Making the Shift Happen: Embracing 21st Century Literacy at Your School -- by Kim Cofino -- see her wiki Making the Shift Happen, where she has slides of her presentation available

Kim gave a workshop at the Teach-IT conference last November here in Singapore and her school, ISB (International School of Bangkok), is pursuing 21st century goals with a passion. See, for example, their ongoing professional development wiki, 21st Century Literacy, complete with minutes of meetings, teams, projects, resources, etc.

Videos and the US election

2008-09-20T17:15:00.011+08:00

As an American overseas, I'm leery of mentioning the US too much. It's wise to keep a low profile/voice. We're not liked. Having said that, I can't help but note two great videos about the election.

The Common Craft Show excels at simple video explanations. Here's their latest, on how the US electoral college works (or why voters don't directly elect the president):

If you have been following any of the Sarah Palin media circus, you will appreciate this send-up of Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton from Saturday Night Live, a comedy show:

Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live's former head writer and creator of the show 30 Rock, appeared with SNL's Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton to "battle sexism" in the show's opening skit.

Michael Wesch, Media Literacy, and Classroom Portals

2008-09-20T14:59:00.012+08:00

Michael Wesch is a professor of digital ethnography who has learned both from his students and with his students. His videos -- A Vision of Students Today, The Machine is Us/ing Us, and Information R/evolution -- are well known.

Over the summer he did two major presentations, with overlapping content, summarizing his work with students and providing a good overview of the cultural history of YouTube and the role of digital media in learning. He rebuts the digital native/immigrant distinction, saying we're all natives now in this rapidly changing digital environment. He also confirms that while students have been exposed to a lot of media, it does not follow that they are media literate.

One was "An anthropological introduction to YouTube" given at the Library of Congress, June 23, 2008.

The other, "A Portal to Media Literacy" or "Michael Wesch on the Future of Education", was presented at the University of Manitoba on June 17, 2008. This is the one I recommend for teachers, as it was aimed at educators. Wesch has only been teaching for four years and the story of his own learning path is fascinating. (NB: it runs for about an hour, so get a glass of wine or a cappuccino in hand before you start.)

Wesch keeps asking, how can we create students who create meaningful connections? How do we create significance?

He offers this wonderful quote from Barbara Harrell Carson (1996, Thirty Years of Stories):

Students learn what they care about from people they care about and who, they know, care about them.

He discusses first finding a grand narrative to provide context and relevance (i.e., semantic meaning, or a big picture), then creating a learning environment that values and leverages the learners themselves (i.e., personal meaning) -- doing both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment. He asks, how do we move students from being knowledgeable to being knowledge-able?

Wesch uses Netvibes to provide a platform for student participation: Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

On a much smaller scale, for much younger students, Keri-Lee and I are playing around with Pageflakes to create a portal for our primary school students. My plan is to make a separate Library tab on the page.

Self-Organizing Learning

2008-09-20T14:28:00.010+08:00

It's not just a new school year, but also a new colony of a school, that makes me interested in people uncovering new patterns of learning in children, e.g., how they learn without any teachers involved.

Sugata Mitra is behind the "Hole in the Wall" project in India where kids were given access to a screen and a keypad and the internet -- and left to learn it by themselves. In his TED talk -- Can Kids Teach Themselves? -- he also addresses the role teacher attitudes play in kids' learning.

Different research -- this time on teenagers who have plenty of quality access to the internet -- reveals the same self-organizing learning at work, thanks to videogames.

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science

I was trying to think about how to watch students learn something technical on their own but in groups (a la Sugata Mitra's experience). Then suddenly there it was, happening in front of me. Keri-Lee teaches ICT in the other end of the resource center and she was busy helping one student at a terminal. Meanwhile, another child had got hold of the interactive whiteboard pen and was experimenting with whatever had been left up on the screen. Three or four students clustered around, shouting out suggestions of what to press and what to try. Made me think we should leave it up running every break and lunchtime, just to let that group learning continue.

It also made me think about how best to introduce our new library search catalog, when it's ready to go. Might just force them to work in groups of four (even though we have enough terminals for a one-to-one session) and make it a treasure hunt with no instructions, e.g., you have 20 minutes to see how many different things you can do with the new online catalog.

The actual, not the virtual - or the love (ideally) inherent in classroom teaching

2008-07-09T23:28:00.014+08:00

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

Listening to Margaret Edson talk about her love of classroom teaching, it's not hard to understand her success as a playwright ("Wit" won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 2001 by Mike Nichols, a movie the critic Roger Ebert recently mentioned as one that hurt too much to watch now that he's had cancer himself).

Don't just read her speech -- watch her perform it. Her delivery is dramatic, poetic, and funny. (I've already suggested her as a speaker for a TED conference.)

Her emphasis on the importance of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students reminds me of one of my favorite poems -- "Did I Miss Anything" by Tom Wayland -- subtitled, "Question frequently asked by students after missing a class".

Edson spoke at Commencement Day at Smith College this past May -- her alma mater, and mine, which is how I came across her speech -- in one of those usually boring email bulletins. Such graduation addresses aren't always so memorable, though two others I've bookmarked are: JK Rowling on "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination" at Harvard this year, and the comic writer David Sedaris at Princeton back in 2006.

Rowling's comments on the benefits of failure -- real failure -- makes me think of the need to welcome and recognize risk in our lives (read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb).

Similarly, her comments on imagination -- that "what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality" -- reinforce Edson's message that it's the journey, not the arrival, that counts in life. Edson claims she wrote her Smith college application essay on the theme, via Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Montaigne. I've always preferred Cavafy's expression of it in the poem "Ithaka".

Edson is passionate about her job as a kindergarten teacher and considers giving children the power to read as the best way she can change the world.

"Reading and writing is power--the thing that gives you the most power in your whole life. I like being part of students acquiring that power. I like handing that power over."

On obstacles, cultural and otherwise...

2007-12-22T13:46:00.000+08:00

Another video that spiraled round the web (and got so much media attention that the guy has been offered a book contract - to write in these last months before he dies of cancer) is Prof. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, given at Carnegie Mellon back in September. Well worth it. (The Wikipedia page on Randy has links to everything -- e.g., listen/read his lecture on Time Management -- sure to make you feel like a sluggard...)

Randy reminds us what the brick walls of life are there for.

The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop other people.

On the last day of school I hit a brick wall of sorts -- and what do librarians do when they're feeling low? They go to a library. Nothing like a new book, a new outlook, to perk you up. There I picked up two books, in that serendipitous way, which were particularly apt.

One was The Dip: a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick) (2007) by Seth Godin, marketing guru, author and blogger (see/hear also his recent TED talk).

Godin goes on about why it's best to be number one in whatever niche you find yourself, in this world of a million micromarkets -- to focus on the "short head" rather than the "long tail". That's it's not good enough any more to be well rounded -- you need to persevere and get beyond the Dip, the slump between starting and mastery, between "the artificial screens set up to keep people like you out" [Randy's brick wall] -- because the Dip creates scarcity which creates value. Beat Mediocrity! is his mantra.

The other book -- Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (2007) -- by James Watson, of DNA "double helix" fame -- also talks, in the context of academic politics, about the need to be the best. He laments how for years Harvard, where he was teaching, refused to hire other biologists working at the cutting edge, leaving rival institutions like MIT to scoop up the best geneticists. The reason? Harvard was complacent about already being the best. "Academic institutions do not easily change themselves" is one (not very surprising) lesson he shares.

Back to my world now.... How can we claim to be offering a world-class education if we don't have world-class libraries and information literacy programs? They think our test results are doing just fine, that such things are luxuries. As if results are the only yardstick...

Our stats certainly don't measure up to a top school -- judging by the recently published School Libraries Count! A National Survey of School Library Media Programs 2007 (American Library Association), e.g., in terms of number of qualified teacher-librarians per student, size of the collection per student, spending per student, etc. (The Australian school/library associations are in the process of doing their own survey -- and I look forward to seeing their numbers.)

But, then, I must remember "culture codes" (again, see The Culture Code (2006) by Clotaire Rapaille) come into play. What is the code for "school library" in different cultures? and how does that affect the position of libraries in international schools?

We are a British heritage school and the UK simply does not have a strong tradition of school librarianship. According to a CILIP survey, less than 30% of secondary schools in England are run by qualified librarians, either full or part-time. How many of those qualified librarians are also qualified teachers isn't mentioned (very few, I suspect) -- as school librarians are not expected to be teachers in the UK -- unlike in the US, Australia, NZ, and Canada.

So there is only a limited code for "school librarian" in the UK and no cultural code for "teacher-librarian" (or "school library media specialist", as they're called in the US). It reminds me of Clotaire Rapaille's story of how Nestle came to him for advice when they were having trouble selling instant coffee in Japan -- and he told them there was no cultural code for coffee there, then recommended they establish one by marketing coffee-flavored desserts to children and wait for the kids to grow up.

I need to find a way for my administrators to experience the value added by a secondary school teacher-librarian and a dynamic secondary school library program... to establish a code...

The Story of Stuff... American culture at its worst

2007-12-12T13:57:00.000+08:00

The latest viral video is "The Story of Stuff" (a fellow teacher e-mailed it to me a few days and now it's turning up everywhere). Well worth watching. (I love the white background + simple drawings, which remind me of the terribly clever videos of The Common Craft Show...)

Throughout the 20-minute film, activist Annie Leonard, the film’s narrator and an expert on the materials economy, examines the social, environmental and global costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. Her illustration of a culture driven by stuff allows her to isolate the moment in history where she says the trend of consumption mania began. The “Story of Stuff” examines how economic policies of the post-World War II era ushered in notions of consumerism — and how those notions are still driving much of the U.S. and global economies today.
-- taken from the press release

Yes, it's political -- and very American, e.g., in its definition (and images) of government, but the message is still worth spreading. Especially as we approach the great consumer holiday of Christmas.

When Annie Leonard laments American culture as one that glorifies shopping and accepts planned obsolescence, I couldn't help but think of how it echoes some of the American "codes" described by Clotaire Rapaille in his book The Culture Code (2006):

American code for shopping = RECONNECTING WITH LIFE (going out to play)

American code for quality = IT WORKS (service is more important to Americans than great quality -- because "it works")

American code for perfection = DEATH

Allan Luke online... and other luminaries in the field of new literacies...

2007-12-03T09:17:00.000+08:00

If you're interested in literacies -- critical, new, or multiple -- and you don't know Allan Luke, then please watch this webcast of him speaking about "New Literacies" in Canada in May 2007, hosted by the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. (Thanks to Susan Sedro for pointing the link out on her blog, Adventures in Educational Blogging...)

He's a huge presence on the literacy scene -- especially in Australia. See, for example, this list of literacy links, including Allan Luke's Four Resources model, gathered by Rosemary Horton at the P.L. Duffy Resource Centre at Trinity College (Western Australia).

I'm also a fan of various colleagues of his over the years (all connected with Australia or Canada):

Colin Lankshear / Michele Knobel (see their blog, Everyday Literacies, as well as their book New Literacies: everyday practices and classroom learning)

Cushla Kapitzke (at Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Kieran Egan (at Simon Fraser University, Canada)

It's interesting that Allan Luke has connections to Singapore as well. He worked here for a few years (some time ago) and is the Foundation Dean, Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

In the webcast, Allan Luke mentions Vivian Vasquez -- a name I hadn't come across before in the field of critical literacy. I'm pleased to see she has plenty of podcasts on critical literacy in practice to listen to. Another lead to follow....

How delicious...

2007-11-17T08:27:00.000+08:00

del.icio.us is one of those tools I couldn't live without.

In my main (personal/professional) account -- TheLibrarianEdge -- I have over 1800 bookmarks to date, while in the account I recently set up for school -- UWCSEA -- I'm only at a couple of hundred.

I use the school one to collect links for both students and teachers. For instance, on my Grade 3 wiki, there's a page for the current unit of study, Blue Planet, which is about water -- where I have a link to my collection of bookmarks. The distinction between links for students and links for teachers/parents is based on the tags I've assigned. When I find a relevant website, I make "water" one of the tags and if it's particularly good for the students, I make "blueplanet" a tag. That way I can show the kids the "blueplanet" links and the teachers the more complete list tagged "water".

Tag clouds shows the concentration of subjects -- and I've got two bundles of tags on my TheLibrarianEdge account: Social Software and GreenWorld.

Definitely bother to install the buttons to make saving a link just a click away.

How it gets social is via the network feature. In my del.icio.us network, you can see that I watch 19 people's bookmarks. You can also see that I have 40 "fans" -- or people who have added me to their network. Some of the relationships are mutual. And every now and then I check out my fans' bookmarks because I discover new people worth watching.

My network page is, in effect, an inbox of everything that my network has bookmarked recently. So I can watch their activity. This is a wonderful way to spend hours on the internet...

Sharing the wealth of information

2007-11-16T12:09:00.000+08:00

Our TeachIT workshop today on Social Software in School and Life is not so much HOW to use these Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, online catalogs, photo sharing, etc.), but what you might do with them. The power of the social comes from seeing how others make use of tools. So we're hoping our chart will get filled in with examples from our participants.

What is the best way to share information?

SHARING LISTS OF BOOKS: Example 1: PYP Resources

PYP teacher-librarians are always being asked to provide a book that exemplifies the IB Learner Profile. And paper lists of relevant books are always being passed around. My solution to this was LibraryThing, an online cataloguing program.

My catalog -- UWC_PYP (see description) started out as a means of consolidating lists of books that relate to the IB Learner Profile (examples of how we can be Inquirers, Thinkers, Communicators, Risk-takers, Knowledgeable, Principled, Caring, Open-minded, Balanced, and Reflective), however, it's now all-purpose.

For example, my children's literature discussion group recently focused on books featuring contemporary cultures. So I took the various recommendations and information collected them under the tag "contemporary cultures" in my UWC_PYP catalog. Voila! -- an instant "contemporary cultures" reading list.

As the school librarian, I also have been frustrated with finding out (and keeping track) of the sets of novels available (but not easily accessible) in all the grade levels' reading cupboards. I run an after-school book club so always need new sets of novels. Once I got the teachers to give me their paper lists, I quickly entered them in a LibraryThing catalog: UWC_novelsets. Note how the tags tell me where the books are and how many are available (where '?' indicates I'm still not sure!).

Building A Reading Community

2007-11-01T12:34:00.000+08:00

Had the chance to hear Helen Reynolds, Teacher-Librarian of the Year 2007 in Australia, speak at the Australian school here in Singapore the other day. Though on the The Southport School library webpage her job title is listed as Senior Librarian, she says she was hired ten years ago as Director of Information Services. Instead, Director of Literacy might be appropriate.

Her talk was titled: Maintaining Momentum: Keeping boys reading in the middle school years, and she gave us an overview of her philosophy and practices behind the creation of an active reading community in a day/boarding boys' school with an enrolment of approximately 1400 preschool to year 12.

She swears by Stephen Krashen's The Power of Reading, Aidan Chambers's The Reading Environment, Young Australians Reading, and Knowing Readers by Susan LaMarca and Pam MacIntyre.

The key is getting the whole community involved -- a giant partnership -- which means not just the library and the English department, but all staff (even the cleaners) and the parents. The goal is an environment which legitimizes wide and comprehensive reading.

Some elements of her successful program:

* All students keep Reading Records -- lists of the books they've read in and out of school -- that follow them throughout their time at the school (so any teacher can see any student's reading history);
* Book reports are 40-second oral events, done at the end of term -- no long boring writing about what you've read;
* Book chat time -- lots of it -- in classrooms, in the library, in the hallways;
* Author visits -- as many as possible;
* Regular silent reading times throughout the school, e.g., every English class starts with 10 minutes of silent reading, and Grades 8-10 English classes come to the library every fortnight for a session of book talk and reading;
* Monthly book club (and newsletter), where students get the pick of new library books to read and review; she also takes club members out to literary festivals and any events related to books;
* Ongoing collection of data -- such as surveys to find out what the kids are reading and how they think reading helps them; this data is shared with teachers, admin, and parents;
* Tons of book displays, e.g., the first display of the year is of books which the students voted as their favorites the year before;
* 7-week parent program at the beginning of each year -- in which she teaches parents the same information literacy skills the kids learn;
* Big book collection, catering for all reading levels and a wide variety of interests; she said she buys for everyone (including parents); I like her attitude that she's about choice, not censorship -- she says it's not her job to censor what a child reads -- parents can do that by submitting a form;
* Supporting teachers as readers and getting them to advertise their reading to students, e.g., before every holiday break, she takes a stack of books into the staff room and passes them out, and teachers in all subject areas are encouraged to produce bookmarks of their recent reads and have them available in their classrooms for students to take;
* Reader's Cup (an annual competition in Australia) -- she always get a team to enter;
* Writing competitions -- she encourages students to enter any online writing competition and says some students have won money from them.

Three websites she recommends:

The Children's Book Council of Australia
Inside a Dog -- a website dedicated to books for young adults
The Source -- a (subscription) database of children's literature, especially Australian, and connected to the children's literature journal, Magpies

Given my current situation, I was particularly pleased to hear her say, of course, she lets parents borrow. And her response to my query about borrowing limits was, unlimited! (She did admit there are borrowing limits printed in some library policy document, but they are not enforced.) Letters about overdue books are sent to parents after two months and any financial reckoning about lost books is only done at the end of term. So reasonable...

I also noted her comment that circular tables in the library encourage social booktalking. Made me decide I must get to IKEA to replace a few of my dreary institutional rectangles with round colorful ones.

Social Software -- or the power and fun of collecting, organizing, and sharing information

2007-10-27T23:23:00.000+08:00

Two major problems with the Internet are:

too much information
too many tools to choose from

Given that, it's best to think of an information problem as an excuse to play around with social software.

The problem Barb and I face -- with this workshop -- is how to organize the information we want to share with people while minimizing the "presentation" talking and maximizing the "hands-on" aspect.

For now, I'm going to blog about the kinds of problems social software has solved for me -- and we'll wait to figure out the best kind of online launch pad for the workshop.

PROBLEM: How to get photographs online -- to share with others or simply to store for personal projects?

SOLUTION: Use an online photo sharing site, like Flickr (see How to Select a Photo Sharing Site for Newbies). Flickr has a tour available on its home page, which is one place to start.

Another way is to just start searching for photos on Flickr, e.g., photos tagged "Singapore" or photos including the word "Hmong".

Flickr also allows you to put photos in Sets and then to put Sets into Collections. For instance, I have a Collection called UWCSEA Primary Library, which contains 8 sets, e.g., Writers' Camp 2007: Telunas Beach and 07-08 UWCSEA Primary Library Displays. It's my way of recording what I do in the library. I have another collection called Other School Libraries where I keep sets of photos of libraries taken on professional peer visits.

NB: I can control who can see any photo by specifying its privacy level -- public, friend, or family.

By becoming "friends" with people and adding them to your Contact list, then you can automatically see when they upload new photos. For instance, Barb just became a grandmother and when I login to Flickr, I can see the latest photos she's uploaded of the baby -- because she's one of my Contacts.

There are also Groups you can join. I'm thinking of joining the 365 Library Days Project -- where you are supposed to take one photo a day of your library for a year and post them on Flickr. Search for groups that interest you. Take a look at all these Singapore groups on Flickr.

How could Flickr be used in the classroom? Read about Photo Sharing in Education in the Teaching Hacks Wiki (which has enough material there to keep you occupied for another Saturday or two).

People are doing all kinds of fun stuff with Flickr. I like this "Spell with Flickr" application -- which takes text as input and gives you back photos that spell out the text, e.g.,:

Social spots in Google's many products....

2007-10-26T17:27:00.000+08:00

Seen a list of all the Google products lately? It's impressive. (Check out the [French] map of these products and how they relate to one another, though -- mind -- it's as enormous as Google's influence.... I prefer the more impressionistic (and English) map of Googleland....)

Maybe Google is taking over the world, but I'm still a happy user.

My favorite tools are Gmail, Google Reader, iGoogle, and Google Notebook.

I love Gmail with its ability to tag e-mails with multiple labels -- effectively allowing them to "live" in multiple folders -- makes managing the inbox so easy. (I don't know if any of you subscribe to multiple listservs -- but Gmail makes it easy to set up filters and automatically tag/label posts as they come in -- have a read here about how I manage my listserv traffic using a second Gmail account, if you're interested...)

Even if you don't use Gmail, you can still get a Google account and access their other products.

GoogleReader is hard to show off -- as you would have to be logged into my Google account to see my (170+) feeds and my pile of reading. But they now allow you to identify items for sharing. This is the public webpage of my GoogleReader shared items. They also allow you to post clips of your most recent shared items on your blog (so you should see them on the upper left of my blog page).

iGoogle is Google's home page option for you. Again, you can't see mine unless you log in as me. But I can tell you it's got feeds from my various social software tools -- my LibraryThing catalog, my del.icio.us account, my GoogleDocs, my Gmail, my GoogleReader, etc., plus a "to-do" list that I maintain.

GoogleNotebook allows me to make notes and mark websites for later reading/action. I can share these notebooks, e.g., Barb and I shared one in planning for this workshop. While we have read/write privileges, GoogleNotebook also has an option to make a notebook public -- so you can see what we have in our notebook called Social Software Workshop.

Will Richardson over on Weblogg-ed recently asked the blogosphere:

What’s Your Process?

Seriously. I want to know. What do you do when you read a couple of sentences in a post or article that really resonate? How do you capture and organize those snippets? What tools do you use? How often do you recall those sentences, access them? How do you search for them? Is your process working?

Lots of people answered him -- and I couldn't resist adding my two cents:

Like so many others posting here, I’m a huge fan of Google Notebook, available wherever there’s internet access, from any machine. Definitely download the Firefox extension, so with one right-click, you can pop in a snippet and a link.

When I go through my Google Reader inbox, I make entries in my various Google Notebooks of things I want to follow up on or want to make notes on (though, yes, I also use del.icio.us to log websites, as well as diigo).

I maintain a number of notebooks and it’s easy to move notes from one to the other. For example, one is for “Books of interest” — definitely useful before heading to the library or bookstore. Another notebook holds my “Notes on books read”. Yet another is “Articles to think about”.

As a teacher-librarian, I work with a variety of classes on different units of inquiry — and I create a new Google notebook for each one. It lets me build up ideas, links, etc. to sort through later.

In a couple of weeks a friend and I are doing a short workshop on Social Software for fellow teachers and we’re using a “shared” Google notebook to log and comment on sites, ideas, quotes, etc.

My “General” notebook is useful for logging things like airplane ticket reservations (so I don’t have to wait for the confirmation e-mail to arrive in my in-box — I just clip the relevant information and feel safe to leave the ticketing webpage).

I use iGoogle as my personal homepage so my Google notebooks are readily available (along with my Gmail, my Google Reader, etc.) Yes, I’m a Google fan…

GoogleDocs is another way to collect and share information. You can upload text documents, spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations -- and invite other people to become collaborators. Barb and I also use it frequently to give each other access to documents -- rather than attaching Word documents to e-mails.

Nov. 19: Just discovered that those clever folks at The Common Craft Show have produced one of their super-simple explanatory videos for GoogleDocs: GoogleDocs in Plain English

The folks at Google are constantly coming up with new ideas (during that 20% of their free-thinking time).

Google Custom Search Engines (though note, they're not the only ones out there) are a powerful tool, especially for teachers/librarians who want to enforce some quality control on students' searching. You get to specify exactly which sites and/or pages will be searched. I've already created several for my primary school students, e.g., Ms. Day's General Search Engine for Kids and an Aztec Search Engine. Both only search sites that I am confident have information at the level of primary school students.

Another more recent addition to the field is DeliGoo, a del.icio.us search engine. It's a Firefox extension that allows you to search just the websites tagged in a del.icio.us account, e.g.,

What is "Social Graph-Based Search"? -- and will it overtake Google?

2007-10-26T16:59:00.000+08:00

Robert Scoble, a well-known Internet guru, makes some strong arguments that Google is going to be left behind in terms of search (over the next few years) because its core strength is about search engine optimization techniques (i.e., how people can tweak their webpage to come out higher in the rankings because of knowing how the search algorithm works).

Instead Scoble believes social graph-based searching -- or tapping into people-based networks for information -- will reign supreme in the search world, and he discusses three in particular: Mahalo, Facebook, and TechMeme.

Watch these three video tutorials of Robert Scoble talking about "Social Graph-Based Search":

He talks about a fabric of trust -- makes me think of librarians as a reliable fabric in society, providing trusted information ....

Scoble asks, what if everyone has their own Mahalo? Our own network of "people-based systems"....

You'll probably have heard of Facebook (if not, see its Wikipedia entry -- and consider the fact that it has almost 50 million active users and Microsoft just paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in the company). TechMeme is more for technology addicts, while Mahalo, subtitled "Human-Powered Search", is designed for the general public.

I think Mahalo has a lot of potential. Their "guides" (as they call the people who put their pages together) are basically creating what librarians call "pathfinders" -- a summary of the best links on a particular topic. See, for example, Mahalo's School Subjects list. Students should find some of those pages quite useful, e.g., the page on Hamlet has everything you might need.... same goes for the page on Ian McEwan..... I know the book club I belong to would find the the Authors and Writers pages useful...

Mahalo also has some good intro "how-to" pages on technology, e.g.,

I read a recent article/interview with Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

His plan was devilishly clever: He would create a human-powered search engine that builds out prefab responses to the most popular search terms. He would shoot for the top 30%, or about 15,000 terms, to effectively skim the cream from the entire search business. Mahalo would deliver results for searches like "Paris Hilton," "iPod," and "Bill Gates," but not for your local high-school football team or childhood sweetheart. And because those results would be prepared by humans, sifted and sorted and condensed for maximum relevance, users would no longer be faced with 10 million hits, as they are with Google, but with a few dozen. Mahalo would be a search engine for people who don't like to search.

Evidently Mahalo has about 60 employees so far.

Most of Calacanis's employees are young out-of-work novelists, screenwriters, musicians, artists, and actors--info addicts happy to earn $35,000 a year plus health benefits by searching the Web rather than shelving books at Barnes & Noble or slinging chai lattes at Starbucks. Calacanis has promised them 15% of the company when and if it goes public, with the investors getting a third and Calacanis keeping the rest.

(Why doesn't he try to hire librarians, who are trained in searching and evaluating information??)

Anyway, if you like Mahalo, you might also look at Squidoo -- which is openly social (like Wikipedia, meaning anyone can create pages). Here's how they describe themselves:

Squidoo is a website hosting hundreds of thousands of lenses. Each lens is one person's look at something online. Your take on football or business or the best thai food in town. Lenses are free.

Adult as Inquirer, or, where did those cannonballs come from?

2007-10-26T15:57:00.000+08:00

Don't miss the three-part blog report in the New York Times by Errol Morris which documents his investigation into two photos taken during the Crimean War of "The Valley of the Shadow of Death".

“You mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of one sentence written by Susan Sontag?” My friend Ron Rosenbaum seemed incredulous. I told him, “No, it was actually two sentences.”

So begins the tale of how Morris, a documentary filmmaker, is intrigued by a statement by Sontag and subsequently seeks to prove which of two photographs was taken first -- theorizing along the way how and why the photographer might have changed what the camera shot. Though it may sound boring, it's not.

It's also exactly the kind of dogged inquiry that we want our students to experience....

The Slow Blog -- comes to life

2007-10-17T10:09:00.000+08:00

It's been months since I posted, so I guess I need to come up with an excuse. The frenetic summer of an expat teacher/parent ? (too much time traveling and socializing)... Returning to Singapore and immediately having to find a new place to live in a hot property market ? (downsizing is painful) ... Instead I'll suggest the tactic of slow blogging (cf: slow food and slow schools).

I certainly digest material slowly. There's that fear of being forever a lurker. Still learning, but not quick to interact. I'm reminded of an article (that I can't provide a link to at the moment) I had to read once about Aborigine children in Australia and how they prefer long periods of observing in the classroom before engaging. For them public mistakes are worse than delay or inactivity. Though the teacher might perceive them as dreaming or not on task, they instead act upon a greater requirement to survey what is going on. Slow but solid absorption.

However, the time to start writing is now. I've signed up to do a workshop at TeachIT with my good friend (and fellow teacher-librarian) Barb Philip. Just a 75 minute workshop -- but for our general international school peers (argh!) here in Singapore on a Saturday in November.

Social Software -- in school and life

See how two teacher-librarians have experimented with free (and almost free) internet software to help them collect, organize, and share information online -- and play with these Web 2.0 tools yourself. Guaranteed to get you thinking how you might use them in your classroom as well as for professional networking and personal projects. The sampler will include wikis, social bookmarking, online catalogs, blogs, RSS readers, photo and document sharing, and customized search engines.

It got a bit truncated in the official line-up, but that was our original description.

It's a deja-vu experience for me, as that's what I did 18 months ago with Beth Gourley. We signed up to do a workshop for fellow teacher-librarians at EARCOS 2006. You never learn anything until you volunteer to present it. Beth and I threw our combined learning into a wiki, which is still out there -- LibraryTails -- and surprisingly not that out-of-date. Barb and I agree we definitely need to pool our content online beforehand. This workshop will be better than the last one in that it's hands-on. So we just need a launchpad so people can start playing. Barb's going to set up a MySpace for us, while I'm going to use this blog to focus on some of our experiences and ideas.

Poem I read recently -- by Eve Merriam:

A Lazy Thought

There go the grown ups
To the office,
To the store.
Subway rush,
Traffic crush;
Hurry, scurry,
Worry, flurry.

No wonder
Grown ups
Don't grow up
Any more.
It takes a lot
Of slow
To grow.

Libraries and/or ICT?

2007-04-10T22:48:00.000+08:00

At the IBAP teacher's convention, each thread of the conference (e.g., Library, On-line Learning Communities, Applied Technologies in Instruction & Assessment, etc.) had a forum where we were asked to evaluate the ongoing issues in our area.

In the Library forum one outstanding issue raised was the relationship between school libraries and ICT. Separate but equal? Collaborative partners? One and the same?

So it was nice to have Stephen Heppell (the man who is said to have put the "C" into ICT) rave about the importance of librarians in 21st century schools.

Librarians are clearly more important than head teachers.

Librarians are needed to thread and guide the components of the learning (because the ability is build a thread is what's valuable, it's about narrative connecting stuff).

The Internet is built all wrong -- it's focused on stuff, not on people. What's important about a library is it's where people come together. The staff are the asset, that's why the librarian is far more important than the books in a library.

On his website he has a page devoted to Learning Places and Spaces -- virtual and actual. There's a lot there for anyone designing a library in the future.

Local to global? Or global to local?

2007-04-10T22:10:00.000+08:00

You hear it over and over again. Learning must be relevant to kids' lives. I completely agree. But sometimes I feel too little credit is given to the power of how we -- as teachers -- can make something non-local relevant to kids.

At a workshop I recently attended my table was supposed to be coming up with sample research paper assignment questions which would force kids to go beyond the basic instruction to "Write about a disease." We proposed a series of increasing challenging questions, from "what is disease? what diseases do I know?" to "what are the most deadly diseases in the world for which we don't have a cure?" to "if I had to write Bill Gates and convince him to give money [or raise money myself] for research into one deadly disease, what would it be and why?". The workshop leader was gently trying to get us to come up with questions more based in the kids' everyday reality, e.g., what diseases are in my community and what I can do about it?

But what if malaria isn't rampant in our community? Does that mean we shouldn't encourage kids to learn about it?

As Rischard said at some point in his talk, we must get people into the mindset of the question,

How can I be first a global citizen, second a national citizen, and third a local citizen?

Which makes me think of Kieran Egan, one of my favorite educational theorists. In an article back in 2003 in the Phi Delta Kappan, he asked if we should, "Start with What the Student Knows or with What the Student Can Imagine?"

While starting with what the child knows works with some subjects, e.g., material ones, it shouldn't be a rigid rule. He bemoans the limitation of the social studies curriculum which annually expands from the family to the community to the state to the country to the world. It can take forever to get to that world perspective. Perhaps that's where we should be starting...

Technorati Tags: EARCOS07, global issues, questions, international, teaching

Networking about pressing global issues

2007-04-10T21:55:00.001+08:00

Continuing on re Rischard and his book High Noon.... (see previous posting)

The 20 most pressing problems, according to Rischard:

Sharing our planet: Issues involving the global commons
1. Global warming
2. Biodiversity and ecosystem losses
3. Fisheries depletion
4. Deforestation
5. Water deficits
6. Maritime safety and pollution

Sharing our humanity: Issues requiring a global commitment
7. Massive step-up in the fight against poverty
8. Peacekeeping, conflict prevention, combating terrorism
9. Education for all
10. Global infectious diseases
11. Digital Divide
12. Natural disaster prevention and mitigation

Sharing our rulebook: Issues needing a global regulatory approach
13. Reinventing taxation for the 21st century
14. Biotechnology rules
15. Global financial architecture
16. Illegal drugs
17. Trade, investment, and competition rules
18. Intellectual property rights
19. E-commerce rules
20. International labor and migration rules

[both images, above right, taken from www.nais.org]

Rischard stresses that these problems require long-term thinking and commitment, something democracies cannot easily deliver (due to electoral pressures). Nation-states, territorial by definition, are also inadequate, given the inherently global nature of the problems. He proposes the establishment of Global Issues Networks, consisting of experts from various countries appointed by world leaders. These experts will work to extract rough consensus for norms and standards for all countries to adhere to in the interest of the whole world.

Rischard said you'd have to tell these experts that they were working for humanity with an eye to each of them winning a Nobel prize for their work. (I love that idea of appealing to their pride!)

The other thing we'd have to do, he said, is to work towards developing the mindset of global citizenship -- which is where education steps in.

There are several educational projects, based on Rischard's book and his advocacy, now in place, with more likely.

In the US, the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) has a program called Challenge 20/20, which pairs schools in the US with a school elsewhere in the world to work on creative global problem solving.

In Europe there are GIN (Global Issues Network) groups starting up in international schools. Clayton Lewis, head of the International School of Luxembourg, has been working with Rischard and a GIN conference is planned for next year.

Here in Asia WAB (Western Academy of Beijing) has a program in place called GIG (Global Issues Group) and they are planning to host a (student?) conference in March 2008.

Rischard said he is also meeting with the IBO to discuss how his framework could be spread throughout their school network.

It's all exciting stuff. Our school already has a well-developed Global Concerns program, but I can see the benefit of becoming part of the Global Issues Network.

Technorati Tags: EARCOS07, global issues, international schools

Questioning projects and assessments

2007-04-07T12:20:00.001+08:00

The importance of generating good, meaty, essential questions, especially for student projects, is something everyone agrees on. However, those of us in a school with an explicit inquiry-based learning framework in place often feel ahead of the game.

For example, at Doug Johnson's EARCOS 2007 pre-conference workshop for teacher/librarians on Designing Projects Students (and Teachers) Love, those of us at PYP schools felt his 4-level Research Question Rubric -- where Level 1 asks for simple recall, Level 2 asks a specific question, Level 3 asks for personal response, and Level 4 includes a call for action -- simply reflected different stages in the inquiry process.

Using Kath Murdoch's inquiry cycle model, a Level 1 question is equivalent to Tuning In, a Level 2 question might be Finding Out or Sorting Out, a Level 3 question reflects Going Further or Making Conclusions, and a Level 4 question falls under Taking Action followed by Sharing/Reflection. So, while he was trying to get us to generate a Level 4 question to assign to students, we all felt the rubric was just a spiral students would move along themselves in any one project or unit of inquiry.

When the question of appropriate assessment (or assignments) came up at the IBAP conference, Prof. Stephen Heppell had a few great substitutions he threw out to us (likes scraps to hungry animals) -- especially after the IB Diploma students participating in the forum complained about two years of effort being assessed in a 2-hour handwritten exam worth 80% of their grade.

~ instead of an 80% exam, why not require a 3-nation collaborative task for students?

~ instead of assigning a 1,500 word essay, why not require either a) scripting and posting a 3-minute podcast, or b) managing an online discussion for a week, or c) annotating 10 website links?

~ instead of bemoaning the availability of "free online essays" for students to pinch, why not assign the task of choosing 4 "free online essays" and critiquing them, and then improving on one of them?

I mentioned this to my daughter and a friend, both of whom are about to take the IGCSE/GCSE exams, and they leapt onto the last idea, saying how useful it would be for them to critique other people's essays -- to internalize the examiners' rubric and understand more fully what it is they are being asked to perform.

Technorati Tags: EARCOS07, assessment, questions, IBAP07, information literacy, plagiarism, inquiry model

Pre-search, or look before you leap

2007-04-07T10:37:00.001+08:00

presearch
pre•search
n.

The initial, guided investigation of topics, themes and main ideas for schoolwork before delving into the deeper research process.
An activity sincerely appreciated by overworked librarians, offered by Answers.com.

This is clever marketing aimed at librarians on the part of Answers.com.

"Presearch" isn't a term explicitly used in well-known research models like the Big6 or the NSW (Australia) Information Process, but it was definitely a focus of attention in several workshops I attended at the EARCOS and IBAP conferences (see previous posting).

Most people agreed that "Define" as step one implied a big first step that students find daunting. They need to be encouraged to take their time.

That's why I like the first step in Kath Murdoch's inquiry model -- which is called Tuning In (followed by Finding Out, Sorting Out, Going Further, Making Conclusions, Taking Action, and Sharing/Reflection).

Tuning In is also more in line with the first step of the revised Bloom's taxonomy (in which Remember replaced Knowledge as the lowest level; another revision was to switch the positions of Synthesis and Evaluate -- putting Create as the highest order):

1. Remember
2. Understand
3. Apply
4. Analyze
5. Evaluate
6. Create

Remembering is a good way of tuning in -- asking what we already know before we start finding out. It also reflects the level of just being able to spew out undigested facts.

At the IBAP conference, Cathy Hill and Yvonne Hammer introduced me to a new model: Parnes' Creative Problem Solving model (which they say is frequently used with gifted and talented students, based on the belief that creativity is a set of behaviors that can be learned).

* Clarification stage:
1. Mess Finding (e.g., brainstorming)
2. Data Finding (collecting the facts, acting as a camera while looking at the "mess" -- a major evaluative tool)
3. Problem Finding (prioritizing options, speculating, focusing, and finally forming a statement or question)

* Transformation stage:
4. Idea Finding (generating ideas and feeling responses, elaborating, more brainstorming)

* Implementation stage:
5. Solution Finding (evaluating, re-examining the focus, identifying leads, and analysing views of the problem)
6. Acceptance Finding (considering the audience, target the priorities, developing a plan of action, editing, presenting work)

I particularly like the word "mess" as the place to begin -- because that's exactly how I feel when I start off on a new project. I create a big mess of information and have to sort through it.

Perhaps "digging in" is a better phrase for that first step -- as it combines the idea of "tuning in" and making a "mess".

Technorati Tags: EARCOS07, IBAP07, inquiry model, information literacy, learning

Embarrassing to be an American

2007-04-06T23:40:00.000+08:00

Watched three documentaries with my three teenagers over the past 24 hours.

Hacking Democracy -- about abuses in voting machine counting in the past two presidential elections (wonderful story of how one woman started asking questions and it led to years of her life becoming absorbed in the inquiry process...)

Who Killed the Electric Car? -- about the various powers-that-be crushing the energy-efficient electric car a few years ago (though there is better news since the documentary came out) -- again, the story of dedicated individuals getting to the bottom of an unsavory situation

The Most Hated Family in America -- mind-boggling BBC documentary about an uber-religious cult family in the States who "hate America" (and gays and Jews, in particular)

Oh, and we also watched Richard Dawkins's documentary on The God Delusion, featuring many overly religious Americans, including Ted Haggard, the prominent evangelical minister, now defrocked for regularly privately paying for gay sex (and crystal meth) while publicly preaching/campaigning against gays.

My kids have never lived in the States, and, I must say, from the outside it looks like a very dubious place...

Abolish school!

2007-04-06T12:59:00.000+08:00

I just love to read calls to abolish schools. If only we had to courage to do it.

Robert Epstein, author of the recently published The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, openly argues for it in his article "Let's Abolish High School" in Education Week. Just as Alvin Toffler explained why we need to shut down the public education system in the Feb. 2007 issue of Edutopia.

It's what Prof. Stephen Heppell was suggesting at the IBAP conference: instead of schools, what if we could measure what people know and offer a free, global model of recognition of accomplishment? A kind of YouTube for learning outcomes, as he said.

During his talk, Heppell showed us several examples of work by "researchers" (as students are called, to distance them from traditional school language) participating his notschool.net project. These kids, excluded from traditional schools for some reason, are given a brand-new Macintosh computer, a broadband internet connection, and mentors -- and the learning begins. The program has exceeded all expectations. (See this report on the Apple Learning website.)

Heppell was also instrumental in the establishment of Ultraversity -- a degree course now offered at a UK university, where people can work full-time and study full-time -- by learning about the work they're already doing. (See this 2003 Guardian (UK) article on Ultraversity.)

Technorati Tags: education, future, IBAP07, schools

Global visions of the world

2007-04-05T12:42:00.000+08:00

How can we convey global visions of the world?

A fantastic visual tool I've started using with my primary students is worldmapper: the world as you've never seen it before - a joint project of the Univ of Sheffield (UK) and the Univ of Michigan (US).

Statistics about the world are presented on a world map where each country or area swells or shrinks in proportion to the data being represented. A picture is worth a thousand words -- start with the basic land area, then move on to population, then look at the estimates of the distribution of the world's wealth in the year 1 (yes, 2000 years ago) and in the year 2015. There are 366 maps so far, covering pollution, disease, resources, violence, education, etc. It's a site to watch.

Then there's the Breathing Earth website which shows you births, deaths, and carbon dioxide emissions in real time around the globe.

On a more artistic note, see Jonathan Harris's Universe project which "reveals our modern mythology" using input from the news portal Daylife.

The form & content of the future

2007-04-04T17:41:00.000+08:00

For all the virtues of virtual connections, there's nothing like a few days of face-to-face with large numbers of peers for some mental and social expansion.

Last week I had two such valuable experiences at overlapping conferences:

[The EARCOS one is listed on Hitchkr (a compendium of blog postings on different conferences) but not the IBAP one. As for handouts to download, the IB ones are listed on the conference website given above, but for the EARCOS ones you have to drill down into the sub-pages, e.g., the Workshop Presenters page, and look under each name.]

I'm writing up my notes here and here, but the focal point of both experiences was on the form and content of the future that educators, in particular, need to start acting upon -- and each conference provided an excellent guru.

Technology is obviously the form, but while anyone can get up and rant about exponential growth and the need to embrace change, not just anyone can show us workable paths and original thinking.

At the IBAP conference, Stephen Heppell (check out his bio, if you've never heard of him) pulled up example after example from his crowded Mac desktop screen showing us how he's involved in getting students and teachers to learn collaboratively using the latest technology (see notschool.net, teachers.tv, the learnometer project, the "be very afraid" film series, etc.). His presentation lived up to the tags on his website: learning, ingenuity, research, policy, design, technology, and delight. (I'll blog more about his ideas in a separate posting.)

Global issues are the content. The appearance of Jean-Francois Rischard, author of the book High Noon, at the EARCOS conference was very timely. Consensus on the pressing problem of global warming has coalesced (thanks in part to Al Gore's movie) over the past several months, so it was wonderful to hear from someone who has been thinking seriously about the problem -- and even bigger ones -- for several years.

His overall message was that we need to come up with a new methodology of global problem-solving because the problems now facing the world must be resolved by countries working together. Like Heppell, Rischard is someone who has been involved in the system he's critiquing, as he used to work for the World Bank and is very knowledgeable about the current international organizations available. (I'll blog more about his ideas in a separate posting.)

The popular meme that was killed for me, thanks to these conferences, was Marc Prensky's digital immigrant/digital native divide. I've been guilty of spreading it myself, but, I'm sorry -- given the rate of change, doesn't the divide continually shift? Is it meaningful? Each cohort born will be exposed to some technology at a younger age than those born a few years before. There was a "Student Perspectives on IT and Education" forum at the IBAP conference and the teens who participated (from two different international schools in Singapore) admitted they marvel at how younger kids are utilizing technology at a younger age than they did, e.g., mobile phones. The term "digital natives" did not resonate with them, though they did gripe that many of their teachers were not as digitally fluent as they were. I much prefer the idea of a digital literacy or fluency continuum, regardless of age.

A focus on an age definition of "digital natives" (e.g., born after 1973 or whatever the current year-marker is) also ignores the very real economic digital divide. To speak sweepingly of a whole digital generation, when many children have yet to touch a digital device, is misleading.

Brain research is strongly linked to this concept of "digital natives" and "digital immigrants". I must go back and review the latest reports because almost every speaker (especially that stand-up comic/evangelist preacher Ian Jukes) made it sound like kids' brains have eternal neuro-plasticity while ours are hopelessly hardwired. I'm sure I've recently read about the window of neural-plasticity staying open (longer), e.g., that the elderly can even continue to build new neural pathways if they keep mentally fit (the old 'use-it or lost-it' saying). Anyway, something to look up later.

As I've mentioned Jukes, I also want to point out something that strikes me as odd about his blog. I've clicked on at least six different postings (see, for example, Video Games Focus on Exercising Brain and The Handwriting is on the Wall) and they appear to be his comments on an article, for which he provides a link at the bottom of the posting. BUT, when you go to the article, it's word-for-word the same as his posting. So he seems to be posting whole copies of article texts on his blog with no attribution (neither publication nor author) on the blog itself -- though he does provide a link to the article (which doesn't always work though -- e.g., several link to expired articles (Students use IM Lingo in Essays and Shoes Track Children Using GPS) and one posting appears to be an image so you can't actually click on the link (1867 Nanomachine Now Reality)). My impression of him was as an energetic re-packager of ideas (I had heard them all before from other sources) and his blog makes it look like he doesn't even do that very well.

Would we really let students copy an article on their blog without indicating that it was NOT their own words in the posting, even if they did provide a link at the end to the real article? Must review online ethical etiquette sometime...

More thoughts in separate postings...

Technorati Tags: EARCOS07, IBAP07, digital literacy, future, conferences, technology

Scanning the literate lunatic aka genius fringe

2006-12-29T22:19:00.000+08:00

Scanning is a common cognitive exercise I focus on as a teacher-librarian, but it's also something I do as a mental magpie, so I was interested to read about scanning in the context of futurist studies.

Yes, I'd read the OCLC's Environmental Scan (re the future of libraries) a few years back, so knew what one generally consisted of, but when I checked out Dr. Wendy Schultz's website (a result of reading her recent delightful offering in the OCLC newsletter re her vision of Library 4.0 as mind gym, idea lab, art salon, and knowledge spa), I was interested to find an essay on the concept of "common, or garden variety, environmental scans", as practiced/professed by futurists like Schultz.

Schultz has her students do what she calls "360 scanning" of anything touching on STEEP (social, technological, economic, ecological, and political) environments. They start by scanning an entire set of (hardcopy) periodicals in a library, no matter what field they are in (e.g., engineers are instructed to not overlook Women's Wear Daily or Art in America), looking for patterns of themes or topics relating to change and new innovations. Then they move onto online resources (and she provides a good list), again, across a wide range of interests.

This type of scanning outside one's forte is exactly what I think all those involved in education should always be doing.

I particularly like her recommendation: "Another strategy is identifying the websites of the literate lunatic fringe -- or genius fringe -- and monitoring their blogs (weblogs)."

Yes, checking out the edge is always interesting. So what websites qualify as the literate genius fringe in the field of teaching and librarianship?? A good basic list of cutting edge mavens in the field of educational technology is on edtechnot. For social software + political philosophy there's Ideant, the blog of Ulises Ali Mejias. In terms of "the book" and adventurous speculations about its future, I love if:book. Of course, for a good collection of geniuses, you can't do better than Edge: The Third Culture.

Must go through my blog list and see who else I would include... Maybe I should make a new category in Bloglines -- "Genius fringe"...

How can stories can save your life?

2006-10-08T10:19:00.000+08:00

In my school library I put different quotes related to reading and books on shelfmarkers, hoping the kids will stop to read and think as they browse. Late Friday afternoon a 5th grade girl caught me as I was rushing from one task to another and said, "Did you make those shelfmarkers?" "Yes," I said and started to move away. "But, what about this one that says 'Stories can save your life'?" she continued, "How can that be true?" I stopped. My brain was really on something else and I searched for the simplest answer. "Well, of course they can. Maybe you read a novel about survival and you learn something that later helps you survive. And think of all the non-fiction books that have important information in them." The look on her face told me she wasn't completely convinced, but I moved on, even though I knew I hadn't handled the moment well at all.

Then today I happened to read Judith Ridge's article in the March 2006 issue of the Horn Book on the books of Boori Monti Pryor, an Aboriginal, and his white partner, Meme McDonald, in which the power of that quote in the context of Aboriginal storytelling was addressed.

It’s a fascinating concept of story — that what is most powerful lies in what cannot be said. The experience made Meme realize that “stories are our lifeblood — they instruct us how to live and how to be and what visions to hold true. They’re fundamental to the happiness of our lives, so they’re very precious. So in that sense, I think if you start to regard stories as an absolute essential of life, rather than a distraction from life, then how you evolve them and in what context, what respect you have for the source of that story, becomes very important whatever culture you come from.”

The point of all of this, of course, is that this new — or, rather, most ancient — way of creating stories isn’t just an issue for Aboriginal people. In fact, it’s not even just about story — it’s about life and culture and creating a society based on principles of respect and collaboration.

As for the quote, "Stories can save your life", one frequently cited source for it is Tim O'Brien's book "The Things They Carried", though of course Sharhazad in "1001 Arabian Nights" is the best example, as Susan Fletcher discusses on her website in connection with her book "Shadow Spinner".

I can't wait to get back to school and find that girl again. I need to talk to her...

Sontag on paying attention

2006-08-19T09:02:00.000+08:00

Wonderful advice from Susan Sontag, speaking to college students a few years ago:

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

found in a NYTimes article.

Holons, or Organic Education...

2006-06-18T21:40:00.000+08:00

Having just read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (see previous post), I can't help but think about how the comparison between the industrialized food production cycle and the nature/organic/localized one can be made re education, especially in the US at the moment.

The industrial model pursues efficiency via standardization and (over) simplification, while in natural systems efficiencies flow from complexity and interdependence.

Pollan cited one 'beyond organic' farmer who described how he stacked enterprises, layering diverse and interdependent activities on one piece of land. The farmer called each of his stacked enterprises a "holon", a word (Pollan explains) originating with Arthur Koestler and meaning an entity that is both self-contained and a dependent part of a bigger system.

For example, one holon on his farm is to have cows graze a new pasture every day, with another holon being to have chickens feed in that same field three days later in order to eat the larvae just hatched in the cowpats. The farmer described himself as the orchestra conductor, "making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time".

I'd like to think of the school library as a holon -- just as every primary school classroom and the other specialist lessons are holons -- each self-contained and yet part of an interrelated system, with collaboration and communication between teachers and teacher-librarians necessary to make sure that the flow of intellectual nutrition is gathered at exactly the best moment.

So who's the orchestra conductor? The curriculum coordinator? Better yet, the teacher-librarian...

The Omnivore's Dilemma as Inquiry-Based Learning

2006-06-18T08:34:00.000+08:00

"What should we have for dinner?" is the essential question driving Michael Pollan in his latest book, The Ominvore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. His narrative of how he explores that question is an excellent model of inquiry-based learning -- in adults, in the real world, on a topic that definitely addresses the big 'so what?' criterium.

Did you know that food production burns almost 1/5 of the petroleum consumed in the US? Just as much as cars consume... "And how could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?" By the way, his website provides access to all of his articles over the years, many of which contain ideas pulled together in this book.

I would love to see such a book re-written for upper primary and middle school students (much like Eric Schlosser took his Fast Food Nation and re-wrote it as Chew on This with Charles Wilson -- not to mention the movie just coming out).

Pollan tunes in, finds out, sorts out, goes further, make conclusions, takes action, and then shares and reflects -- in continual loops (to use Kath Murdoch's model of inquiry -- though any one could be used, e.g., the Big6, PLUS, etc.) -- about food chains, a topic included in many curricula.

Having kids see that adults get excited about big questions and pursue them is so important. Unfortunately, I haven't seen all that many primary school teachers who are committed to inquiry projects of their own -- or perhaps I should say I haven't seen many teachers share their outside passions within the school. Perhaps in my new school come August I'll provide display space in the library for teachers to do just that -- share their reading interests and personal ongoing inquiries.

Books and time

2006-06-17T08:23:00.000+08:00

A quote on books and reading that I'd never come across before:

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

But I like the version of it quoted by Gerrie Lim, who credits Warren Zevon with this rephrasing of Schopenhauer:

We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them.

Which sums up how I felt when my kids were young and time was terribly precious -- I just had to keep buying books....

EARCOS, Ross Todd, etc.

2006-04-12T06:54:00.000+08:00

My notes from the EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council on Overseas Schools) Teachers' Conference in Manila held two weeks ago are now typed up. Useful as my own memory enhancement technique -- even if no one else ever reads them!

In terms of school librarianship, the time spent with Ross Todd of CISSL was invaluable. He's an iconoclastic pixie in adult form -- terribly knowledgeable and 'naughty' -- effectively campaigning for guided inquiry and evidence-based practice (proving that you're actually adding to the learning process) rather than the drum-beating and public worship of information literacy as the focus of the Information-Learning Specialist (aka the school librarian):

--- Step out of libraryland! -- Step out of information literacy land! -- It's not about finding stuff anymore! -- Get over it! -- That annual library tour and all that Dewey babble are just a waste of time! -- Get off that information literacy pedestal! -- Get over it!

Instead

-- What we want is the discovery of knowledge, not the discovery of resources -- knowledge construction, not product construction
-- I see appalling things going on - with little learning as the outcome
-- Guided inquiry is back-door Information Literacy
-- Guided inquiry is a staged process and mediation is where you come in
-- Intervention is about identifying what the kids need and figuring out how to get them to the next stage
-- Kids are being abandoned (usually in the name of 'independent research') at the most critical stage - when they're ready to interrogate all the 'stuff' they've found
-- Knowledge in - or via - conflict is what's really important
-- We need to confront kids with alternative perspectives and conflicting ideas -- and help them grapple with evidence, arguments and judgements
-- It's about getting the kids to develop personal positions
-- Think outside the information literacy box -- Think about what intellectual scaffolds you can provide
-- Don't make information literacy standards or library skills separate from curriculum standards! Information literacy is a secondary, derived standard -- You need to look at the curriculum standards THROUGH the information literacy lens.
-- Documenting your sources (i.e., teaching bibliographic citation skills) is part of the knowledge experience -- it shouldn't be a library lesson!
-- Highlight your rubrics on your school library webpage - not your library rules!
-- Avoid PFS ("petty fine syndrome") and LHC ("loans harrassment complex")!
-- Keep asking yourself: "Did they learn anything?"

But it was Ross's excitement over doing research that made the biggest impression. I started thinking about mini research projects of my own in my new job come August, e.g., establishing baseline surveys of kids' knowledge and levels of multi-literacies in order to track just what added value a teacher librarian can provide (especially as the school doesn't have one at the moment) and the positive difference created by collaboration...

Technorati Tags: information literacy, evidence-based practice, EARCOS, conferences, school librarians, guided inquiry

Manila, here we come

2006-03-26T06:57:00.000+08:00

Only a few more days until the EARCOS teachers' conference in Manila. Really looking forward to Ross Todd's one-day pre-conference for teacher/librarians.

On Thursday Beth and I do our workshop on "The Long Tail of Narrative Space and the Information Landscape: its implications for schools and libraries".

Our LibraryTails wiki is where we're pulling it all together. It's also what we'll be delivering to the people attending. There's so much we want to say. Still figuring out the best way to demonstrate it all. Check it out a week from now.

del.icio.us sayings

2006-02-21T09:54:00.000+08:00

Joshua Schachter, from del.icio.us, gave a talk at a future web apps summit that Simon Willison attended -- and took notes on. They're wonderful snippets of thought relating to del.icio.us, RSS, and tagging (as well as more techie concerns).

Here are the bits that made me either nod my head in approval or mentally tag for more consideration:

When you chose what to build, solve a problem you have yourself so you can be
sure to understand it. Passion counts.

Aggregation is often a focus of attention (latest, most active, etc.)

As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes
less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the
system fragment in to different areas of attention.

Tagging is mostly user interface - a way for people to recall things, what
they were thinking about when they saved it. Fairly useful for recall, OK for
discovery, terrible for distribution (where publishers add as many tags as
possible to get it in lots of boxes).

Automatic tags lose a lot - doesn't help the user really achieve their goals.
That's why the "add to del.icio.us" badges don't let you suggest tags.

Value in Delicious is in the "attention" - auto-tagging detracts from this.

Make users do the minimum amount of work. But make them do something.

You have to speak the user's language. "Bookmarks" are what you call them if
you use Netscape of Firefox - most users these days know the term "favourite"
instead. Half of his population (? users) didn't know what a bookmark was.

And here's a line that made me -- as a librarian -- stop and stare:

"Beware librarians" - some people want to give tags a specific, underlying
meaning. Don't let them.

Come on...

Anyway, his comment re tagging as most useful for recall -- for the person who tagged it -- reminded me of Roger Schank's "Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence" (1990), a book I keep returning to in thinking about tagging as well as cataloging (yes, the librarian kind).

Here's an excerpt from the foreword by Gary Saul Morson, summarizing Schank's argument:

"What enables ... people to respond intelligently? The answer, for Schank, is that they have previously mulled over their experiences and labeled them in multiple interesting ways. From a sequence of experiences they have constructed a narrative; they have reflected on this narrative and found a number of ways in which it is significant; and in so doing, their memory has attached several labels to the story, which allow them to recall the story when another narrative suggests similar labels. Once the earlier story is recalled, these people can reflect on pertinent comparisons with the current situation. Present wisdom depends on earlier indexing.

In effect, then the real moment of intelligence occurs not (or not only) when one is reminded of the pertinent story, but when the pertinent story was stored in memory. Intelligence occurs earlier. It is closely related to good indexing."

Technorati Tags: tags, tagging, attention_economy, librarian, Schank

You only learn what you need to / want to

2006-02-16T11:09:00.000+08:00

"I give them just enough technology to be able to navigate. What they learn because they want to is much more effective than what I can teach."

-- Quote from an article in Edutopia re high school students learning to make films.

In this upcoming workshop Beth and I are doing, that's what we need to do: whet the appetite of the teacher/librarians. We don't have to be the experts -- we just need to tell the story of our own journey, in the hopes that it will make them want to explore the road themselves.

To be travel agents, not travel guides -- as one article on teaching information literacy (which one was that?) put it.

Technorati Tags: information_literacy, teaching

The business of storytelling

2006-02-16T11:07:00.000+08:00

Storytelling is a big story throughout the Internet. It's particularly interesting how business and marketing have taken it on board. See, for instance, this posting excerpt:

"Don't sell me a product, tell me a story!" from The Intuitive Life Business Blog
Marketing through telling stories doesn't stop there, it
infuses all that you do to market yourself and your business.
Consider two of my favorite business authors, Tom Peters and Jim
Collins. One of them is focused on participating in the business of
business, of sharing his evolving story and his view of which
businesses are and aren't successful, while the other is locked away in
his ivory tower, selling products and doing research that he'll share
when his next book is published. Which is which? You tell me: visit Tom Peters' Web site and Jim Collins' Web site for yourself. The difference is glaringly obvious.

Yes, the power of blogs is in the collaborative story.

From another business blog, another posting (Naked Conversations: Story Telling v. Product Selling ) comes this comment about speakers at conferences and how the best ones tell stories:

Malcolm Gladwell was our favorite last year. He was selling his book, but he didn't talk much about his book.

A case of showing what a good storyteller he was, rather than telling people he was. Of course, Gladwell has been a favorite of mine for years -- from the days when he was just in The New Yorker and I would rip his articles out to save.

Technorati Tags: storytelling, business, narrative

My personal attention structures....

2006-02-15T18:29:00.000+08:00

Slowly but surely I am creating a constellation of attention structures that allow me to follow the plot on Web 2.0, Library 2.0, School Library 2.0, etc., adding up -- with any luck -- to School Librarian 2.0. The cutting (librarian) edge story on information unfolding in the Attention Economy.

So this is the blog.

Then there's my wiki -- where I store the files I might reference here (like any papers I've written and want to share with people) -- as well as my bibliography of favorite writer/thinkers. I'm using pbwiki for that -- and find it quite easy to use. Can't say I've tried out every feature -- but there's plenty there to try. My wiki is definitely still "under contruction"...

For bookmarking, I have an extension collection going over on del.icio.us

What books have I read lately? Check out my Reader2 (that was "squared") site. I'm trying out another "catalog your own books" program called LibraryThing where I track and tag books that could be used in the PYP programme -- e.g., tags based on the Learner Profile and the PYP Attitudes and Concepts.

I haven't really put up any personal photos yet. Instead Flickr is where I'm storing photographs of primary libraries (ones I've worked at available to the public and ones I've just visited available just to friends). This was done to help a bunch of teachers get ideas of how they might like to modify their primary library.

Gmail is indispensable for the collection of listservs I belong to -- where I tag posts as I read them, accumulating my own annotated database, so to speak.

Bloglines is where my RSS feeds come in to.

Then, last but not least, I still rely on IKeepBookmarks as my "home page" when I fire up Mozilla, displaying my most commonly accessed links -- laid out as main plus subfolders. Of course, the most commonly accessed links are all the other attention structures just listed.

That old question... what to call oneself....

2006-02-15T18:16:00.000+08:00

Reading about the "blended librarian" movement (started by Steven Bell and John Shank) makes me wonder whether a blended librarian is just another name for a teacher/librarian -- only at the university level.

Here's their mission statement (it features that teacher/librarian mantra -- collaboration):

The Blended Librarians Online Learning Community is librarians, faculty, instructional designers and technologists, and other academic support personnel working collaboratively to integrate the library into the teaching and learning process. It is designed to encourage and enable academic librarians to evolve into a new role that blends existing library and information skills with those of instructional design and technology. To that end, the Community leverages innovation, collaboration, and communication to bring together its members in a virtual environment for professional development and learning opportunities.

Technorati Tags: school, librarian, collaboration, teaching

The point of college/university is what?

2006-02-12T09:26:00.000+08:00

Refreshing report in the Guardian (UK) -- "Another Hard Day in the Library" -- earlier this month from Germaine Greer and other academics about how they really spent their university days and the long-term benefits of NOT forcing students to attend lectures and tutorials (as Oxford is threatening to do via contracts with the students).

I always felt college was mainly four interesting walls within which to grow for four years. Greer says it better:

Kids don't go to university to sit at the feet of their elders and betters; they go to university to meet each other.... Because this is what uni is, the first time young people have their own collective space to organise or disorganise as they please.... Dragooning undergraduates would be to delay their maturation still further, so that they never achieve the autonomy on which our whole political system should be based.

Made me think about the importance of young people having "their own collective space" online to "organise or disorganise as they please" -- and the need for human attention structures. Lanham in his article on general education in the digital age (see yesterday's posting) makes the point that "considered on the largest scale, the undergraduate curriculum is an attention-structure."

Greer also argues that incompetent teachers are often far more valuable than good ones -- because they make you react to their incompetence -- and hence move you further along towards your own competence.

"Surely not!" is a more salutary reaction to a statement from a teacher than "Precisely". As I used to say to my students, "Confusion is the most productive state of mind. Respect your confusions. Don't let me waft them away."

Carol Kuhlthau would surely agree.

Greer also makes a case for lectures being replaced by digital multimedia versions:

In 2006, it would make more sense to issue the lectures on DVD, and spend the hour in the lecture room dealing with student's questions. In my day, students were supposed to be critical listeners.... The very best teacher is the one who really enjoys being made to look a fool by a student.

Lectures are a misshapen survival of medieval pedagogy, which took authority as absolute and understood the teacher's sole duty to be that of expounding it. Lectures have no place in a system based on critical thinking....

Technorati Tags: information literacy, university, teaching

Blogging Characters?

2006-02-12T09:04:00.000+08:00

So Dwight, the US equivalent of Gareth on the TV show "The Office", has his own blog, eh? Andy Carvin suggests other TV characters he'd like to see start one.

Made me think about having students set up a blog for a novel's protagonist, with the class taking turns blogging that character's life beyond the pages of the book.

The first book I thought of was "Flat Stanley "-- as there is the long-standing tradition of sending snail mail letters containing him around the world (I know I once hosted him in Ho Chi Minh City) -- and, sure enough, a simple search reveals Stanley is already very much alive online in the blogosphere, e.g., here, and here, and here.

What other characters would be well-suited to start their own blog?

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, childrens literature, books

Future librarians?

2006-02-12T01:57:00.000+08:00

The effectiveness of library schools -- what they should and shouldn't be teaching and doing -- has been bandied about in blogs recently, e.g., Technology and Education: Are Library Schools Doing Enough? on Tame the Web blog.

Another blog (I forget which) posted a reference to the article "Crying Wolf: An Examination and Reconsideration of the Perception of Crisis in LIS Education".

Coming up in April in Singapore there's the Asia-Pacific Conference on Library and Information Education and Practice (A-LIEP)-- entitled "Preparing Information Professionals for Leadership in the New Age". I'm particularly looking forward to it because some of my former professors from Charles Sturt University (Australia) will be attending -- and I hope to meet them for the first time. Having done my masters via distance learning (while living in Phuket, Thailand -- never having been to Australia), technology was an integral part of my library science education.

In terms of preparing for the future, one theorist few people in librarianship seem to be paying attention to is Richard Lanham.

Okay, he's not a librarian, but he has a strong vision of the role librarians should be playing in the Attention Economy. Over ten years ago he addressed the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and outlined "The Economics of Attention", a concept he then turned into an article in 1997 (available on his website), and now a book is due out in May 2006 from the Univ of Chicago Press.
In an information-rich world where human attention is the scarce commodity, the library's business is orchestrating human attention-structures.
He was lamenting the closure of university library schools back in 1997 ( see his essay "A Computer-based Harvard Red Book: General Education in the Digital Age") precisely because he feels librarians are ideally placed to become the architects managing the convergence of content, delivery, and manipulation of information.

I'm hooked on his idea of attention-structures and thinking about how rhetoric plays into the new literacies in the school library.

Technorati Tags: library, attention economy, LIS education, lanham, attention structures

Teens and Information Literacy... and Public Libraries

2005-11-25T08:20:00.000+08:00

The impetus to write about games in the library was a result of my literature review of the librarian's role in the development of teenage information literacy outside of school (the last assignment I had to do for my masters in library and information management, June 2005):

"Teens and Information Literacy... and Public Libraries"
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As with so many assignments, it's a bit dry -- but has some interesting nuggets buried inside.

Technorati Tags: information literacy, libraries, library,teens

Serious games in the library

2005-11-21T17:50:00.000+08:00

Here's a paper on "Gaming as an Educational Tool" I recently wrote for one of my teacher/librarianship courses.