Author Archives: Sue Belcher

The librarians are showing off their alumni spirit.   Yesterday, Janelle Hagen sported her favorite Pitt t-shirt.   Today I decided to demonstrate my Wisconsin pride by donning my beloved library school hat.   If Rutgers had a seat at the table this year, I have no doubt that Heather Hersey would have gotten in on the action.   It’s March Madness at the Pigott Library!

During the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, we set up computers and a big screen TV to show all of the games.   The idea was spearheaded by Julie Johnson, our media specialist, a number of years ago.   The games build community on a number of levels.   It is fun to see students and faculty members cheering on their favorite teams during free periods.   The student newspaper runs an ESPN bracket competition.   Anyone in the Lakeside community who wants to play is welcome.  March Madness gives our faculty, staff, students and administration a common language for banter and a light-hearted reason for camaraderie.

Rapport with students is a high priority for our team.   Due to the fact that the Pigott Library is one of the few public spaces one campus where students are held to a consistent level of behavioral expectations, there is definitely an ebb and flow to the library team’s approval rating with students.    The goodwill and fun atmosphere created during the tournament helps to rebuild our hero status, even if it is only for a few days.   The countless thank yous are appreciated.

Every January our team spends the month preparing for the department review.   This involves a combination of gathering usage statistics from our databases and catalog, surveying students, creating individual reflections and gathering readings that support our vision to share with the admin team.

Our goal in gathering data is to notice patterns or trends.   As I looked at our database statistics, I was reminded of a dilemma that I have been shelving for a while now.   Despite the fact that virtually all of our database usage statistics have gone up, Safari Montage has gone down significantly over the past three years.  Safari Montage is our streaming video database.   I was drawn to the company based on the quality of their content.   What other company has publishers like BBC, NASA, National Geographic and PBS?  Unfortunately when it comes to playing the videos on individual laptops, we’ve had inconsistent results.   There are a variety of reasons for this.   Lakeside’s philosophy of not having a single, locked down image for student and faculty laptops is likely the top culprit.   Regardless of the reasons, if teachers can’t rely on a product working on demand in their classroom, they won’t use it.   If they can’t ensure that students will be able to do their assignments in a flipped classroom model, they won’t assign them.

When trying to solve this problem, there are a number of key questions to consider:

• How will teachers who have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into creating playlists for their classes feel about switching to another system?   How can we alleviate growing pains during the transition?
• Are we at the point that there are enough videos freely available online (YouTube, Vimeo, TED Talks) and through open courseware (Khan Academy, Coursera, EdX) and that we no longer need to subscribe to a video database?
• Have any new products come on the scene in the last few years that rival Safari Montage’s content?

After a bit of research, I stumbled on Facts On File Curriculum Video On Demand.   I was thrilled to see that they offer engaging content from Films Media Group.    We have a preview for the next month and I am looking forward to the comparison.  Do any librarians out there have any feedback on this product?

The question of video database platforms reminds me of why I love being a school librarian.  The information landscape is constantly evolving and we truly need to be life-long learners in order to stay current.    Heather Hersey’s last post highlights why watching videos rather than simply reading can boost content retention.    It is a good reminder of why we need to find a solution to our video database issues.  What’s best for students is at the core of our decision making process.

Recently, I stumbled on a group of students collaborating while sitting IN the study carrels.   Each of them, snuggled up knees to chest, was comfortably making our library their home.  I walked up to the group of students and said, “I’m not exactly sure why, but I need you to sit in chairs.”   Priding myself on reasonable self-awareness, I started to question the situation.  Why do I need them to sit in chairs?   What purpose does it serve besides calming my neurotic need for the appearance of order?   Side note: I also feel best when all of the chairs are pushed in at the end of each class period.

The following day, I watched Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk, Bring on the Learning Revolution.   In the talk SKR suggested that in order to have radical change, we need to disenthrall ourselves with current conventions in education.   Specifically he said,

“There are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them.”

Disenthralling ourselves of current conventions is easier said than done.    Considering the idea, I started to make a list of conventions about our physical space that I seem to hold dear and ones that I have let go of in the last few years.

It is true that most of our work as librarians either takes place in classes, online or one-on-one with students and faculty.   That being said, libraries (learning commons) are still essential gathering spots for students to congregate, collaborate and even play.   Library Journal’s recent series, The Makings of Maker Spaces, has me thinking about our physical library and ways that we could continue to evolve to meet the needs of our students and faculty.   I haven’t come to any definitive conclusions about what exactly needs to change, but I know that revolutionary thinking should involve the following considerations:

•  Learning is driven by demand for knowledge rather than supply.
• We are moving from a culture of consumption to one of creation.
• Students are most engaged in learning when it looks and feels like play.
• Our students need to take a multidisciplinary approach to learning.
• Collaboration is an essential 21^st century skill.
• One of our students’ best resources on campus is each other.
• Students will continue to take more classes exclusively online.
• Our virtual resources are more important that our print ones.

Perhaps we should put the question to our students.   How would they design the library of the future?

As a recovering perfectionist, all of the talk about risk and failure in the education world today makes me understandably nervous.   Our faculty started off the school year by learning about design thinking, a concept made popular by Stanford’s d. school.   One of the key philosophies of design thinking innovation is to fail early and often, not getting attached to early iterations of the creative process along the way.  Our faculty then discussed the New York Times article, What if the Secret to Success if Failure?.   Here Paul Tough examines predictors of future success and as it turns out, grades are not necessarily the answer.  Recently, I attended a design thinking workshop by Christian Long.    He introduced me to the idea that if we want to be innovative educators, we need to live in the world of “perpetual beta”.   The phrase resonated with me.

What does perpetual beta look like for me as a teacher librarian?  It means stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying new approaches to research.   Last week I worked with a Modern Middle East class on how to use social media in research.   I put together a LibGuide, had students set up Twitter accounts, and introduced them to TweetDeck.  Students found a relevant blog on their research topic and shared it with the class using their course number as a hashtag.  Then I introduced ScoopIt as an alternate way to create a works consulted list.   At the end of the class, I set up a research challenge for students to interview someone connected to their topic from another country via Skype.    A few students looked at me perplexed by what I had just suggested.

The class went reasonably well but definitely left room for improvement.  In retrospect, I should have had students use the online version of TweetDeck and I learned that not all students’ tweets would show up if they had set up their accounts with higher privacy settings.    I assumed that our digital natives, having grown up in a participatory culture, would be well versed in Web 2.0 technologies.  As it turned out, the students in the class had a wide range of knowledge and comfort with social media.   My most important key takeaway was that although technology is the tool that facilitates research, information literacy skills should be at the core of the lesson.    The next iteration of this seminar will be redone based on these new understandings.

Though I can’t go back in time, I can still craft ways to assist my current students.  My first step was scaffolding the research challenge.   After class, I reached out to a colleague in the international school community.  She was able to connect me with history teachers at schools in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.  The details still need to be worked out with pairing up students, but isn’t that what life in perpetual beta is all about?   As educators we need to embrace the journey of teaching as much as the destination.    Innovative methods involve creativity, risk, and sometimes even failure.  I must say that being open to this less restrictive path is quite liberating for me as a teacher.  By modeling these behaviors, my hope is that students will allow themselves more room for risk and demonstrate resilience when things don’t go exactly as planned.