Library Think Tank

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?

Recently, I saw Cory Doctorow speak at Elliot Bay Books in Seattle.  (A similar reading was filmed at Word in Brooklyn.)  He was promoting his new novel, Pirate Cinema, which starts with a boy who loses Internet access for his entire family because he is making mash-ups of copyrighted movies.  If this sounds like an incredible piece of fiction, think again.  Doctorow discussed the The Digital Economy Act in England and how his novel represents a scenario that could easily become reality.

But we’re fine in the USA, right?  The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was defeated after all!  Not so fast…Doctorow warns us not to be complacent.  Firstly, SOPA was postponed not completely defeated, and there has been other legislation introduced similar to it.  Secondly, Doctorow brought to my attention a new initiative from The Center for Copyright Information, “a collaborative effort between U.S. content creators in the movie and music industries and leading” Internet Service Providers.  Getting surprisingly little attention given the uproar over SOPA, the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is

“part of a progressive educational system to help subscribers understand the significance of protecting copyright in the digital environment, to advise them about the importance of avoiding inadvertent or intentional online distribution of copyrighted content, and to suggest legal ways to obtain digital content.”

This is just one of many alert systems being instituted around the globe.  Wikipedia provides an overview of these various “graduated response” systems.  The US system “applies to peer-to-peer file sharing of digital copyrighted content.  It does not address other possible forms of online copyright infringement involving the downloading or streaming of copyrighted content.”

In our the meme-saturated, mash-up world, young people need to be aware of these issues not only so they can protect themselves but also so they can protect their rights.  As Cory Doctorow explains on his website while discussing why he recently altered his Creative Commons license to include “NoDerivs:”

“Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real. Fair dealing is real. De minimum exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make all sorts of uses of all copyrighted works, without permission, without Creative Commons licenses.

Rights are like muscles. When you don’t exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!”

Copyright is not a standard part of a school curriculum.  There might be lessons about finding copyright free images and music, and I’ve had discussions with students about Creative Commons.  Librarians are often charged with policing or being able to provide answers about legality rather than being asked to teach the reasoning skills that are required for a law that should not be treated as black and white.  To truly grasp the concept of copyright, students need opportunities to look at case studies, discuss with others, reflect on their own uses of information, and do a lot of practice thinking through real applications of fair use.  Cory Doctorow clearly believes that if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it, but we have to understand it first.

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.

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.

 

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.