Category Archives: Library Posts

Living in Perpetual Beta

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.

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Resources for the Arts

I have always made the arts a priority in my life, so I was really excited to find out that my role at Lakeside would include being the Librarian liaison to the art department.  As someone who studied Studio Art and Art History in high school and college,  I was surprised that Lakeside did not offer any art history courses.  However, after some investigating and speaking with our faculty, I learned that art history is heavily incorporated into the studio arts classes.

When I was approached by our painting and drawing teacher to help her find information and works by contemporary artists- I jumped at the challenge.  It turns out, she had a few “go-to” sites, but was confused about where to start.

Art databases are VERY expensive and while there’s a lot of really great ones out there, they are often designed for more higher level research.  We have many art books in our collection available to students, but they need to have an idea of what they are looking for.  When it came to searching on the Internet, we wanted to avoid art sites that wanted you go “buy posters” or that were watermarked.  The students would need high-quality digital images for reference from reputable sources.

For something like searching for visual images, browsing works best.   Marcia Bates’ Berry Picking Theory of Information Retrieval suggests that when looking for information, you collect bits and pieces along the way.  When looking for inspiration for artwork, this “cascade of interactions” benefits the user because they are able to take a more interactive approach to searching rather than searching using text and specific artists’ names.

I looked for resources that allowed students to easily search using keywords and also discover new works as they go.  A Google Image search was really helpful for this kind of searching.  We used different advanced search options (which I will show in more detail in a later post) but many of the pages we were sent to did not have high quality images, were watermarked, or the sites lacked authority.

Here is a list of the high quality resources I was able to find:

Google Art Project:  Explore collections from around the world with thousands of artworks photographed in extremely high resolution.

I couldn’t believe what an amazing resource was right under our noses.  Museums work in collaboration with Google to provide high-resolution works in this database.  You can search by collection, artists, discover “like-works” by using the artworks.  Users can also create “galleries” of images for ex: “Mathematics and Art”

Smart History: Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

Search by time, style, artist, or themes.

Art 21:  Art in the 21st Century is a PBS series, educational resource, archive, and history of contemporary art. It premiered in 2001, and is now broadcast in over 50 countries worldwide.

In addition to the video content, this site contains bios, work, and interviews with contemporary artists.

Art Babble:  Art-Bab-ble [ahrt-bab-uhl] noun; verb (used without object) -bled, -bling 1. free flowing conversation, about art, for anyone. 2. a place where everyone is invited to join an open, ongoing discussion – no art degree required.

This site is great for checking out the process behind how art is made.  The videos included in this collection cover a wide array of different styles, cultures, and eras.

Kahn Academy- Art History:  Spontaneous conversations about works of art where the speakers are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. Videos are made by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker along with other contributors and maintained at smarthistory.khanacademy.org.

Really neat collection from the Kahn Academy- great resource for teachers and students!

National Gallery of Art Classroom:  Online interactive lesson units for Teachers and Students.

Includes lesson plans, guided activities and lots of high quality bios and resources.

Picturing America: is an interactive gallery of artwork related to events, people, and themes in American history. You can browse the gallery chronologically or by theme. Click on any image in the gallery to learn about the artist and the artwork itself. Along with the background information for each image, Picturing America provides links to additional resources for learning about the artwork and artists.

MOOM The Museum of Online Museums:  is a list of museums that offer online exhibitions. In some cases the museums include virtual tours and in other cases the museums online exhibits are simple photo galleries.

 

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Academic Sources for Everyone!

I love databases like JSTOR and Academic Search Premier; however, they are quite expensive.  With a growing number of online courses like those provided by the Global Online Academy, which hosts students from a variety of schools with varying levels of access, finding free scholarly sources is more important than ever.  This month, Joyce Valenza wrote about this issue on her blog, NeverEndingSearch.  In a post titled “New tricks for academics,” she discusses changes to Google Scholar, a rediscovery of Microsoft’s Academic Search, and the connective power of Mendeley.  Today, a new academic source appeared in my inbox.  According to the email,

Academic Room is an online platform that was conceived at Harvard as an independent initiative to facilitate multidisciplinary engagements among scholars and researchers around the world. Our mission is to democratize access to scholarly resources, which are organized in over 10,000 academic sub-disciplines. We share the conviction that easy and unimpeded access to quality educational resources should be a right and not a privilege. Our platform allows academics, researchers and students to create highly specialized portals for their subfields. These portals can be enriched with professional directories, scholar profiles, video lectures, bibliographies, journal articles, books, reviews, images, ancient manuscripts and audio recordings.  Scholars can now promote their work to a much larger audience than allowed by traditional channels.

Even without registering, a user has access to a variety of multimedia.  A quick look at the “History of North America” page reveals full text articles such as “Psychological Warfare in Vietnam” by James O. Whittaker and videos like “Malcolm X interview at UC Berkeley (Oct. 11, 1963).”  A quick search for “civil war” finds 752 items including lectures, books, reviews, and bibliographies.  Academic Room and other scholarly search portals are more than just repositories of information because they add the opportunity to create scholar profiles.  As Valenza notes, there is great potential for them to “become an interesting source for discovering experts, for assessing authority, and for identifying relationships among research and researchers.”  Not only are some of the walls coming down around scholarly sources, but these tools are also creating powerful paths for us to travel as we research.

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Curation is the New Citation?

Recently, I have been intrigued by the concept of digital content curation. What is it? How is curation different and better than simply collecting? Is curation the new search? What tools are best for various applications? If you are curious about any of these ideas, check out Curation Station, my first topic on Scoop.it.

I’ve been asking myself these questions in order to better understand the integration of curation tools in my work with students. My explorations have led to a radical idea. Could we use a curated page in place of a works cited list? In certain current event situations where all research is done on the free web, why not? If the purpose of a works cited list is to demonstrate the author’s scholarship, give credit to others for their ideas and allow the reader quick access to sources, absolutely! A Scoop.it topic is more visually appealing and takes infinitely less time to compile than a MLA works cited page. Students hate worrying about the formatting just as much as I detest pretending that I care about periods, commas, protocols and spacing. Less time spent on creating a works cited list means more time for synthesizing research and formulating new understandings. In the end, this could be a win-win for all parties involved. Who wants to be the first to collaborate with me on this experiment?

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