Readingrocks

Talk about WOW! Our school had a presentation from the SMART board company about their version of interactive white boards.  OK, I have to clarify something here.  We are used to referring to anything with a copier as Xerox — NO — Xerox is a name brand for copiers. That would be like us to referring to all cars as Chevrolet.  What an awesome presentation.  You hook up your computer to a projecter which projects to a 77″ screen.  The software that is running this is WOW!  If you get a chance, get a demo, my school is getting one of these and this is such a cool inbetween feature to link the Internet that classroom teachers  have to making their lessons develop into a 2.0 mode.  I’m so excited!  And I get to be a part of this huge introduction to teachers who before were resistant to anything new.  Life is good!

L

My paper:  “How Library 2.0 Can Enhance Teacher Collaboration and Effect Student Learning Outcomes in School Media Centers. 

            OK, you’re 15 years old again, in a high school communications class (what we used to call English) and studying “To Kill a Mockingbird”. (Had to choose this title so close to Banned Books week). You can choose to write a book report, fill out a packet about the book, or post three blogs on the classroom book discussion blog. Kids still love this old classic, but they want to learn about it in a classroom culture which matches the way they communicate. They want to participate in their learning, they want to digitally create and share what they are learning. Unfortunately, not enough teachers are offering the “blog” / 2.0 option. Research supports that millenials’ intelligence is up due to the digital environment they grew up with. To connect with these students there needs to be a new culture of community in schools centered around social learning. There is a natural motivation to become part of this community, just like students want to build their other social networking communities online – here there happens to be “learning” taking place. As librarians, we are instrumental in making that happen. We have to bring teachers on board to change the misperceptions of how students learn today and how valuable 2.0 and other technology tools are in developing lifelong learners in the 21^st century.

Bringing 2.0 into school curriculums was our group project. Much of the focus of 2.0 research and discussions has been on the public and academic library level.  But, I think a very important component to the future of libraries embracing a social networking philosophy starts with kindergarten and the next 12 years of a student’s life. How well we introduce and train 5, 8, and 12 year olds how to find things, create and share information is the future to how they are going to use libraries and 2.0 tools. Christie set up our powerpoint using google.docs which was new to me. I furnished a lot of curriculum critieria and tie-ins that my school district uses to meet the essential learning standards. Being in the trenches, it really is a tough battle – to get teachers to overcome their fear of technology and to convince administrators that using open source tools is not endangering the district. Probably the only people on board besides the media and technology people in schools are the students.  I showed my 16 year old my blog and explained that this was like our weekly journal entry that he has to do for many classes. “Wow, I wish my teachers would let us blog instead of writing things down in class.” 2.0 brings relevancy to how we teach our kids. It speaks to them in their language. They learn best when we engage them. Now we have to create that mentality with many educators who refuse to give up lecture only teaching. Patience and passion and perseverance – that’s what it is going to take to convincing others to take advantage of all the benefits 2.0 tools can bring to classrooms.

Gone are the private pink slips. Today, in the age of transparency, layoffs will be blogged. Gone are the water cooler conversations. Web-savvy employees vent all their feelings about what’s going on at work on personal blogs and tweeters. The article’s author, Jim Hopkins, also authored the unofficial blog for Gannett Corporation. He posted blogs about possible upcoming layoffs by Gannett. At the time, Gannett did not have a company blog. They chose to announce the layoffs the old-fashioned way. Hopkins’ blogs gave many the heads up that their jobs were being terminated and he justified his blogging by saying that this avoided employees being blind-sighted about the job loss. Now this puts the company in a rough spot of avoiding a tarred PR image. So, many companies are using blogs to announce layoffs. An example, was a CEO who met with 8 people he needed to lay off and immediately published a post and video on the company blog saying “this is an extremely sad day for al of us who have to say goodbye to a group of great people”. His justification:  “I was not seeking PR, I just knew I would have bad PR otherwise.”   I’m still reflecting on this – where does the humanization fall into place?   

Nov. 5^th edition of the StarTribune Business Section: Article “Layoff Blogs”

Quote:  “Today, whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog.”

            Rusty Rueff, former human resources exec at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo.

Citizenship. Boy, could we use more of that these days. Kids just don’t show respect or have manners and that concerns me. There is a class of kindergartners at my school that I would like to put head to head with the negative political ad campaigners. Is this a product of the digital environment? Communicating digitally takes away a lot of the sensory vibes – visual, body language, human touch – and some of the compassion. It’s easier to rip someone online than face-to-face. Digital citizenship will be an important part of my job – digital etiquette starts with the basic appropriate behavior online. Everyone has equal rights on line, but they don’t understand the responsibility that comes along with that digital freedom. The November issue of “Cable in the Classroom” had an article about Digital Citizenship along with a link about incorporating these concepts into information literacy curriculum. Go to www.ciconline.org/cicmagazine for the article, “Building New Skill Sets” by Mike Ribble, author of  Digital Citizenship in Schools.

Other information: www.digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html

–The plus side – only 3 more days of negative political ads and we get an extra hour of sleep tonight!

I just read the article in Library Journal by Michael Casey & Michael Stephens.

“Library PR 2.0” in the recent 10-15-08 issue. I was excited about their twist on marketing today.

2.0 is definitely changing public relations. The PR message used to be one way, from the corporation to the public and we just listened. Now the PR message is two way. Consumers are no longer just listening, they want to have a say about the product or service. Back when I worked for broadcasting companies, advertising 101 stated that the best form of advertising was “word of mouth”. This is similar to what they refer to in the article as the grapevine, which can be a good form of word-of-mouth advertising. We want people to talk about our product and service – hopefully most of it is positive. But we need them to voice their opinion if the product or service is not up to par. That’s the foundation behind ‘customer service’. Until 2.0, customer service was one-sided. If you did a good job, people returned. If you didn’t meet their satisfaction, they didn’t return. That holds true today, but customers want a say in what you are offering. Take fast-food restaurants as an example–“Have it your way…” has a new meaning now. With the impact of the movie “Supersize Me”…the entire industry ‘down-sized’ its servings and made more healthy alternatives on their menus with the pressure of the rise in obesity of our kids.  And then there is the advertising “testimonial” which has always been successful – if Brett Favre buys this brand of _______, then you should too. I love the phrase in the article “PR-speak stinks”. Invite patrons to participate in what is working or not working in your library. People will buy-in to something more if they have a say in what that something will be.  I used to moderate focus groups and this was the forum back then for getting upfront input on a TV or radio personality or station format. Now we can do this with 2.0 on a daily basis. I guess we can simplify this – 2.0 is taking the former suggestion box to the next level. As librarians, we need to speak less, and listen more to what our patrons are asking of us and the library. 

Not World of Warcraft … but Worldbook Online Website.  Our school district dumped Grolier and subscribed to Worldbook. It’s awesome. It has home pages for K-3, Grades 4-6 and upper levels. It includes multimedia links, a separate NASA section, links to state standards and lesson plans. But what I found most useful, was the RESEARCH section. It showed how to teach research skills and included Web 2.0 tools: What is a blog, RSS feed etc… how to decode URL’s as a means of evaluating website…how to evaluate Web 2.0.  Here are a couple of sites to help learners assess the influence of a blog:  http://technorati.com and http://blogpulse.com     They had an example of a student presentation about accurate information in a blog. You can access this at www.adobe.com and look for the Invisible Horses video. 

Kids can put items into their backpacks (World book’s bookmarking & tagging tool). They can access World book on any school computer, use the district password outside of school and then set up their backpack account for access from any computer. This would be similar to RefWorks at St. Kate’s Library. If anyone is interested, I can bring a couple of handouts to the next class or maybe Michael will want to show you part of the website if I type in our district password.  I can’t wait to get started with some research lesson plans.

WOW!

10/18 Blog:  Just some great bullet points from my context book “Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter”, by Stephen Johnson.

Columnist George Will accuses that modern techy entertainment is “dumbing down” our consumers with a “more sophisticated delivery of stupidity”.  In his book, Johnson argues that the culture is more demanding and is positively altering the cognitive development of today’s youth.

• Gaming & 2.0 is not making us read less, in fact we’re reading & writing more online
• Our time is being split between more different choices, so usage is down in a lot of different entertainment levels:  going to movies and TV viewing
• Rise of the Internet is because it challenges our mind in 3 ways: being participatory, forced to learn new interfaces, and create new channels for social interaction
• According to the 2004 PEW study, 8 million Americans have a weblog or online diary – this number has reached the audience size of TV networks and the reason why – “IT IS PERSONAL”.
• For this generation, “the screen is not something you manipulate, but to project your identity onto, a place to work through the story of your life as it unfolds”. It creates its own risks, but so does every new technology.

There are increasing articles about how schools are not addressing the increasing failure of boys in its classrooms. I remember a Newsweek article that said that boys turn to games because they can “fail” online and not be embarrassed or made fun of as they would at school.  For these reluctant learners, gaming and web 2.0 tools will benefit learning because they make it relevant.  Game designers know this. They design games that are not too hard, not too easy. These are engaging with an edge of problem-solving. You interactively “fill-in” not lean back and watch. Now Education designers (us library folk & teachers) have been encouraging students to “read” at their level, not too hard, not too easy. But what’s missing is we need to make it relevant – and engage them interactively and we can do that with 2.0 tools.

“Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is

Actually Making Us Smarter” by Stephen Johnson

George Will proclaims modern technology entertainment is creating an “increasingly infantilized society” in which we are ‘dumbing down’ our consumers with “a more sophisticated delivery of stupidity” (Will, 2001). Stephen Johnson is the author of “Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter”. Johnson disagrees with Will by defining a positive trend he labels as “The Sleeper Curve” in which he says that culture is getting more demanding intellectually. This is a spin off from Woody Allen’s movie, “The Sleeper” where scientists negatively labeled several parts of society as being unhealthy.

            Critics claim that this new culture of entertainment is replacing reading books. But people are still reading and are writing more – the literacy landscape is changing now that both are done more online. Reading research increases the cognitive process as one makes sense of words by following narrative threads. In participatory gaming, you’re not just learning one thing, but the game forces your thinking to actually process the information, analyze it, prioritize it, and evaluate evidence—all of which are higher level thinking processes. An example, in the game of chess you have to follow the rules and use them to your advantage. In online gaming there is a multi-layer tasking process where you have to strategize and problem-solve to discover what the rules are.

            Johnson also discusses the increased complexity of plots, subject matter, and relationships in today’s TV shows and movies. “Dallas” was a revolutionary show because of the intertwining plot and character lines – definitely a step up from “The Brady Bunch”. Now, compare these to “24” and “Desperate Housewives”. Disney and Spielberg have added this complexity to the screen with Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Lord of the Rings. So all levels of media; gaming, TV, and screen are engaging people with an edge of problem-solving. We now have to “fill-in”, not lean back and watch. These are interactive and this is the way today’s kids want to learn:  engage them, challenge them at their level (just like the importance of reading at their level), and entice them by making it something that is relevant.  Hence, the success and appeal of participatory tools in all facets of today’s popular culture.

Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

Will, G. (2001). Reality television: Oxymoron.

            www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20010621.shtml

            This was the cite in Johnson’s book.

Remember when

1)      Social was a dance – now it’s on online trend defining popular culture

2)      Networking was something you did for a job promotion now it means linkedin, Facebook and MySpace

3)      Google was Barney’s last name – a popular comic strip – it was used in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and now is in the dictionary. If you don’t know who Barney Google is – just ‘google it’.

4)      Friend was a person you had a trusting, supportive, affectionate relationship with … now it’s someone you invite to your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc… site

This last piece “friend” is interesting.

“With strangers connecting and friending each other out there, are social networks actually changing the definition of the word ‘friend?”

http://blogme.dium.com/content/2008/09/social-networks-changing-the-definition-of-friend/ (Link for above blog quote).

Jennifer also made a comment in her blog that the ideal number of social networks to belong to is “7”. I would be interested to find out how many of you belong to “7” … how many less, how many more? Jennifer says she is maxed at 5 – with only a limited amount of time to monitor all these web spaces.

http://www.onteenstoday.com/2008/07/22/serial-friending-how-facebook-is-changing-the-definition-of-friendship/

In the link above, from the mouth of a 15 year old, she said the allure of “friending” on Facebook is just accumulating as many friends as possible as a guage to your popularity. She defines the Facebook friends as: 

            Fake Friends. After you have become accustomed to the system of serial friendships on Facebook, you begin to forget what friendship used to mean and gradually assimilate to the system.  While it may have taken months to wear down your resistance, eventually you receive that friendship request from the person who is not really your friend, who you know that they know you are not friends and you accept their friend request nonetheless.

As part of popular culture, I think this will be an interesting trend to follow – how society will continue to re-define “friend”.  Hey, do you think the dictionary will add a new definition of friend as that part of social networking piece? They added google. 

Social networking has changed the way we communicate and is changing the look of our community. But at least it is just that – the communicating – that helps humanize the WWW, our information community.

Friend, anyone?

     Linda J