Importance of (School) Librarians for 21st Century Learners

"To use the Internet as a library you need new research skills: the ability to pick out reliable sources from an overwhelming heap of misinformation, to find relevant material amid an infinite array of options, to navigate the shifting ethics of creative commons and intellectual property rights and to present conclusions in a manner that engages modern audiences."

"In addition to learning how to phrase a search query, students need to learn how to protect themselves online, and how to share their work through wikis, videos, and other interactive media. Without a dedicated guide, they end up, in the words of professor Henry Jenkins, as 'feral children of the Internet raised by the Web 2.0 wolves.'"

"Students at many elite schools are learning critical 21st century skills while librarians are eliminated from budget-stressed school districts. The result? What a University College of London study called a 'new divide,' with students who have access to librarians 'taking the prize of better grades' while those who don't have access to school librarians showing up at college beyond hope, having 'already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to "get by" with Google.' This new divide is only going to widen and leave many students hopelessly lost in the past, while others fully embrace the future. Already Tufts University has begun to accept student-produced Web videos as a supplement to admissions applications."

"Before parents accept the wisdom of a school board to cut school librarians, they should ask: Will my child graduate with a 21st century resume, or a 19th century transcript? Can he use collaborative technology, such as wikis? When a search engine returns 105 million results, can the student find the five that will set her paper apart? With the Web evolving by the minute, can classroom teachers alone, stressed by assessment testing and ever-growing paperwork burdens, help students figure this all out? As the information landscape becomes ever more complex, why does a school district want to abandon its professional guides to it?"

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google: Forbes 3.22.10

Quotes: Twenty-First-Century Kids, Twenty-First-Century Librarians

Twenty-First-Century Kids, Twenty-First-Century Librarians by Virginia A. Walter

Boston Public Library's original 1852 mission statement:
"There can be no doubt that... reading ought to be furnished to all, on the same principle that we furnish free education." (quoted from Williams 1988, 4) p. 1

Writing Programs

"No Wrong Way to Write"
Overview of starting a Teen Writers Group, including writing exercises:

"Writing soundtracks - Ask teens to compile their favorite writing soundtracks for different genres.

By the beat - Share a short story with the group, then give them ten minutes to re-write it using only one-syllable words. Discuss how different the story feels.

Round Robin - Write a sentence on the white board and then have everyone continue the story for three minutes. After time is up, everyone passes the page to the right to continue the story. For the next pass, the fold the page down so they can only see what the last person wrote. The page goes all the way around the group one time.

Speak up - Ask your teens to write a scene using only dialogue--no descriptors, no tag lines.

Story in a hat - Choose four types of words (nouns, adjectives, colors, actions, etc.) and ask the group for as many examples as there are teens in your group, writing each word on its own piece of paper. Then pass a hat with the words in it so that everyone gets one of each type. Give the teens 15-20 minutes to write a story using those words as often as possible."

Issue also includes a couple more articles/columns on teen writing programs.

VOYA April 2011

Bullying Resources

"The Elephant in the School Yard"

Picture Books, Middle Grade, Middle and High School titles
Media Picks (DVDs)
Websites

SLJ February 2011

Quotes

"Libraries are about people and information in an evolving, dynamic environment. Employees at libraries help people find what they need, answer questions, advance freedom of information, help people to discover exciting resources, and adapt to new technology, among other things."
-Arthur W. Hafner & Susan G. Akers

Public Libraries, 50:1 January/February 2011

Stop Disasters! gaming program

Gaming program focused on hurricanes (South Carolina). Includes computer and board games, plus resource websites.

SLJ May 2011

Horizon Report 2011

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
2. Key Trends
3. Critical Challenges
4. Technologies to Watch
5. The Horizon Project
6. One Year or Less: Electronic Books
7. One Year or Less: Mobiles
8. Two to Three Years: Augmented Reality
9. Two to Three Years: Game-Based Learning
10. Four to Five Years: Gesture-Based Computing
11. Four to Five Years: Learning Analytics
12. Methodology
13. 2011 Horizon Project Advisory Board



Horizon Report

User Experience: Resist that Redesign

Article focuses on making continuous, small changes to the library website rather than a big overhaul. Provides reasons why not to do a big change, and suggestions for implementing/easing the transition to such a committee/project.

"Don’t redesign your website. You will be tempted, especially if your website hasn’t received adequate attention in the past few years—but don’t do it. Learn from some of the most successful websites around. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix have never done major redesigns. They’ve slowly evolved their sites instead. Like them, plan to make many small improvements constantly to your website through incremental iterative changes."

"Website redesign projects, even if they result in a technically improved website, are likely to affect adversely the heaviest users of your site. Consider the inevitable outcry that follows any change to the Facebook interface. Momentum plays a big part in usability, and people adapt to designs even if they’re less than ideal. Forcing them into an entirely new environment is jarring no matter how friendly the result. Fortunately, small iterative change spreads out the cognitive load required to learn new things on a site."

"If your site is truly that awful, there are probably plenty of obvious fixes you can make right away. Spend a year constantly tuning up your site and turning it into the site you want, learning as you go, rather than putting all of your money on the elusive perfect redesign. It’s going to take time, money, and the right talent, but it will pay off—and right away."

LJ March 1, 2011

Teaching Children Philosophy through Children's Literature

"This website is dedicated to helping adults conduct philosophical discussion with and among elementary school children.

"Contrary to what many people think, young children are both interested in and good at discussing philosophical questions. Picture books are a great way to initiate a philosophical discussion with young children and this site will help you get started."

Good for educators. Also has a lot of Book Modules (essentially book discussion questions and guides) on picture and chapter books. Discussions are themed around philosophical ideas, but are basically just thought-provoking questions.

Teaching Children Philosophy

Booklist Online: Teen Recs under 200 pages

Booklist Online SR Short Teen Recs

Librarianship

LJ letter to the editor, response to Michael Stephens' "Heretical Thoughts"

"Innovation required
In 2009, we created 'innovation' as a performance requirement for all staff at my library. Each person (shelvers, custodians, librarians, department heads) must 'bring a new idea, development, or system' (Michael Stephens, 'Heretical Thoughts,' Office Hours, LJ 12/10, p. 72).
...
The goal is to encourage and reward the staff for thinking of improvements.
...
Stephens's closing paragraph recalls something that Lawrence Clark Powell wrote: 'A good librarian is not a social scientist, a documentalist, a retrievalist, or an automaton. A good librarian is a librarian: a person with good health and warm heart, trained by study and seasoned by experience to catalyze books and people.' —Nann Blaine Hilyard, Dir., Zion-Benton P.L., Zion, IL"

Ms. Hilyard, please hire me!

LJ Feb. 1, 2011

Reference: Screencasting

Screencasting can be used to answer reference questions for any number of people... Record your navigation to/through a database or online content and distribute it to users. Could be used for how-to's posted on a website or to answer virtual reference questions for one individual. Can be archived or posted to YouTube for others to browse and utilize.

Tame the Web

LJ January 2011, expanded article with tool reviews

Nancy Pearl...

"...conducted workshops for all 1200 staff members. 'From pages to library managers, everyone learned new ways of approaching readers, and they generated scores of new ideas,' says KCLS director Bill Ptacek. The library’s 'Take Time To Read' program, with its simple goal 'to make King County a more literate community,' grew out of Pearl’s workshops."

"'People who [are] circulation clerks or pages in libraries work there because they love libraries. Otherwise, they’d work at McDonald’s,' says Pearl. 'We must not cut them off from being able to talk about books and other materials with the people who use the library.'"

"'A good book is a book someone likes and a bad book is one they don’t like. When someone doesn’t like a book, it doesn’t mean they will never like it. They don’t like it for that moment,' says Pearl.
'We shouldn’t be afraid to suggest a wide variety of books to people. I think libraries are the last democratic institution, small ‘d’ democratic. It wasn’t always that way. Librarians were gatekeepers.... When it comes to readers’ advisory, though, I think we need to validate a patron’s reading."

"When people ask, 'What should I read next?' we should always try to give them three books. One should be pretty close to the one they loved. The second should be a little bit different, a bit of a stretch. The third book is the real stretch book, the reach book. The book they never would have found because it is nonfiction and they only look at Westerns."

"People come into the library and head straight to the section where they have found the most pleasure.... It is our job to take them around to the rest."

"'She is neither snobbish about the old ways nor disdainful of new ideas. Ask her about audio or ebooks or gaming, and you’ll get an earful about the importance of stories told in their myriad forms,' says Janes" -U Washington iSchool Chair

"My fear is that we don’t recognize or will forget that library service is like a three-legged stool: information, outreach and programming, and reading."

"Pearl also worries about the demise of independent bookstores and the relative health of public libraries. 'Librarians must figure out what we need and how we need it, and then we have to get together and make it happen. I think we still have some power over the direction of these changes.'"

LJ January 2011

User Experience: Benefits of Less

Less is more - less content can lead to better website design.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a daring pilot and talented author, also weighed in on user experience:

'In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.'

In some ways, libraries have been taking the opposite approach. We've gotten in the habit of tacking on new services and taking on new responsibilities, and many library websites can be seen as piecemeal collections of patron engagement tactics."

"More content thins out our efforts. It sounds simple, but the more things a library tries to do, the less attention it can devote to any one thing. Without the attention they deserve, web content and services can’t be as effective as they should be."

"Good content takes staff time to produce and arrange, and the navigational overhead can be a time expenditure for users. I’m not suggesting that libraries shouldn’t try new things or add content to their sites. They should. Still, the library world needs to start a dialog about an additional way to prevent stagnation: subtraction." Less content is easier to manage, thus make better.

LJ January 2011

Chicago government and CPL

John Berry's editorial calling for more cities to follow Chicago/Daley's example and to place an emphasis on public libraries. CPL's budget increased for FY11!

"Mayor Daley, LJ’s inaugural Politician of the Year (LJ 11/15/97, p. 28–30), sees each branch as a community 'anchor' crucial to Chicago life. Branch use is heavy, and the local branch is often the only library a citizen uses."

"When cultural institutions such as libraries are run by business managers, they are forced to adhere to the simplistic methods and measures that ignore their importance as public goods. In terms of economics, a public good is a service most efficiently provided to all people through taxation. Schools, libraries, public health, and police and fire departments are public goods. When anyone uses them, everyone benefits. It is more efficient to provide them through taxes than to levy a charge for each use."

"Commissioner Mary Dempsey and her team know CPL is a true public good and that when any Chicagoan uses it, everyone in Chicago gains. The United States will be a smarter, stronger nation when more elected officials follow the Chicago model and give the highest priority to their public libraries, recognizing them as the government agency that serves the needs of all the ­people."

LJ January 2011