Frameworks for play / inquiry / research

"We have a responsibility to introduce children to things they don't yet know they will love." -- Edith Ackermann

Dr. Edith Ackermann

came onto my radar this summer.   (See

my previous blog post on "Constructing Modern Knowledge 2014"

for the context.)

Such a charming, thoughtful expert on play and learning.  And

such credentials!

-- she worked with Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert, and has been associated with MIT for years (as well as other universities).

She loves

Reggio Emilia schools

,

Steiner/Waldorf schools

,

Katie Salen and Quest schools

, and

Freinet schools

.  A true educational radical (or realist) -- depending on where you stand.

Read this recent interview with her on creativity, talent, and intuition

-- in a journal aimed at architects.

I wish I could find her CMK14 slides online.  I took basic shots into my Penultimate notes, but they aren't good enough to reproduce, e.g.,

The part of her talk that interested me the most was her description of

the iterative cycle of self-learning

, which she outlined as:

• Connect -- Wow! I can't believe...  -- the inspiration - the imaginarium

• Construct -- hands-on -- the atelier -- immersion and innovation

• Contemplate -- heads-in -- mindfulness -- the sanctuary or secret garden

• Cast -- play-back -- re-visit -- stage -- dramatize -- experiment

• Con-vivire -- the sharing -- the piazza -- the agora -- expressivity

She stressed these are just guidelines for what happens along the way in different ways -- that the stages should never be used prescriptively. 

Our school is just settling on some common terminology around

a research model

-- one that will be differentiated for Infant (K1 to Grade 1), Junior (Grade 2 to Grade 5), Middle School (Grade 6 to Grade 8) and High School (Grade 9 to Grade 12).

A midway meeting ground has been agreed, e.g., here is a standard arising out of the articulation of the middle school curriculum:

The blog "What Ed Said" (Edna Sackson) recently had a post

on her frustration with expected slavish commitment to an inquiry cycle model.  I agree.  You might as well insist everyone follow the same sequence for falling in love or grieving over death.  It's useful to appreciate typical stages, but impossible to expect everyone to adhere to them.  NB:  Kath Murdoch, referenced by Edna, is a frequent professional visitor to our school, and

her phases of inquiry

were key inputs to our process -- see here:

Edith was talking about

Play

-- and undoubtedly about

Inquiry

.  But our school is talking about

Research

.  Are they all the same thing?  Just at different age levels?  We'd like to think so.

Research, for middle/high school students, is just a game with adult rules (e.g., alluding to the ideas of others in a constructive and respectful way) -- and our job is to alert them to those rules and to convince them it's a game worth learning (after all, research is a form of adult fun, yes?).  As Edith put it, students must learn to add value in the process of borrowing.   They must become adept at massaging ideas until they are their own, rather than just functioning as an information broker, passing on ideas.  To ride others' ideas until they can feel in solo mode, not fusion mode.

I particularly like Edith's "Cast" phase, with its implicit theatrical connotation.  Something between our "Reflect" and "Communicate."  It's the part that implies the iterative nature of the process.  That you, within your own mind or in the presence of others, re-think what you have, try it out, and ask if it's sufficient, if it's enough.

(I'm also partial to Design Thinking as a basic research model; see my previous blog post:

Carol Kuhlthau Meets Tim Brown

. )

Other things Edith commented upon....

• re MOOCs and online learning: 

  • the double standard:  it's the new entrepreneurial elite, who are educated onsite with constructivist methods, who are promoting education online where "others" struggle alone;

  • re today's learners:

    •  growing older younger, and staying younger older;

    • the tension between temp and "forever" work

    • the tension between professional mobility and lack of security;

    • re the role of the eye and the senses:

      • away from Piaget (the rationalist) to Papert (feeling the materials);

      • the real practitioners (e.g., architects) are always tricking people to get a different perspective;

      • to crawl out of the old ways of thinking;

      • tricks to get us off our own beaten path;

      • using objects creates resistance; 

"Learning is all about moving in and out of focus, shifting perspective, and coming to 'see anew.'" -- Edith Ackermann

Summer camp for teachers (way beyond the old Crafts Cabin)

Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez have been holding a very special 4-day summer institute in New Hampshire for the past 7 years.

"Constructing Modern Knowledge" (#CMK14) provides teachers with a learning space and enough time to the fail -- and succeed -- at doing what we are always exhorting our students to do:  learn something!  make something!

I got involved by virtue of having put Stager and Martinez's book -- "Invent to Learn: making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom" -- on display in my library to coincide with the Learning 2.0 conference last October (see my previous blog post on it).  Brian Smith (from Hong Kong International School) immediately began to talk to me about the book -- and the related conference.  Considering I spend my summers in Maine (a stone's throw away), it wasn't hard to decide to sign up.  At 21st Century Learning in HK in December, I also had the opportunity to meet Gary, who exudes enthusiasm for messy learning and hard fun.

4 days, 180 participants.  You can see the Vimeo videos here and the Flickr group photos here.  All in a Radisson Hotel in ManchVegas.  (Yes, I guess that's what they call Manchester, NH -- as it's the region's hotspot.)

Who were we?  The informal hands-up survey at the beginning indicated mainly teachers from private schools, from all over the US, plus a few internationals.  I quickly found Tina Photakis, from Australia, to hang out with.  The crowd was seeded with plenty of highlighted helpers, like Brian Smith (and his daughter), young Super-awesome Sylvia Todd (and her father), Peggy Sheehy (one of the few librarians), Dan and Molly Watt, Cynthia Solomon, etc.

How did we decide what we were going to build in our 4 days?  By shouting out suggestions that got put on giant post-it notes on the wall, followed by a massive gallery walk and sign-up.  Then we gathered by our top favorite post-it -- and groups were formed.  It worked admirably, better than most unconference events I've experienced.  I loved the range of ideas:  a light-sensitive chicken coop, a robot dog, an interactive recycling bin,  an interactive tree, an interactive garden, interactive clothing, etc.

One proposed project was "wearable speakers" -- and having attended two conferences this summer, I wish there were a smart-phone app for that right now.   How can it be that we don't have a way to make ourselves heard in big groups, e.g., questions from the floor, where no one can hear the question.

I wanted to work on a noise meter of sorts, as I'd had a Design and Technology IB student create a (unfortunately non-working) prototype for my library, using an Arduino.  So I knew I wanted to play with sound input creating some sort of visual output.  (Imagine: students in a supposedly silent study room with windows, where I am outside and can't tell how much noise they are actually making; when decibels go above a certain level,  colored lights began to flash -- indicating to both them and me that the room is no longer silent.) 

In the end, I went with a group interested in "sound sculpture", which eventually split into three or four smaller groups.  Gordon, Wendy, and I decided to see how we could get sound through an Arduino to display different colors, based on volume and frequency.  Gordon and Wendy wired the 3D matrix of lights, while I fooled around with programming an Arduino Esplora (a device which can take a variety of input).  We didn't get a fully-functioning integrated model, due to time and other limitations, but we sure learned a lot.  For me it was such a throw-back to my programming days.  Oh, the frustrations of imperfect code!

A major highlight of the conference was a field trip to the fabled MIT Media Lab, thanks to Gary and Sylvia's connections.   A talk by Mitch Resnick, founder of the Lifelong Kindergarten group.  (Here's a recent video of him doing a talk that is similar to the one we heard - on Projects, Peers, Passion, and Play.)  A chat with 87-year-old Marvin Minsky, one of the three pioneers immortalized in the lobby of the impressive building, the other two being Seymour Papert (represented at CMK14 by his daughter, Artemis, and granddaughter), and Muriel Cooper, who died 20 years ago.

Marvin regaled us with memories of his time at Bell Labs with Claude Shannon.  Re his artificial arm.  Though he lamented that no one wants to work -- nowadays -- on something so pedestrian as a former invention.  So no improvements are forthcoming.  He talked about being enthralled by nanotechnology.  The wave of the future.   He talked of computer games, and his belief that 4 year olds might play games, but 5 year olds should be moving on to making games.   His advice when getting stuck in life?  Ask the experts.  Which for him were Claude Shannon and Robert Oppenheimer.

We took advantage of the chance to wander down through the building.  So many windows into projects and the learning going on.  It was a wonderful evening in Cambridge/Boston.

Click here to see all my photos of the conference -- including plenty taken inside the Media Lab.


Back in Manchester, there was plenty of time for work, for reflection, and for inspiration from speakers interspersed in the schedule.

Edith Ackermann, an MIT stalwart and "play" expert, gave a fascinating presentation.  She talked of so many things -- she deserves a separate blog post.

Pete Nelson is famous for building treehouses.  I didn't know about him before, but now I appreciate he has his own reality TV show, Treehouse Masters and a treehouse center where you can go and stay.

He told the story of how his childhood passion for treehouses eventually led to a very public and remunerative vocation.  (Creating a coffee table book on treehouses of the world was an important first step!)  I'm sure most of us sitting there were thinking of old trees we wanted to create houses in.  He made it sound all so feasible.

 
Overall take-away thoughts:

• Re the sharing of resources:  the organizers had an incredible array of materials available to us, but the trick was, whatever we took, we needed for the four days.  There wasn't much that you just needed short-term access to.  So the sharing was limited.  I wondered how libraries with a makerspace would cope with this.  Would someone be able to check out or reserve, say, an Arduino Esplora, for three days?  What is realistic for what time period of exclusive use?  It makes me think that individual hardware, such as Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, is better suited to a teacher-class situation, where a learner can work with one set of materials over time.
• How best to handle differentiation?  In this situation, some of us at a table had NO experience, and some had CONSIDERABLE.   I was conscious of trying to balance the time I spent floundering on my own and the time I spent getting help from others.  One thing for sure: we were in charge of our own learning.  It was fascinating to wander around, seeing the vast range of projects and skills on display.

CMK library:  There was a room at the conference where Gary and Sylvia laid out all their personal collection of books related to making and creating.  I took photos of most of them -- and have searched Amazon, making a "list" of them.  See the booklist here:  The Maker Movement and Constructing Modern Knowledge.

Also see this Reggio Emilia bookshop for more.

p.s.  Just discovered Gary and Sylvia maintain their own recommended booklist on Amazon -- see here.

p.p.s.  Here's another related booklist -- one from the International Design Technology teachers' conference, held at our school in May.  These were all the books I had on display during the conference.

ALA Las Vegas: Take-aways from being with 25k+ librarians for a couple of days

The American Library Association's annual conference is a heaving mass of librarians (of all varieties) in one place for four days - Friday-Monday, June 26-30.  Almost any US city is a convenient stopover for me, heading to Maine, at the end of the school year.

This year ALA was in Las Vegas, a venue that lived up to its stereotype, in the eyes of a first-time visitor. Next year's location - San Francisco - will be more my style perhaps.

But ALA is always an enriching experience, no matter where it's held.

The problem is to figure out what and who you want to see in the small time and huge space of the event (the exhibition hall alone is worth four days).

You can search offerings and construct your own schedule online ahead of time -- and there is a mobile app -- but the lack of fast/reliable/free internet access (especially Sunday) made that fairly irrelevant.  And for those of us with overseas phone accounts, the smart-phone solution for internet data access wasn't very economical.  So making off-line lists and lugging around the fat, physical ALA Guide was a sad, but comforting, necessity.

Here is my public debrief of the conference, filtered through my international, K-12 (primarily middle/high) librarian focus :

Pre-Conference: SCHOOL VISITS

There was a half-day pre-conference event on Friday, visiting three independent (i.e., private) school libraries -- Alexander Dawson School, Faith Lutheran Middle and High School, and Las Vegas Day School.  A few photos of each are here on Flickr with notes below.

Alexander Dawson:
-- the librarian pointed out how, in designing the school, no electrical cables or wiring is hidden, so kids are very aware of where electricity is being used, e.g., for air conditioning, for internet access, etc.;
-- the library had an "Aurasma" wall -- where we could pick up iPads, scan images, and watch videos the kids had made for one unit of inquiry (e.g., Irish castles);
-- two authors a year do two-week residencies, including 2 days in each classroom, e.g., Brian Falkner (from NZ) and Paul Owen Lewis -- during which time each student creates a book;

Faith Lutheran:
--  had quite a few full-size physical displays, e.g., military uniforms and a skeleton;
--  had an author/illustrator wall, where each visiting celebrity's name is added each year;

LV Day School:
-- they offer a "Classic Reader" program -- where students read more "quality" literature, and then discuss with an adult, four books above and beyond their other reading;
-- they run an "Adopt a Shelf" program for parents -- where parents are responsible for re-shelving and keeping one shelf looking tip-top -- they say it's quite competitive!

Overall, questions focused on staffing (all were minimally staffed, surprisingly) and what they were doing for ebook provision (e.g., all had Overdrive, despite the fact the local library offers it -- though not sure if that affected their choice of titles -- would they try to avoid overlap?).

NETWORKING

This is no small part of ALA.   Many of us international school librarians managed to find each other (and we are determined to make it more organized next year).

The four of us from Singapore (Kim Klein from Stamford American International School, Kate Brundage from Singapore American School, and Susanne Clower and I from United World College of Southeast Asia - East campus) arrived as a nucleus -- and soon found Leanne Mercado from Nishimachi International School (Tokyo), as well as Candace Aiani and Barb Middleton from Taipei American School.  Later we connected with Leslie Henry from Jakarta International School and Victoria Robins from ASF Guadalajara Mexico.  There were others on the list of international attendees, but poor connectivity (and our overseas phones) made it hard to communicate.  I kick myself that I didn't put out a general call on the social media channels (like the ECIS iSkoodle listserv) beforehand.

During the pre-conference session of school visits, while getting on or off the bus, I overheard one woman say the word"Sakura" -- and I quickly determined to talk to her at the next stop, knowing she must have been referring to the Japanese international school librarian book award program, which is how I met Leanne Mercado.  Only when I later I put a face on the name "Barb Middleton" did I realize that she was on the same Friday school library tour, but because her registration tagged identified her as being from Minnesota, I didn't realize she was one of us - from Taipei American School.

Those of us that managed to meet up did our best to "divide and conquer" in terms of session attendance.

TO DO:

• Finish de-briefing with those who attended this year, especially my Singapore colleagues when we all get back in August;
• Next year: advertise on social media for all going to ALA to connect ahead of time;
• Next year: maybe have a group of us do a panel presentation on International School Librarians - as an employment opportunity - pluses and minuses, etc.

EBOOKS

A big complaint about Overdrive for schools has been the annual fee -- as much as US$4k/yr in the past.  But at their ALA booth, an Overdrive representative confirmed they have recently lowered the cost for school libraries.  Now it is US$1k/yr for up to 999 students and US$2k/yr for up to 1,999 students.  This cost is content purchase per annum -- it's not an annual usage fee -- which is great.

For those of us in international schools, a ongoing issue with all ebook vendors has been digital rights management (DRM) -- where popular titles are often not available to us, being situated outside the countries that are the biggest publishers (USA, UK, Australia, etc.).  I asked the Overdrive rep where I could preview the titles actually available to us in Singapore -- and she suggested I contact the sales force and get access to a demo overseas account.

StarWalk KidsMedia is a new ebook vendor -- headed by the famous (and charming) non-fiction author for kids, Seymour Simon (and his wife).  500 titles available so far, for grades K-8, half fiction, half non-fiction.  Leveled according to Fountas and Pinnell.  Only US$895 a year (at least for big schools like ours -- I forget if it's cheaper for smaller schools.)  Unlimited, simultaneous access.  Device neutral -- in fact, they assured me that if users downloaded a title (as you have to do to read on a mobile device), the title will stay accessible on the device for as long as the subscription (e.g., a year).  And they will provide MARC records.  It sounds a lot like BookFlix -- but going as high as Grade 8 in interest and complexity.  They were happy to offer us a 1-month free trial -- which I intend to do.

Kindle, Kindle, Kindle....?  Candace Aiani (High School) and Barb Middleton (Primary School) have embarked wholeheartedly on a Kindle-loaning program at Taipei American School - and have a wealth of experience.  Back in February she put a call out to the SILCAsia listserv, starting a discussion on the management of Kindles in schools - which some of you may have seen.

They organize their Kindles into "pods" of 5 devices each -- as each Kindle account can be synced to five devices.  Each Kindle (in a pod) will have up to 30 titles or so on it. Click here to see what a search for "Kindle" and "pod" turns up in Candace's High School catalog.  Click here to see what one Kindle might have on it, e.g., Pod "I".  (Now that Kindle Unlimited has been launched, I wonder how many of their titles are available to overseas subscribers.)

Taipei American School has gone for Overdrive in a big way -- see their Overdrive homepage -- even though the Overdrive books can't be downloaded to overseas Kindles, they said.  They also aren't thrilled about the fact there is often a 6-month delay getting the latest titles into Overdrive.  Note: Barb affirms that FollettShelf is far easier for primary school students to use than Overdrive.

TO DO:

• Contact sales@overdrive.com and ask for access to a demo overseas account -- now that the Overdrive annual fee is reasonable for school libraries -- for secondary school.
• Start 1-month free trial in September of StarWalk KidsMedia -- for primary school.

GAMING / COMPUTING FOR KIDS

Jane McGonigal was the opening keynote for ALA -- and didn't disappoint.  She reminded us of all the positive emotions gaming releases:  CREATIVITY / CONTENTMENT / AWE + WONDER / EXCITEMENT / CURIOSITY / PRIDE / SURPRISE / LOVE / RELIEF / JOY.

-- not to mention the development of RESILIENCE.

I was glad to be reminded of her experience developing a game for the New York Public Library and the quote by Brian Sutton-Smith:  "The opposite of play isn't work.  It's depression."

Later, in the exhibits hall, I ran into Scott Nicholson, professor at the iSchool in Syracuse and expert on gaming -- (I attended one of his workshops last year at ALA) -- and was thrilled to hear he is due to come to Singapore in November to work with the National Library Board (NLB).  Scott did several sessions at ALA this year -- and is particularly keen on the cognitive benefit of creating games, not just playing them.   Read some of his past papers here.

In the course of our conversation, he also alerted me to the Math Fairs for students being held annually in Toronto -- which I could definitely see our campus implementing.

There was also a Poster session on Computational Thinking for Tweens and Teens -- see http://ala14.ala.org/node/14901 where you can download the four PDFs.  It's where I came across Cubelets.... 

TO DO:

• Connect with Scott Nicholson before November -- and with the NLB -- and see if I can organize an ISLN or school event as well when he is there.
• Talk to Tilson Crew, our primary school math coach, to learn more about the math games that she has created and made available in our primary library for borrowing.
• Talk to all our math teachers about the possibility of getting a math fair going at our school.

READING

ALA is one big reading-love-fest.  Everyone there is full of book-talk, whether ebook or pbook.  And walking down the aisles of the exhibition hall, I just kept snapping photos of book covers, if not picking up free ARCs.  I refuse to fetishize signed editions, making it easy to avoid the urge to join any queues in front of author booths in the exhibition hall -- though I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to chat with authors when given the casual chance, e.g., attending a reception with the author/illustrator Kevin Hawkes who happens to live in Gorham, Maine, one town over from my hometown.

Donalyn Miller, aka The Book Whisperer and Grade 5 teacher extraordinaire, gave a talk on "Fostering Positive Reading Identities".  I was sitting between two international primary school teacher-librarians (Leanne Mercado from Tokyo and Barb Middleton from Taiwan) and we just kept nodding and laughing as Donalyn enlightened us with her research and entertained us with her personal experiences as a reader and reading teacher.


Like her, my identity as a reader was clinched in 3rd grade thanks to "SRA" -- that popular color-coded series of comprehension exercises in a box (which introduced me to speed reading as a competitive sport) -- and a memorable teacher, Miss Poole, who not only read "Charlotte's Web" to us, but also the delightful (though 1950s antiquated) "Mrs. Piggle Wiggle" series of magic solutions.

Donalyn talked about the power of reading communities and reiterated the influence of book "commercials" arising out of the natural community (e.g., peer-to-peer recommendations) -- and the role modeling of being a reader and read-alouds -- and all the things we know and have been doing, but need to remember are terribly inter-connected and important.

She challenges her students to read 40 or more books a year -- without any other reward system.  (Reading is its own reward, as she says.)

She talked about the intersection of reading interest (motivation), reading level (ability), and background knowledge (fertile ground for understanding) in terms of book choice.  Which makes me think of my beloved Design Thinking intersection of desirability (are you interested in the topic?), feasibility (does it match the assignment?) and viability (do we have the resources to support you) -- relating to research questions.

 

 

 

Though when it comes to reading levels, she reminded us that lexiles are only scaffolds (e.g., Fahrenheit 451 and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid have the same lexile band (true??)) -- and that text complexity is about what is NOT found on the page.

She recommends having a small pile of "Special Class Books" -- ready to hand to any child who says they have no book to read.

I like her idea of "Epicenter Readers" -- that category of people who influence other people's reading, whether in the classroom or in life.  Her own include John Schumacher (@mrschureads) and Teri Lesesne (@professornana).  I happened to meet two long-standing online "Epicenter Readers" of my own at a Random House reception:  Lynn Rutan and Cindy Dobrez (aka the Bookends bloggers) -- and gushed over them like a proper groupie.

Donalyn also reiterated the wisdom that less-than-highbrow series helps develop readers.  They are not to be sneered at.  Neither is the habit of re-reading.  As she reminded us, close reading is re-reading with a purpose. 

TO DO:

• Contribute to Donalyn's Nerdy Book club blog 
• Don't miss her regular Twitter chats, e.g., #bproots - on roots of best practice for literacy teaching

INFORMATION LITERACY and THRESHOLD CONCEPTS

 
There are so many information literacy sessions to attend at ALA, some school-focused, some university-level.   As a high-school teacher-librarian, I am often indifferent to that distinction, as much of the information literacy instruction is focused on students just entering tertiary education.

A big difference, however, is that school-based librarians are almost all trained teachers, while university ones aren't (necessarily). 
 
One flipped university classroom session I attended was a bit of a waste, as it mainly extolled the benefits of using curriculum design models in designing flipped courses, which any teacher-librarian would already appreciate.  And I already knew about the handy tools for flipping the classroom being recommended, e.g., Screencastr, Prezi, Google Docs, etc.
 
But another session by university librarians teaching information literacy was brilliant in every way -- content, design, and presentation -- "From Stumbling Blocks to Building Blocks: Using Threshold Concepts to Teach Information Literacy."  See their Powerpoint slides here.

I’d read about threshold concepts, as defined by Meyer and Land (academic instruction experts) — and discussed by David Perkins (of Harvard fame and general teaching expert), before — but had never read or heard anyone talk about them with specific reference to the field of information literacy, which is what this panel of academic librarians did.  

Korey Burnetti, Amy Hofer, and Lori Townsend reviewed five characteristics of threshold concepts:

• Transformative -- they change understanding
• Irreversible — one you get them, you can’t not see them anymore
• Integrative -- part of a network of interconnected understandings
• Bounded — meaning they are usually discipline-specific
• Troublesome — meaning often counter-intuitive

The metaphor of the threshold refers to the acquisition of these concepts -- which can be compared to crossing a border; a mental, liminal space, delimited by time and experience; an extended place where the novice transitions over time to being an expert, with some people getting stuck until they "get it" (learning bottlenecks), some roaming around inside indefinitely, perhaps never to emerge.  A lens is a popular metaphor for appreciating the power of threshold concepts in different disciplines - to see with the eyes of an expert.  (The transition from one side to the other also reminds me of the shift from slow thinking to fast thinking (System 1 and System 2) of Daniel Kahnemann et al.)

Slide from the ALA 2014 presentation

They then discussed some basic information literacy threshold concepts they had distilled as "enduring understandings," using theWiggins and McTighe model of backward design, for their teaching practice.
 
FORMAT AS PROCESS
INFORMATION AS COMMODITY
AUTHORITY IS CONSTRUCTED + CONTEXTUAL
METADATA = FINDABILITY  (aka GOOD SEARCHES  USE DATABASE STRUCTURES)
DATABASE = ORGANIZED COLLECTION
PRIMARY SOURCES DEPEND ON PERSPECTIVE

For example, in exploring FORMAT AS THE RESULT OF A PROCESS, they showed the following typical search results, which to the average student would all look like "websites":

Slide from the ALA 2014 presentation

Go read the seminal articles by Land + Meyer -- and other resources available on the wonderful webpage page of the three presenters: http://ilthresholdconcepts.com.
 

Another librarian showed how he promotes some of his library's more unusual digital collections as a means of exploring primary vs. secondary sources with students, e.g., presenting students with an archive of 1950s women’s magazines and having them imagine for what research question would particular advertisements or articles be a primary source.  Showing how questions develop, to a large degree, from the resources being used - in an iterative cycle.

The mantra they left us with:  READ -- SHARE -- ACT.

Many sessions were preceded by awards for best practice.  In the case of the Threshold Concepts one, an award was given to Library DIY (by Meredith Farkas) — a flipped classroom example of teaching procedural (as opposed to conceptual) stuff.  I'd already starred the project in my Diigo bookmarks as something to emulate -- and was thrilled to see it so publicly recognized.

There was also a poster session on a website called InfoSkills2Go - http://infoskills2go.com/ -- which allows college-bound high school students to earn badges in four categories:  academic integrity, information seeking, information organization, and information evaluation, using TRAILS as the pre-test and post-test. 

Another poster session I missed was -- "Student to Superhero: Freshmen Tell Their Research Stories" -- see http://bit.ly/studentsuperhero -- where they described how they had students create a graphical narrative using the software called Comic Life to reflect on their entry-level university information literacy course. 

TO DO:

• Re-think my own teaching modules with these info lit threshold concepts in mind
• Look at the InfoSkills2Go website

DISCOVERY (AND FAST CATALOGING)

There is a tension between the Google single box search — and the box (or boxes) we provide as windows into our local information resources.  Between what is out there in the largest sense of the world and what we can actually deliver (from our physical collection and our various virtual ones).

Candace (of the Taipei American School) told me she has recently implemented the EBSCO discovery layer.  I didn’t get a chance to really get into this with her (which is why I am determined to get up to Taipei to spend concentrated time absorbing her school’s information environment and how she is tackling these common problems of ours).

In terms of our library catalogs — Follett Destiny, for both Candace and me — the new Universal Search interface is an improvement (e.g., useful filtering via the sidebar).  But it's still slow and cumbersome compared to Google.  

Should we still be trying to steer students to our catalog?  What if we the library just focused on delivery of what students find elsewhere?  Leave the catalog there as our best inventory tool and perfect Subject Headings for our own discovery purposes, but not expect students to desert their best-friend Google?  (NB: I've been heavily influenced by the thoughts of Aaron Tay (an academic librarian in Singapore) -- see this Sept 2013 blog post of his and his ongoing Flipboard magazine on Web scale search and discovery systems.)

Traditionally (think: paper card catalogs) findability has depended upon controlled Subject Headings (e.g., Library of Congress (LCSH)), where each item would have no more than six highly-faceted subjects (e.g.,  Indonesia - Relations - China - History).  Nowadays, with full-text searching and unlimited tags possible, controlled vocabularies are less important -- at least to users.

The single search box -- allowing for multiple fields and combination of terms to be searched at once -- demands a re-think of subject headings.  Which is why I've been following the FAST cataloging project for years -- and chose to attend the Faceted Subject Access Interest Group sessions at ALA this year.  
 
 
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)

As much as RDA(1) is about moving bibliographic metadata forward, FAST cataloging is the cutting edge of subject heading progress.  Which is perhaps why it was standing room only in this session where Cornell University librarians (one of whom is a Discovery Metadata Librarian by title) relayed their experience as guinea pigs converting their data from LCSH to FAST — in collaboration with OCLC Research (who were also in the room).  They're hoping to go live on July 1st.  (See their Powerpoint slides here.)

A lot of the technical stuff was beyond me -- and the scale difference between Cornell’s converting their holdings and a school library like mine are enormous.  But I still got a lot out of the session -- and think we should be moving to FAST subject headings instead of Sears/LCSH.

Facets can be in eight categories:  Personal names, Corporate names, Geographic names, Events, Titles, Time periods, Topics, and Form/Genre.

The FAST mindset was described as:

• Use what you find
• Subjects do not cross facets, e.g., you can't have "Italy - History"
• Observe difference between topical and genre/form facets
• Fewer application rules, e.g., the order of headings is not significant, no constraints on combinations of topical and geographic terms
• Dates can be whatever you need to assign, e.g., "1992-2011" is fine if that's what the resource covers

The elephant in the room, they admitted, is that, if FAST is so great, why isn't everyone rushing to use it?  Will it replace LCSH?  Only time will tell.  Watch this space.

Links re FAST:

• ALCTS: FAST for cataloging and discovery - newsletter
• OCLC FAST Research page
• searchFAST
• OCLC Classify tool -- to get suggested FAST headings for a book
• Cornell Library FAST webpage

LIBRARY DESIGN

Library design is of on-going interest, no matter that my library is theoretically all built now.  I went to a session on “Science + Form = Function: The Impact of Neuroscience on Architecture and Design” -- a subject for which is there is an Academy -- see http://www.anfarch.org/ and especially their recommended reading list: http://www.anfarch.org/recommended-reading/.  

The session opened with a quote from Winston Churchill who said, "We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."

The speakers talked about the ten senses:  touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.... plus pressure, balance, temperature, motion, and pain.

Imagine a grid where these ten senses are the y-axis.  Then put these library space functions across the x-axis:  assembly, contemplation, data collection, presentation, reading, refuge, retreat, storage, studying, and teaching.  Consider the intersection of each -- and decide priorities and possibilities.

We need to consider the intersection of three things:  Behavior, Experience, and Brain Activity in a space like a library.

Speakers talked of Inspiration, Trust, and Empathy, as well as Symbolism, Wayfinding, and Exploration -- linking hand, brain, and symbol.  They asked us to consider what Affordances the library provides, to invite or indicate desired actions -- and the tension between Function and Representation (symbolism) in our spaces.

Frankly, I didn't get any practical inspirations from the session, but felt mentally stretched from sitting through it.

Meanwhile some other teacher-librarian went to a discussion meeting (one of those smaller things in the schedule that you could miss in the blink of an eye, unless you were observant) on The Information Commons.  Of all the things I was listening for in her brief summary in the time we had for debrief, I latched onto her reporting of someone who had “pink things hanging from the ceiling” that absorbed sound.  The ALA notes on this meeting also mention "pink noise machines" (see here). I am now searching for this mysterious product/item.  (Contact me if you can help!)  (Could the person have been talking about "pink noise" - in contrast to "white noise" -- see distinction here -- instead of something literally pink?)

Acoustics is my ongoing elephant in the room and I am on the lookout for all ameliorating accessories.  (Over the summer there are ceiling/wall panels being installed in my library — wish I had done my pre-installation research benchmarks and logged some decibel stats….)

There was a poster session I really wanted to attend, but missed -- Librarian Design Share: Inspiration for Library Creatives.  On the other hand, the beauty of the best poster sessions is that the poster itself is posted online and tells it all -- see http://ala14.ala.org/files/ala14/LibDS-ALA-Poster-FINAL.pdf -- and their website -- http://librariandesignshare.org/ -- is a treasure-trove.  The session description mentions they would be giving visitors "design strategy cards" -- I wonder if they pointed people to the "Design with Intent" toolkit, which I love.

Another poster session I missed was "Gearing Up for College" -- about university libraries reaching out to low-income middle school children who excel in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields.  Interestingly, they used a map activity to get the students to observe what was going on in the university library -- and hopefully to get interested in what they were observing.  (Reminds me of the ALA program session I attended last year -- where Andrew Asher described having students create color-timed cognitive maps of the library -- see http://www.andrewasher.net/BiblioEthnoHistorioGraphy/category/mapping/.  A fascinating way to make the virtual visible.... )

TO DO:

• Track down "pink noise things"
• Contribute to http://librariandesignshare.org/

Makerspaces

Makerspaces is definitely still a hot topic for libraries.  I did a full-day pre-conference last year at ALA on them, and knew I was going to a four-day "Constructing Modern Knowledge" summer institute in New Hampshire, July 8-11, which would be completely about making things (watch for another blog post eventually), so I didn't bother to attend maker-related sessions at ALA.

As my school already has an extensive Design and Technology department and set-up (with 3D printers, laser cutters, et al.), I'm thinking the library should focus on making to do with books -- like setting up a Writing Center (a project several of us have been trying to get off the ground for three years now) and promoting Book Art.

One poster session was about an annual RE:BOOK altered book contest -- at the Claremont College Libraries.  See the PDF here.  What a great way to re-purpose donated books -- of which I have plenty.

TO DO:

• Connect with the art teachers and get some regular altered book art going -- perhaps with a permanent book art workspace in a corner of the library -- or up on the Art Floor.  I like the idea of an annual contest.

PDA (Patron Driven Acquisition)

When I hear "PDA," I still think of "public display of affection" -- something every high school librarian deals with every day.  But it's the latest term for users letting us know what they want (starting from that good 'ole book suggestion form) -- and it goes hand-in-hand with a good collection policy.

There were several small sessions on PDA as it relates to e-book and video purchases, e.g., see here, here, and here.

Candace was telling me how she has instituted an online ticketing system for all library requests -- whether book purchase recommendations or queries about database passwords, etc.  I forget the name of the software package she said she bought, but it is one where people can search the database, to see the status of their problem or request.  Our Facilities and IT Depts both use a basic ticketing system, but we users don't have the ability to search their records.  Must look into it for our library.  I know there are requests that fall off my radar.....

The Latest and the Greatest: ARCs and Awards

For school librarians, there are two important annual lists that get announced at ALA.

• Best Apps for Teaching and Learning
• Best Websites for Teaching and Learning

 ALA is also a place to pick up Advanced Reader Copies of books.  I try not to go crazy.

Here are a few I picked up:

• Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" - Young Readers edition
• Frank Einstein and the Anti-matter Motor - by Jon Scieszka 
• Hold Tight, Don't Let Go - by Laura Rose Wagner - a YA novel re Haiti and the earthquak
• Vango - by Timothee de Fombelle
• Imaginary - by A.F. Harrold, illustrated by Emily Gravett
• There Will Be Lies - by Nick Lake
• Young Houdini - by SImon Nicholson
• The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency - by Jordan Stratford
• On a Clear Day - by Walter Dean Myters
• A Path Appears - by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu

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Notes:

• Last year at ALA I did a full-day pre-conference on RDA (Resource Description + Access).  What I immediately love about RDA is its simple hierarchy, distinguishing between Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item (WEMI), not to mention its elaboration of dates — so one can distinguish between work creation date, original publication date, particular edition date, and manufacture date.  

Photos:

• SRA: http://allaboutthe1970s.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-remember-those.html

Past Papers

Teacher/Librarianship

Gaming as an Educational Tool -- October 2005

Teens and Information Literacy... and Public Libraries -- June 2005

(Word format: Teens and Information Literacy...and Public Libraries)

The Challenge of the Critical Edge for Teacher/Librarians -- June 2005

Literacy Crisis in the Information Age? (and where does information literacy fit into it?) -- June 2005

The Obstacle of Ignorance in the Creation of an Information Literate School Community -- May 2004

Information Literacy: an exploration of the issue vis-a-vis the English National Curriculum -- June 2003

Children's Literature

A.L.O.E.: Between Two Worlds -- UK IBBY Talk November 2000 - a short introduction to Charlotte M. Tucker, known as "A Lady of England"

A.L.O.E.: Writing Home -- 1999 MA Thesis

The Seductions of Elsie -- 2000

The White Cat and the Squirrel Wife: The Subject Construction of Two Animal Brides (or "How I left My Semiotic Home for Life as a Human Wife in the Symbolic") -- 1996

Beholding Emotion: Two Picture Book Narratives of Love and Loss -- 1996

International School Librarians' Knowledge Sharing Weekend in Brunei: my take-aways

A huge thank-you to Karli Downey and her team at Jerudong International School in Brunei for hosting a valuable two-day workshop for international school librarians, Feb. 21-22, 2014.  About thirty of us came together from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, and Brunei to share our practice and thoughts.

See the LKSW Libguide for an overview.

The highlights for me included:

• Lyn Hay, from SybaAcademy and Charles Sturt University, spoke on the concept of the iCentre (see her slides here)
• Read on: Mal Lee blog: http://schoolevolutionarystages.net/ and "digital normalization"
• Lyn Hay also spoke about guided inquiry -- and Linda Twitchett (AISS) spoke about how she developed a scope and sequence of information fluency for her secondary school.
• As Lyn listed the seven survival skills a la Tony Wagner, I mentally tried to remember the 9 elements of our UWCSEA profile:  Qualities ( Commitment to Care, Principled, Resilient, Self-Aware) and Skills (Critical Thinker, Creative, Collaborative, Communicator, Self-Manager).  Information fluency/literacy is implicit in the descriptions of each.
• Made me realize our library team needs to schedule time with our curriculum dept to continue to hash out our own research model.  Linda came up with four main stages: Exploring, Investigating, Processing, and Creating.  Our middle school has most recently settled on five stages:
• Identify and ask relevant questions
• Gather and organise information from different perspectives
• Analyse, synthesise and evaluate information
• Communicate
• Reflection
• Made me re-read my blog post on "Carol Kuhlthau meets Tim Brown: Guided {Design} Inquiry"
• Lyn highly recommended Keri Smith's book, How to be an explorer of the world -- which is one of those books I hesitate to buy for the library, as it's meant to be written in and personalised.
• Check out Linda's Libguide on Research.
•  Crys Mills reminded us of some great Australian picture books -- I put the list here in LibraryThing -- and will double-check we have them.
• Library tech topics....
• In the RFID discussion Rob George reminded us that RFID isn't sufficient for security, that most libraries still use magnetic strips for that.  We don't anticipate going to RFID though the self-check and ease of inventory are appealing.
• Thumbprint (biometric) recognition for check-out with Follett Destiny: Kim Beeman said she has a working installation -- which I look forward to seeing when I get to Bangkok next.  I always envisioned it for primary, but several people warned me that it doesn't work reliably with kids younger than seven or so -- as their fingerprints are too soft? unformed?  Others also mentioned parental concern over storing biometric data of children.
  
• Book Weeks.... listened to others discussing what they do.  What we all do is cram a lot into one week.  Why not make every week "book week"?  Spread out more author visits over time, matching the right author to the right age level during the right curriculum time.  World Book Day in April could be the excuse for the whole campus to dress up as a book character.  The UN provides enough days throughout the year to focus on (especially for us as we aren't a nation-based school), e.g., World Literacy Day, Mother Tongue Day, etc.
• Engaging readers.... Lots of good ideas and resources.
• Collection development... Ditto.
• Audiobooks and e-books....  A topic we all have opinions about and experiences with, e.g., Shrewsbury has Overdrive, so we were quizzing Kim Beeman.  Many of us have FollettShelf, Bookflix, and TumbleBooks.   Barb Philip shared the wealth of her experiments in her primary school library.
• Style of PD.... this small group worked well.  I'm now thinking our network in Singapore (ISLN) should go for one-day Bootcamps designed for no more than 50 participants at a time, on various topics, e.g., on graphic design and signage, copyright, RDA and cataloging, managing genres and the trend to genre-fication, etc. -- for all library staff.

Next year LKSW might be in Bangkok..... ? 

Photo above:  a snapshot of the fabulous biscuits made specially for the conference!

Connecting books and readers via the virtual, visible, spatial, and personal

I have a penchant for schematics.  Below is the one I made while thinking about the types of connections between readers and books -- and ways to enable them.

Note: when choosing ways to connect, three factors must always be considered:  Can it scale? (i.e., will it work for large numbers)  Is it easily accessible?  How will it be maintained?

We recently started an initiative that manages to combine all four delivery methods.

The personal connection is that we invite secondary school teachers to identify the books they want to recommend to their students.  The library then buys 3+ copies of those books for the general library collection.

The virtual connection is a booklist of the titles via our library catalog, e.g., see Dr. Alex's Favorites (where Alex McGregor is the head of History).

The visual connection is a huge skeuomorphic bookshelf poster (thanks to a new big Epson printer and this *.jpg of a blank wooden bookshelf) of the booklist, with a QR code linking to the list. 

To give you an idea of the size, the blank spots on the "shelf" are A4 size (8.5"x11") so teachers can add books to their shelf (read: maintenance) -- by printing out a cover and just blue-tacking it into place.  (Who said cutting and pasting is dead?)  See below example of a poster on a classroom wall.

The spatial connection is a display shelf in the library where multiple copies of each book are displayed - in a very visible way.  (The wall posters are also displayed, but as A4 size in acrylic holders.)

The books are placed face-out with the extra copies stacked behind -- and in the event that all copies are gone, we have a mini-poster (another visual connection) which is a piece of paper inside a plastic sleeve -- which has a QR code and shortened URL leading to the title in the library catalog, so people can check how many copies are available.  I always complain you can't see what books are missing when looking at a shelf -- this way you can permanently display the most important or popular titles.


Will we have room for all the teachers' selections?  We'll find the space....  Click here for a Google Presentation showing all the book wall posters made so far.

Next I want to some teachers to write up little booktalking blurbs and see if we can hang them off the metal holders -- the way independent bookstores do.....

Outside Connections and Follett Destiny

If I could wave a magic wand and improve Follett Destiny as a school library catalog, it would be to improve ways of linking and looking into it.

Here are a few ways to ameliorate the situation.

1)  Share a Destiny link -- the need to add the all-important 'site' information

Have you ever wanted to send a Destiny link to a title, resource list, or copy category to someone?  If so, you know you HAVE TO add:

&site=NUMBER

to the end of the link, where NUMBER is usually 100, 101, 102, 103, etc.

We host our own catalog, so that's all we have to do.  I just learned that if Follett hosts your catalog, you also have to add:

&context=BLAH

For example:  &context=saas18_8553630&site=100

You can see your particular site information by hovering over the link that gets you into your particular catalog.  For example, our Dover Secondary library is site 100, our Dover Primary library is site 101, our East Primary library is 102, and our East Secondary library is 103.  So that information is added to any link we send to anyone.

Update 12Apr14:  If Follett hosts your catalog and you need to find your CONTEXT number, look at the URL when you see all your catalogs displayed -- and it will be at the end of the URL:

2)  Get a Destiny link -- to a set of search results

If you want to send someone a "canned" ("tinned"?) search -- such that they can dynamically search the catalog by clicking on a link, you need to edit the URL.

For example, suppose I want to send someone a link that will do a keyword search on "economics".  I put "economics" in the Basic Search box and press Enter.  The URL that results is not reproducible -- you can't send it to someone and get the same results.  Instead you need to choose "Refine your search" and work with that URL.

When you get that URL, you need to change the word "present" to "handle":

Lastly, I have to add the site/context info, e.g., here is the final URL.

http://catalog.uwcsea.edu.sg/cataloging/servlet/handlebasicsearchform.do?keywordText=economics&siteTypeID=-2&searchType=keyword&siteID=&includeLibrary=true&includeMedia=false&mediaSiteID=&doNotSaveSearchHistory=false&awardGroupID=-1&site=103

The URL above will do a keyword search on "economics" for the East Second Library of UWCSEA and present the results.

Note:  You can also use DQL (Destiny Query Language) to do a more complicated search out of the Basic search box (because you can't access meaningful URLs based on an Advanced Search).

See the Destiny Help system for more information, e.g.,

3)  Goodreads -- how to click to check if you already have a Goodreads book in your Destiny catalog

First, find a book in Goodreads.  On the Title information page, look for "online stores" and "book links" at the bottom.  It's the "Book Links" bit that you (and your patrons) can customize to go to your school's Destiny catalog to check availability.

Angie Erickson and I presented a workshop on "Geeking out with Goodreads" in September at the Google Apps Summit here in Singapore -- and put "how to" information about integration with Follett Destiny up on a Google Site page here:

https://sites.google.com/site/geekingoutwithgoodreads/library-catalog-interfaces

4)  Book Cover Displays -- mirroring bits of your collection via Goodreads or LibraryThing or showing "Latest Arrivals" via Pinterest

Many people use Goodreads or LibraryThing to generate book display widgets for parts of their catalog.

Basically, you reproduce a Resource List or Copy Category (i.e., a list of books) in your catalog into Goodreads or LibraryThing or Pinterest -- and then put them on a shelf or board or tag them.

E.g., here is the 2013-2014 Red Dot books for Older Readers -- display out of Goodreads:

ISLN\ \(Int'l\ School\ Library\ Network\)'s bookshelf: 2013-2014-short-list-older

ISLN (Int'l School Library Network) Singapore's favorite books »

Update 12Apr14:  
If you "pin" books from within your Destiny catalog (adding the &site=xxx as per above), then when users click through on the board, they will be taken to the title in your catalog.

Pinterest, unlike Goodreads and LibraryThing, is a time-sensitive -- last in, first out -- list.  So it's perfect for showing things like "Latest Arrivals". (In Destiny Quest, users can see latest arrivals, but only 10 or so and you can't control what is on that list.   Via Pinterest, you can choose the books to advertise.

And here are some links to Pinterest boards that show our latest arrivals:

• New -- History books -- East
• New -- Science books -- East
• New -- Economic books -- East

5)  LibraryThing for Libraries -- Book Display Widgets -- linking back to Destiny

LibraryThing for Libraries has a javascript Book Widget generator available via Bowker for about US$ 400 -- which allows you to create any number of book display widgets in four different styles that will let people click on a book cover and go directly to that item in your school catalog.

We're now using it to get beautiful displays of booklists on our Libguide pages, e.g., see our Economics: Introduction: Books & Physical Resources and our Mathematics: Introduction: Books & Physical Resources guides.

The widget can take a variety of inputs -- as the screenshot to the right shows.

If you want to have the book covers displayed link back to your own catalog -- you need to use the "LibraryThing.com User".  When you buy the widget generator, you automatically get a LibraryThing account to put books into.  The widget works off LibraryThing "Collections" -- so when you enter or import titles, put them in a Collection.

If you have a Destiny Resource List and want those titles imported into LibraryThing, you can run a "Title/Copy List" report out of Destiny -- which includes the ISBN of copies. When the report is displayed, select all and copy the whole text output.  Then in LibraryThing go to "Add Books" then "Import Books" -- and paste that text into the "Grab ISBN" box.  Identify what collection you want them imported into -- then import.

You can then create a widget based on that collection.

You can also dump your whole school catalog as MARC records out of Destiny - and LibraryThing will upload them in batch mode -- though you can't identify tags or collections upon import.

In order to have the widget link back to your catalog, you have to tell LibraryThing how to search your catalog using a URL, e.g.,

ISBN search:
http://catalog.uwcsea.edu.sg/cataloging/servlet/handlenumbersearchform.do?searchOption=3&searchText=MAGICNUMBER&includeLibrary=true&includeMedia=false&siteTypeID=-2&siteID=&mediaSiteID=&doNotSaveSearchHistory=false&awardGroupID=-1&site=103

Title search:
http://catalog.uwcsea.edu.sg/cataloging/servlet/handlebasicsearchform.do?keywordText=KEYWORDS&siteTypeID=101&searchType=title&siteID=&includeLibrary=true&includeMedia=false&mediaSiteID=&doNotSaveSearchHistory=false&awardGroupID=-1&site=103

 Access-based URL:
http://catalog.uwcsea.edu.sg/cataloging/servlet/presenttitledetailform.do?siteTypeID=101&siteID=&includeLibrary=true&includeMedia=false&mediaSiteID=&bibID=ACCESSION&awardGroupID=-1&site=103

After you get these Global Configurations set up, creating the widget is straight-forward.

Here are the four styles available:

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3D Carousel example:

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Dynamic Grid example:

---

Carousel example:

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Scrolling example:

NB: As it's javascript, it's not possible to embed these widgets into Google Sites nor in the Destiny HTML homepage.

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 6)  Destiny Homepage -- call numbers and collections....

Last but not least, I think we all should be providing better clues about the structure of our catalogs on our Destiny homepages.   

When I get to somebody's catalog start page, I have no way of knowing how many books they have or how they've organized their collections.  So I'll look at Resource Lists and Visual Search lists, but if people haven't create any -- then it's a blind search box and I have to guess.

Ideally I'd like to create a map showing my library's layout and physical collections as well as digital resources -- and have that on my homepage.

Until I get around to to doing that, I list all the major call number prefixes on our Destiny Home Page.

Liberate your book cupboards and create a more true "bookstore" model in your school library?

We all enjoy the mental exercise of comparing libraries and bookstores as spaces where humans come to interact with books.

Libraries nobly address users' needs (the story goes), while bookstores focus on their wants -- and therefore provide a better browsing experience, being organized for optimum attention rather than intellectual access. 

Positing bookstores as the outside competition prompts us to examine and improve discoverability in our library environment -- to increase the likelihood people will find the books they want - or, more importantly, books they didn't even know they wanted.

First there's the basic environmental psychology of shopping, which Paco Underhill explained so well in his 1999 book, Why We Buy: the science of shopping -- what I think of as the "grocery store" approach. Put the most frequently purchased items at the back of the store, forcing people to walk through the space and be exposed to more merchandise.  Put the tempting last-minute purchases (the candy and gossip magazines) in the checkout aisle.  Make as much stuff face-front display as possible (who buys cereal by looking at the spine of the box?).

More commonly, talk of implementing bookstore models in libraries is associated with ditching Dewey (e.g., see this September 2012 article in School Library Journal) in favor of sections with real names on prominent signs ("Science Fiction", "Sports", "Travel", etc.), not decimal numbers.  Of course, we all ditch Dewey to some degree.  Everyone has an A-Z author-sorted "Fiction" section outside the 800s.  Many have a separate "Biography" section.  Every collection outside the run of the Dewey numbers can be claimed as a victory by the bookstore model.

The Magic of Multiple Copies

But there's one aspect of the bookstore model that most libraries don't or can't reproduce -- having multiple copies on the shelf and potentially more stock "out back" somewhere.

In our library this year, we have started to create "bookstore" sections.  Book covers facing out.  Rough grouping by author or genre.  Multiple copies behind the front book. And, most importantly, a paper place-holder sign showing you what book is normally shelved in the spot -- and a QR code to let you see how many copies are still available.

We started with the English Dept'.s resources, creating a Hot Reads for High School (over 250 titles so far) and a Middle School Reading Zone (over 170 titles so far).  Next the Math Dept. came up with a list of books to buy multiple copies, and the Economics Dept. wasn't far behind.  We've put those titles face-front at the beginning of the subject Dewey section in Nonfiction.

The best thing is - you can booktalk efficiently.  The selection is smaller and definitely selected - by virtue of the curriculum or a teacher or librarian. And there is an instant supply!

Because that's the usual frustration of a school librarian in front of a group of students - booktalking when only one copy is available.  What if you could booktalk a book and have 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 144+ copies available?

The project started with our middle school's foray into Reading Workshop, with its focus on literature circles instead of whole-grade novel study, and our Grade 9 English teachers deciding they wanted to kick off the year with a wide reading initiative (inspired by Penny Kittle's Book Love) before having to hone in on IGCSE texts.

How could we quickly produce varied class libraries for 8+ English classrooms per grade level?  Where would these books come from?

Solution:  Take all the multiple copies previously purchased for whole-class novel study by the English Dept. and make them available to all students (when not required by a particular teacher).  Then choose some extra titles for purchase, whether in small or large sets, based on curriculum need or teacher/librarian choice.  Finally, for us, add in the multiple copies purchased as part of running of the annual Red Dot Awards (see history here).

Voila!  The library as massive class library.  With multiple copies of great books available on the shelf.  This is our "Best Books for Middle School" list, our "This is What Your Child Will Be Reading in English Class" list, our "What Your Teacher Recommends" list.  Parents love it, as do kids.  It's the quick pick-up zone.  The whole Fiction section still has a fantastic selection of books, but students don't have to negotiate it until they are motivated to do so.

I want to focus now on the logistics of our implementation.  Because there always are tricks that make things work, in any given situation.

Q:  How to you keep multiple copies on the shelf?

A:   Our shelves are deep enough to store a stack of books behind a simple metal bookend, bent to hold a front-facing book on display.  The excess are kept in a backroom, handy enough that library staff can go retrieve them to replenish the shelf stock or upon request.


Q:  What if all the "hot reads" are gone?  How do I know what is all out?

A:  There is still evidence left behind.  No titles out of sight, out of mind. We have made A5 (half of 8.5x11" sheets, for you Americans) printouts showing the cover plus a QR code and shortened URL -- which take you to the catalog, showing how many copies are still available.


QR codes are magic.  I've liked them from the beginning and have them sprinkled around my library, connecting the visible with the virtual.

I recommend you get ShortenMe in the Chrome Extension store.  With one click, you get an instant QR code and goo.gl URL.

NB: if you're using Follett Destiny, you always need to add your site number at the end of the URL before shortening it (e.g., blahblahblah&site=100).  Contact me if you use Destiny and don't know what I'm talking about.

The A5 paper signs go into re-usable stiff plastic "card cases". Sample at left.

Q:  How do people know if there are more copies out back?

A:  By scanning the QR code or typing in the Goo.gl shortened URL provided on every display stand -- both of which link into our catalog, e.g., click here to see availability of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

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As mentioned above, this model is being extended into subject departments in high school, creating pockets of the "bookstore experience" within the Dewey run.  Mathematics, Economics, History, and Drama are the first.

To the right are books on the Mathematics shelves in the Dewey section.

We have virtual walls, too, mirroring these bookstore sections -- thanks to a new HP large-format printer, which can make posters up to 1.x meters in size.  See examples in the slideshow below.

Looking back: the evolution of the Red Dot Book Awards & Readers Cup in Singapore

The Red Dot book awards (reddotawards.com) are one of those hybrid awards:  students vote on shortlists selected by adults (school librarians).  Eight books in four categories, one winner in each -- followed by a Readers Cup competition between international schools here in Singapore.

"But what's the mission statement?  Good literature or just promoting books from various countries?" someone asked as we gathered to sort through the longlists of the four categories this year.

My gut response was "good literature from various countries."

The awards website's "About" page says:

The Red Dot categories are roughly based on readers, rather than book formats or school divisions.  (NB: It is up to every librarian to determine which books are right for which classes in your school to read.)

• Early Years (ages 3-7) -- formerly Picture Books

• Younger Readers (ages 7-10) -- formerly Junior) -- (where Captain Underpants and Geronimo Stilton are the assumed reading level)

• Older Readers (ages 10-14) -- formerly Middle) -- (where Inkheart and The Lightning Thief are the assumed reading level)

• Mature Readers (ages 14-adult) -- (formerly Senior) --  (where Twilight and The Book Thief are the assumed reading level)

Shortlist titles are chosen by a committee of teacher-librarians from recent children's literature (first published in English within the past four years), with the goal of offering a range of books from around the world. 

The initiative is now entering its fifth year, just long enough for its origins to deserve review -- especially given our transient teaching population.

• 2009 - 2010 website
• 2010 - 2011 website
• 2011 - 2012 website
• 2012 - 2013 website
• 2013 - 2014 - website under development

As one of its creators, it was interesting for me to go back through the minutes of meetings and  posts in the Google Group of our local network - ISLN (International Schools Library Network - Singapore) and remember how it developed.

First there was Barb Philip Reid, a NZ/Australian teacher-librarian at Tanglin Trust School, back in September 2008 wanting to get a Readers Cup going between all our schools, similar to the Readers Cup in Australia.   As research, she and I did a librarians-on-tour trip to Hong Kong in May 2009 to watch the finale of the annual Battle of the Books (based on a well-established American model) run by their international school library network, ALESS.

At the same time I had been wanting to get an annual international students-voting book award going in Singapore, inspired by the Panda Book Awards created by SLIC (School Librarians in China) and the Sakura Medal started by the international school librarians in Japan.  (The French international schools in Asia run a similar program: see here and here -- and there is now the Morning Calm Medal in South Korea.) 

Barb and I figured, why not combine the two ambitions and start an annual book award program, whose shortlists would become the source of the Readers Cup competition booklists.  Introduce the books in Oct/Nov, vote in March, and the three older categories (as shown) would compete in May.

• Younger Readers - Year 3, 4 & 5 / Grade 2, 3 & 4
• Older Readers - Year 5, 6, 7, & 8 / Grade 4, 5, 6 & 7
• Mature Readers - Year 8+ / Grade 7+

Our booklists would then necessarily be "formative" ones, meaning only fairly recent literature, in contrast to the "summative" kind most "Battle of the Books" (Google it) use, mixing old and new titles.  Both have their place.  The "summative" approach guarantees kids don't miss great books from any era.  The "formative" ensures students and teachers are exposed to the best of the latest -- and encourages schools to buy multiple copies of new titles every year, potentially freshening up the book cupboards.

We got a committee together and in October 2009 it was announced the award would be called the "Red Dots" (as Singapore is proud of that epithet).   The shortlists followed in November, with 14 schools immediately signing up to participate, including a British school, an American school, a German school, a French school, a Canadian school, an Australian school, plus just plain Anglo-heritage/international ones.  And so it started, and has continued, with some variation in implementation.

Each school can do what they want with the lists.  Buy them all or only a selection.  Participate in voting or not.  Participate in the Readers Cup or not.  Give your students different criteria for choosing one book to vote for in each category.  (Your personal favorite? The one you would recommend to friends the most?)  We only say students should probably have read at least two books in a category in order to make a choice.  We do expect just one vote per student per category.  Results are tallied by category and school, and then for all the schools, giving us overall winners.

An International Approach (in Singapore)

 

But back to the question, how do we choose titles?   What assumptions has the committee been working on over the past five years?

Barb and I did a presentation at the 2010 IASL (International Association of School Librarians) in Brisbane, Australia, on "Creating Internationally Literate Readers" (see the workshop website and our conference paper), which recounted the Red Dot story and summarized the challenges we face in choosing books suitable for and accessible to the wide range of students in our various international schools.

We brought up the danger of the single story (a la Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk) and the need for books to serve as both mirrors and windows of culture for children, especially given the predominance of "third culture" kids in our schools.  We showed examples of books that bridge cultures well - and others that are problematic.  For example, the question always has to be asked, is this book too American? too British? too Australian? too Canadian? too Singaporean? etc.

There are so many factors, but these are the major ones considered for the Red Dot books:

•  Publication date:  published in English within the past four years.  That seems to increase the chance that books are available in paperback.  It also allows enough time for us to take advantage of other/national book awards which may be limited to just the past year - we can choose from their backlists.
• Cost and ease of access:  If a book is perfect, but not available through our regular book-buying channels, or only available in hardcover, we hesitate to choose it.  Likewise, if a book is available as an ebook as well as print, that would give it extra points.  Everyone runs their Red Dot program differently, but we assume multiple copies will be purchased.
• Genres:  with only eight titles per category, variety is desirable, but there is no formula.  One non-fiction? One poetry or verse novel? One graphic novel? One fantasy? One historical fiction?   One book in translation?  One book featuring global concerns, like child labor or refugees or war? There has been talk of starting a separate category for graphic novels.  Maybe next year?
• Reading Level vs. Reader Maturity Level:  This is the hardest thing to gauge.  Where to place a book.  Sometimes we get it wrong.  There is an assumed one year overlap (at least for the Readers Cup) between Younger and Older Readers, and Older and Mature Readers.  And schools have different comfort levels with language and content.  All we can say is, each librarian is responsible for reading and placing the books in their school.  There is no requirement that each school stock each book.  Students don't have to read all the books in order to vote.
• Country of origin or country of flavor:  We like to include a book or two in each category that reflects the region.  Having said that, we try not to privilege country of origin over quality.   If there's a good one from Singapore, that's great (especially if the author likes to do school visits), but if not, we would be happy with a good one from, or set in, another Asian country.  Also, no one country of origin should dominate a list.  When in doubt, think international.
• Literary vs. Popular:  This is the tension in the modified children's choice style of book awards.  They don't pick the longlist or shortlist - they only get to vote.  So are we choosing books we want them to read?  Or books they would choose to read on their own?  Should we choose a book if we already have a sense that it's going to a big hit?  Or avoid the easy choice and try to put another one in their path, a lesser known one that could have just as much appeal?  (Some of our past choices might look like we went for a bestseller, but if you check the dates, we chose them before their massive popularity - e.g., "The Hunger Games".)
  
  The bottom line is, we are buying multiple copies of these books.  They might not have to be texts worth teaching in depth, but if the extra copies are going to be used (after the Red Dot cycle is over) for literature circles or to enhance class libraries, then we want both quality and appeal.  I know I want books my students can possibly make at least two connections with (using the Keene & Zimmerman / Harvey & Goudvis strategies):
  
• Text-to-Self -- emotional or personal connections -- think empathy...
• Text-to-World -- social or political or historical connections -- relevant issues or introduction to other cultures...
• Text-to-Text -- literary/literacy or intellectual connections -- perhaps an author, series, or genre that will keep kids reading...

Balance is Everything

This means within the list, across the categories, and across the years.  For all the factors above.

I found some old photos of our Red Dot committee shortlist meeting from September 2010.   Here we are:  drinks, nibbles, laptops (note the person being skyped in), smartphones, and books.  I recall it was a marathon session.

 

And here's the whiteboard where the balance of the lists was incessantly being assessed.

 

This year we've split into two groups to do the selection:  Early/Younger and Older/Mature.  Time is ticking and we should be finishing our lists within the next two weeks.  There are books to be bought.  And a new website to get up and running.  Watch reddotawards.com for updates......

Title talk: Librarian + What? Teacher? Facilitator? Curriculum Leader?

The last time our school posted a library job, it asked for a Teacher-Librarian (TL).*

This time it says we need a Library Facilitator.  (Apply by October 23!)  Primary or secondary.  (While I'm in secondary now, I'm flexible.)


Where did the teaching go?  It's still in there, but shifted - from direct to indirect - while retaining learning as the priority.  Read the job responsibilities:

• Work collaboratively with library staff across the campus and college.
• Work collaboratively with the curriculum leaders and department heads to develop resources and promote inquiry-based learning and all forms of literacy.
• Work collaboratively with all members of the community (whether students, parents, or staff) to support teaching and learning.
• Manage the library as a learning environment and public space, including patron services and library staff.
• Manage and develop learning resources, physical and digital, both for the library and classrooms/departments.
• Lead the development and promotion of the library as a centre dedicated to the spread of ideas, information, and learning.
• Other responsibilities as determined by the Head of Libraries and Head of Campus.

 The issue is our librarian-student ratio.

With only two teacher-librarians, one in the primary library and one in the secondary library, and 2,600 students total, the ratio is challenging (to be euphemistic).  We  have roughly 1,000 students in primary and 1,300 students this year in middle/high school (secondary) - and will be adding another 300 students in secondary next year, for a maximum of 2,600 on this new campus.  (And we have a mirror campus across town with 2,900 students, K-12.)

How can one person "teach" 1,000 students?  They can't.  At least not regularly.  Instead they must focus on developing teachers' capacity (as a coach, modeling lessons and acting as a consultant) and learning resources (from pathfinders via Libguides to videos, podcasts, slide presentations), not to mention running a facility that is a learning space by default (the environment as the 3rd teacher), hosting events and initiatives.   Our libraries are in prominent well-trodden paths.  There's no danger of students not coming into them.  Two major pillars of support are the stalwart library staff and the motivated and multi-talented parent body.  Both are critical to maintaining library sanity.

Did I mention that, at this campus, the library is also responsible for the processing and management of all teaching resources?  This includes textbooks for secondary (where we have them) and reading/writing workshop resources for middle and primary (i.e., literature circles and class libraries).  In addition, the secondary library works closely with departments to ensure multiple copies of great books for each age and subject are available (imagine "Hot Reads for High School" across disciplines).

In this situation, we decided that the librarian half is more important than the teacher half in recruiting a new person.  Hence the word "facilitator" over "teacher".  We played with several others.  Coach? Curriculum Liaison? Curriculum Developer?  Curriculum Leader?

We have great teachers.  And we have a great number of resources, digital and physical.  What we need is someone dedicated to connecting the two efficiently.  Perhaps we are just looking for a TL committed to the Flipped Classroom -- who is also excited by metadata.  Because that's what the librarian end should be focusing on -- ensuring easy, intellectual access to everything (the curriculum++) from anywhere.  And this must be accomplished while living in the center of the library, where the students live each day.   It's a front-of-office job with back-of-office responsibilities.

So consider applying.  Whether you agree with our label or not.  What's important is that you appreciate our situation and feel you could not only cope, but add value.

Head of Library role is another interesting definition to consider.  This is how I describe it at the moment.

• Develop staffing plans and co-ordinate staff recruitment and deployment
• Co-ordinate the budget process

• Represent the library team in a variety of settings
• Facilitate communication between libraries across the campus and college
• Develop a strategic plan and co-ordinate goal-setting for the libraries
• Co-ordinate staff professional development
• Manage facility planning and development
• Develop library policies and procedures
• Liaise with heads of departments & grades about policy and procedures relating to the management of learning resources (e.g., textbooks and class libraries)
• Oversee the provision of information services

Comments welcome.... as well as sympathy.

Update Oct 15:

I forgot to mention two other very very very important positions that complement the library ones.

The primary school has two digital literacy coaches as well as one literacy coach (in charge of the reading/writing workshop learning).  There are also two digital literacy coaches in secondary.

So five other people in the school are supporting other literacies (digital, traditional, etc.) that in a smaller school would probably fall within the teacher-librarian's remit.  Which helps a lot.

I always draw the relationship like this:

Also note the head of library responsibilities listed above are additional to a basic role.  I have to do that as Head of Library on top of being the secondary school teacher-librarian (or library facilitator).

Update Oct 17:

Several questions keep coming up.

1)  Is this a teaching position, with a teacher's contract and benefits?  Yes.

2)  Is there library support staff?  Yes.  Lovely, hard-working staff.  And we have just been given approval to advertise for a local-hire, administrative librarian for our campus (the other campus already has one - giving them three fully-qualified librarians, including the TLs).

3)  What about the online portfolio that must be submitted?

In addition to the usual requirement for applicants to submit a resume and letter of application, candidates for this position should also submit an online portfolio showing evidence of implementation/innovation in these six overlapping areas of the library:  patrons; resources; teaching & learning; events & initiatives; the library environment as "the 3rd teacher"; library staff/team.

Our campus is moving towards teacher portfolios instead of appraisals, so this seemed a good way to have new staff start off -- by showing us things you've done that you're proud of and that have made a difference to the learning in the institutions you've worked in.  Feel free to interpret the six areas as you will and to fashion a portfolio that suits you.  Just give us something to click.

---

* For the record, I have always been irritated by the American term, "Library Media Specialist".  Years before I became one, I imagined such a person in charge of just CDs and DVDs (ok, it was many years ago).....

A look at staffing in international school libraries

I've been asked to project what our library staffing needs will be post-set-up phase (as we are in Year 3 of a brand-new school with one more year of expansion).

Please fill out the form below if you are a fully-established middle or high school library in an international school.  Don't forget to hit the Submit button at the bottom.

Many thanks.... I've made it so everyone can see the results right after you complete the form.

UPDATED Sep 6: Here is a direct link to the spreadsheet of results.

Making and Tinkering to Learn

If you want to have a good read about the history and future of the "making" movement in education and tinkering as "a mindset for learning," I highly recommend the book "Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom -- by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager.

Go to their website for an overview of the chapters, with links to extended resources for each.

The best thing it did was to send me back to read/re-read Seymour Papert, the grandfather of the movement.  (I didn't realize the roots of his projects were in Maine.)

I also refreshed my acquaintance with the writings of Mitchel Resnick (head of the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten group) re the cycle of imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine.  And a biography of Nikola Tesla is on my "to read" list.

A few notes/quotes from the book:

Stager's hypothesis:  "A good prompt is worth a thousand words." -- where 'good' means it has (a) brevity (e.g., can fit on a post-it note), (b) ambiguity (let the learner be free to satisfy the prompt in their own voice), and (c) has immunity to assessment. (60-61)

Learners can exceed expectations with the following four variables in place:
-- a good prompt, motivating challenge, or thoughtful question
-- appropriate materials
-- sufficient time
-- a supportive culture, including a range of expertise (60)

"Great teachers know that their highest calling is to make memories." (67)

"Constructivism is a theory of learning that doesn't mandate a specified method of teaching.... Constructionism is a theory of teaching.  We believe that constructionism is the best way to implement constructivist learning." (71)

Advice: skip the pre-load, don't overteach planning, encourage continuous improvement, allow reflection. (77)

Assessment interrupts the learning process.  Even asking a kid what they're doing is disruptive. (81)

"Writing, filmmaking, and presenting information are the low-hanging fruit of creative expression in the digital age." (84)

"The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge." -- Seymour Papert (157)

 Educators need to be reminded that it is possible to learn without being taught. (202)

---

Reading the book, I remembered my father's workshop down cellar in the house in Maine where I grew up.  We loved to make things with him.  My biggest project was a bookcase that would double as my bed's headboard.  Mainly we marveled at how he could fix things.  He was definitely a tinkerer.

A few years ago it was time to clear the workshop out.  After all, he'd been dead for some twenty years and no one was using it.  But I took some last photos.

 
Full Flickr set here 

Reporting back: On being with 26,000 other librarians for five days

I started this year's ALA* (#ALA2013) experience with two very practical all-day pre-conference workshops.

• Library Makerspaces: The Field Trip -- at the Chicago Public Library, which focused on the spaces being created to allow  kids to experience hands-on tinkering, especially with flexible, inexpensive digital/electronic components.  Various people presented, on various aspects. All-day interesting.  Separate blog post coming. 

• RDA: Back to the Basics -- which explained, in illuminating detail, the benefits to libraries of the new metadata Resource Description and Access standard and how to gradually implement it via existing MARC data records.  Welcome, worthwhile. Separate blog post coming.

 The conference itself involved shorter sessions.  Highlights included:

• Crossing the K-20 Continuum: Are Librarians Bridging Information Literacy and 21st Century Skills? -- a panel discussion by Kenneth Murhanna, from Kent State University, director of the TRAILS project and author of the new book, Informed Transitions: Libraries Supporting the High School to College Transition -- see his presentation slides ("Battling the Unready") here -- and Tasha Bergson-Michelson, a Google Search Educator moving in September to a girls-only high school in Palo Alto (http://library.castilleja.org/) -- see her presentation slides at bit.ly/SearchSources.

• Friction: Teaching Slow Thinking and Intentionality in Online Research -- a presentation by Debbie Abilock (NoodleTools) and Tasha Bergson-Michelson again (see above).  See presentation slides here.  Not only was I thrilled to finally meet Debbie in person, having known and interacted with her online for years, but this was one of the few sessions which managed to involve the audience effectively.  If you go to http://bit.ly/FrictionALA, you can get links to the ten Google Docs used to record the small group discussions. 
  
  I liked the idea of focusing on "friction points" in the research process -- where students could or should be prompted to use System Two thinking (as in Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" - one of my favorites).  More on on this in another blog post.

• Studying Ourselves: Libraries and the User Experience -- a panel presentation by a professor and two university librarians, each of whom had studied the library environment -- and students' use of the library -- using sociological and/or anthropological research methods.  The sociology professor, Andrew Abbott, was particularly fascinating.  Again, more in another blog post.

• LibrarARy Orientation: Augmented Reality in the Library:  Reality -- a quick session by the University of Houston librarians on how they are using Aurasma, a free augmented reality app, to enhance their library orientation sessions.  Click here for their Prezi presentation.  I had already played with Aurasma and found it interesting to see how they were using it.  More on this later.

• Bleak New World: YA Authors Decode Dystopia -- a panel discussion by four top-notch dystopia authors, from old to young: Lois Lowry ("The Giver"), Cory Doctorow ("Little Brother"), Patrick Ness ("The Knife of Never Letting Go"), and Veronica Roth ("Insurgent").  As Ness said, the best YA books promote the question, "what would you do if....?" And another of them said, dystopia is not a story, but a way to tell a story.

• Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? -- An auditorium presentation by a major player in the making of today's digital world, unafraid to criticize it with compelling economic arguments in his new book.  Also thoroughly charming. I'm a long-time follower of his thinking, so I felt like it was a fireside chat with an old friend, bringing up scary topics (too true, big data is a big danger), but also reassuring that we can change history by raising awareness at critical moments. (What a lovable hippie....).  Google him for all kinds of resources, starting with his homepage.

•  Ping Fu: Bend Not Break -- An auditorium presentation by a woman who grew up in the worst of China's Cultural Revolution and today is a cutting edge American entrepreneur in the 3D digital "maker" space, thanks to her company, Geomagic.  Her story is fascinating - as she started out doing comparative literature in China, while computer science was her ticket to success in the States.  In the photo below, note her her shoes and scarf are both 3D-printed objects. 
  
  For more info re her book, see her website: bendnotbreak.com -- though she has come under a lot of scrutiny for some of her depictions of the Cultural Revolution.  Has she exaggerated or mis-remembered?  Google it yourself, if you're interested in the controversy.  I still enjoyed listening to a rags-to-riches-via-technology American immigrant woman on stage -- and hope some of my students will read her autobiography.

•  Beyond Genre: Exploring the Perception, Uses, and Misuses of Genres by Readers, Writers, etc. -- a panel discussion by three popular writers (for adults, not teens or children) -- crime novelist Laura Lippman (wife of David Simon, if that name means anything to you fans of "The Wire"),  Margaret Dilloway, and Naomi Novik, fantasy writer and analyst of fandom fiction.  All new-to-me authors.  The comments that stuck with me include:   "Never forget, literature can be done within genre; the author is potentially limited, not the form."  Also a reminder of the benefit of genre lists, i.e., booklists that help young people in a library looking for the next thing to read.  NB:  Since the session the organizers have posted a long list of resources related to genres -- it's well worth a look:  Beyond Genre: Research and Trends PDF.

Next year ALA is in Las Vegas, a place I would normally not go near.  Now it sounds quite attractive.

---

*ALA - the American Library Association's annual conference, held at the end of June (convenient for those of us on the northern hemisphere school calendar - and for me regularly winging my way from Singapore to Maine - so any US city is "on the way".... this year it was Chicago...).  A conference that attracts 26,000 librarians/attendees.  Yes, think mega-library.  Below is a photo which gives an idea of the expanse of the exhibition space -- which I navigated, iPhone in hand, snapping books and ideas to pursue later.

All photos taken by me.

The digital sensitivity of a library collection

"How many books are there in the library and what are the annual circulation statistics?" says the secondary school administrator.

My first response is, what do you think that measures?

Okay, it's budget allocation time, so the underlying issue is financial competition with other development goals.  It's a request to justify the collection we're building as a new secondary school, finishing our second year of operation.

But let's start with the devil in the detail of our circulation statistics.

• Browsing vs. Check-out:  A lot of books are taken off the shelf, but don't get taken out.  They're read  in the library, then left on tables.  Every day we have to go around and pick them up.  The most popular browsing material seems to be self-help and well-being books (yes, this includes sex-ed), art and photography books, poetry, graphic format (think: cartoons, comics and manga), middle-school novels (because: teachers regularly bring their classes in for free-choice, silent sustained reading), and Chinese-language books (reasons: various). 
  
  The fact that we're open until 9:30pm four nights a week for boarding house study time increases students' browsing potential within the library -- without having to check books out.
  
• In-library-use-only Displays: Large numbers of curriculum-related books are kept on display tables while a grade has a particular focus - and students are asked NOT to take them out, for mass maximum access.  Students' ability to scan-to-PDF pages or chapters from books makes in-library-use-only more manageable.  Recent displays have supported units on peace and conflict resolution, human rights and up-standers/heroes, the Vietnam war, religions of the world, genetics, South Africa, etc.
• Library resources are intertwined with those of the English Dept. -- so our circulation statistics should be considered jointly.
• Some English teachers use the school library for their class library, checking out a box of books for in-class circulation over a long period.
• Multiple copies of titles bought by the English Dept. are available on library shelves for general loan -- when not needed by a particular teacher -- rather than letting them languish in departmental book cupboards.
• The library buys multiple copies of recently-published titles as part of the annual Red Dot Book Awards, and those books are automatically shifted to the English Dept. (both in the catalog and on the shelves) each June.
• In such a new library, large numbers of new items are constantly being added.  Many resources haven't had much chance to be discovered and taken out.

Each school will have its own context that weakens the power of plain circulation statistics.

What is the ideal number of books in a secondary school library?  In different countries at different times, school library associations, whether national or regional, have cited research and quoted numbers.  12? 16? 20? 36? books per student?  I know schools that swear by each of those. 

But what are we counting?  Just physical books?

Our collection size and substance is definitely affected by students' access to digital resources, due to our 1:1 Macbook program for grades 6-12.

To start with, we have no need for a separate reference section -- as databases provide that so well.

What doesn't the internet deliver as well as physical volumes in a school library?

• Large-format art and design books -- ones you can spread out on a table and see many images at once.  Big beautiful books to browse.
• Graphic novels and sophisticated picture books.  Same idea.  Big visuals.
• Poetry.  Yes, you can find poems on websites, but due to copyright you can't find whole collections of one poet.  And so many poetry books are physical works of art in themselves.
• Playscripts.  Again, a collection not accessed every day by everyone, but a godsend to someone interested in drama.
• Special collections in one physical location, available for browsing -- Singapore books, self-help and well-being books, third-culture kids and global nomad books, "vintage" books (books published prior to 1950, culled from piles of donations, are a fascination to our students).  World languages (mother-tongue) collections come under this category, too.
• Books the average person isn't going to buy for their home library.  For example, The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.  Price: Expensive. Who is reading this, you ask?  Not just the art teachers.  Yes, they're assigning it -- because they're thrilled to have it available. 
• Narrative and visual non-fiction -- about science, math, history, etc.  Biographies fall in this category. 
• Experience with non-fiction book layout standards -- e.g., how to use a table of contents, index, appendices, etc.   I find middle school teachers are particularly concerned with giving their students access to and experience with non-fiction books precisely because the internet doesn't easily allow them to absorb the conventions of research texts. I'd prefer to let databases provide (up-to-date) access to basic science, humanities, and geography information, but the teachers are still requesting a physical collection.
• Fiction.  We're still delivering fiction via physical books for the time being.  While ebooks are growing in popularity and availability, the software to be able to lend ebooks (e.g., Overdrive) isn't cheap or doesn't have a good enough interface yet (e.g., Destiny), plus the whole DRM (digital rights management) situation isn't easy.  Several international school libraries have bought the ebook lending software only to find the books their students want to read aren't available as ebooks (legally) outside the US or UK.  
  
  Our students spend a lot of time in front of a screen and when we have tried to deliver English-class texts digitally (e.g., for works out of copyright and readily available in epub format), there has been push-back. The school's standard-issue laptop isn't the ideal ebook device.  I am also not convinced that the library should invest in mobile ereaders to lend out.
  
  Discoverability -- seeing what's available to borrow -- is also much harder with a digital loan collection.  It's not like sweeping your eyes over a bookshelf.  (I find Overdrive very frustrating on the browsing-for-titles front.)  

Making the virtual visible is one of my library mantras.  Not just making the library's digital presence visually evident, but also creating a physical space that provides a sense of the world's knowledge -- organized in some fashion.  The environment is the "third" teacher --  therefore the library, as a physical space, should be a powerful influence upon learning.

What I think the library space needs to do better is to connect the user with the online resources that complement and expand the physical resources on the shelf.  To let digital nuggets convince you to read a whole book; it could be a video of the author speaking or an animated illustration of a book's argument or just a great article related to the book, freely available online.

I never answered the question of how many books is enough.  This comes back to the question of what we want to measure in the library - and how it can be measured.  I'll save my proposed dashboard for a separate post. 

Images via Flickr:   
Books and Books by Kara Allyson 
Avian books 34 by Mal Booth 
The book by giopuo

Carol Kuhlthau meets Tim Brown: Guided Inquiry {Design} Thinking

Two books have been guiding my thinking about research & inquiry cycles for the past couple of years.

a)  Change by Design -- by Tim Brown, of IDEO "design thinking" fame.  His framework is not explicitly educational, though IDEO have published a toolkit of design thinking for educators.

b)  Guided Inquiry Design: a framework for Inquiry in your School -- by Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari.  Kuhlthau is the grand dame of teacher-librarianship and the one who first recognized the emotional element involved in the ISP (Information Search Process) back in 1991.

For me, the most important feature they share is the recognition of that emotional element in research.  We all get discouraged - or should.  If you don't experience any dip in confidence, then it means you're not really pushing yourself in terms of researching.   Tim's sketch illustrates Carol's original insight very well.

Tim's design process is an incredibly simple iterative cycle between Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation (below is my sketch) -- but I think it works just as well in terms of research.

Carol's latest framework is more expansive, incorporating 8 "verb" steps (mirroring her older ISP "noun" stages - shown in parentheses) :

• Open (Initiation)
• Invitation to inquiry
• Open minds
• Stimulate curiosity
• Immerse (Selection)
• Build background knowledge
• Connect to content
• Discover interesting ideas
• Explore (Exploration)
• Explore interesting ideas
• Look around
• Dip in
• Identify (Formulation)
• Pause and ponder
• Identify inquiry questions
• Decide direction
• Gather (Collection)
• Gather important information
• Go broad
• Go deep
• Create (Presentation)
• Reflect on learning
• Go beyond facts to make meaning
• Create to communicate
• Share (Presentation)
• Learn from each other
• Sharing learning
• Tell your story
• Evaluate (Assessment)
• Evaluate achievement of learning goals
• Reflect on content
• Reflect on process

Carol's book offers plenty of practical suggestions for implementing inquiry in schools, e.g., she stresses the need for an Inquiry Journal (a workspace for individual composing and reflection) as well as Inquiry Charts (attempts to visualize ideas, connections, questions, etc.) and an Inquiry Log (a record of sources consulted), but one of the most important points she makes is the crucial distinction between the Explore and the Gather stages.

The Explore stage is about browsing, scanning, and skimming.  "Dipping in" means you need to relax, read, and reflect.  Sources should just be tracked in the Inquiry Log at this point.

The Gather stage is about detailed note-taking, comprehensive searching, and "going deep".  This is also the stage when you need to thinking about citing, quoting, and paraphrasing. Too often students think they have to take detailed notes on a source the first time they encounter it - before they have decided on an inquiry focus.

Again, Tim has a simple distinction which I think epitomizes the difference.

Here I have added just two extra descriptions:  Finding Out vs. Sorting Out (a la Kath Murdoch)

When talking to students, I now like to have them clarify which mode they think they are currently in.  And the emotional dip of uncertainty is often a sign that's time for the shift.  What a metacognitive skill -- to know how much first stage searching is enough to work with -- to have enough choices.

This is Carol's Identify stage -- which is about focusing and establishing a meaningful inquiry question -- when the thinking shifts from divergent (broad) to convergent (deep).

Tim Brown insists all ideas (i.e., research questions) must be analyzed in light of three criteria:  Desirability (personal interest/passion), Viability (for Tim this means "makes business sense," but in the educational realm it translates to "fits the assignment or criteria" and satisfies the big "so what?"), and Feasibility (the time and resources to actually complete the project).

Similarly, Carol asks students to consider their question in terms of the assigned task, their own interest, the time available, and the information and resources available.

I think Tim's four basic illustrations concisely convey the key stages of research better than Carol's more elaborate theory.  I still want her book on my shelf, but, until I can get more teachers to read and absorb it, I'll be using Tim's ideas and images in conversation.

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

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?

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

"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!

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.)

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

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):

• Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?
• On Using Technology Without Understanding It
• Why “Academic Excellence” No Longer Cuts It Today
• Videos: Mental Poverty, Collaboration, “Recession Skills 101″

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