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- attempt to open up access to facebook and other social networking sites in the school library
- create a blog for the student book discussion group (and get a student to moderate/update it)
- create a wiki for the Abraham Lincoln Book Award nominees–create a contest for those who read and vote on the books
- create an animoto video for the Abe Lincoln Book Award nominees
- collaborate with the English department to revive the “One Book, One School” program/ advertise with an animoto video and create a blog for discussion of the year’s book
- create a blog for teachers that informs them of library events and services we offer (such as collaborating on technology based projects… if they don’t know how to use a wiki I can co-teach with them to instruct their students, I can help them set up a ning or a blog for communicating with their students, etc)
- offer workshops for teachers (maybe during teacher lunch hours) to instruct teachers on how to use some of the 2.0 technologies / ideas for integrating these tools in their classrooms
- offer workshops for students about how to use privacy settings, how to create a blog, how to make animoto videos, use slideshare, google docs, RSS readers, etc.)

LIS 768 has given me a reservoir of ideas for using participatory technologies as a librarian. I’m looking forward to trying to implement the use of these tools in our school library, with students and teachers.

Working on the presentation for the New Digital Divide was a treat. Our group worked well together; we divided up the project according to types of technology users (or non-users). I claimed the Digital Natives, since that’s my area of greatest interest as a School Library student. As a group we also brainstormed about the different reasons for the Digital Divide. We decided to include aspects of the “old” divide–access to technology–since this divide IS still a great concern for many Americans. And we discussed how we think the “new” digital divide is different and what is causing it. We landed on several different ideas beyond the lack of physical access: lack of knowledge about new technologies, lack of skills needed to interact with them, lack of desire to be “connected” all of the time, and lack of a sense of relevance to one’s own life or circumstances. Each of us then researched our particular group of “non-users” to determine what factors influence their non-use. With our research we also each created our portion of the powerpoint, using Microsoft’s Office Space Live to combine and edit our powerpoint presentation. We then also posted this to Slideshare.

The tametheweb site was great because we were able to create a group blog–this let us communicate with one another easily and post different articles and images we wanted to share with one another. These tools made this project one of the easiest group efforts I’ve been part of at Dominican!

The Effects of 21st century technologies on 21st century learning and literacy

The technology available today is changing the way we live our lives— from the world of business and consumer behaviors, to family interactions and personal socializing, to the classrooms and libraries of our schools and how young people think. My paper will be an expanded analysis of some of the ideas presented in the book Born Digital, by Jeffrey Palfrey and Urs Gasser—specifically the changing behaviors and habits of “Digital Natives” and the positive and negative effects for literacy and learning.

This paper will begin with an examination of how students’ interactions with media and information technologies have changed in recent years, with the introduction of Web 2.0 resources. Then I will discuss how these interactions may affect the actual functions of the users’ brains, as well as their learning styles and preferences. Many experts see and predict negative results from these changes— decreased attention span, sense of identity, ability to think critically and form connections, and an ineffective tendency towards “multi-tasking.” Other experts see positive results from these changes— increased creativity, contributions to the creation of new media, and a stronger sense of engagement with learning.

My paper will analyze each of these proposed effects— the positive and the negative— and attempt to offer suggestions for how public and school libraries of the future should attempt to address these changes. In addition to the ideas from Born Digital, my paper will focus mainly on the theories of Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small, developmental psychologist Maryann Wolf, a report from The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and a report from the British Library and University College of London on the “Google Generation.”

In creating this social media policy, I thought it was important to first briefly explain the mission of the library. Because the use of social media is supported by the library’s mission to provide students with the resources needed for their future success, reiterating the mission statement provides a rationale for potentially concerned parents and administrators. Along these same lines, I thought it was important to explain the library’s dedication to teaching students about responsible and effective use of these, and other, technology tools; the guidelines given for social media use offer some groundwork for teaching students these appropriate behaviors. And the “rules” for inappropriate postings are included because they reiterate school guidelines for appropriate and respectful behavior; obviously while on school grounds, students are expected to behave appropriately, whether in the actual or the virtual realm!

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

The mission of the West High School Library supports life-long learning, encourages intellectual curiosity, and promotes information literacy, while providing access to the resources students need for success in the 21st century.

In keeping with this mission, the West High School Library uses and grants student access to various social media websites. Social media is defined as an online application or website that allows users to create and share information. Such social media include blogs, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking websites. Specific examples are Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, Blogger, and Wordpress, among others.

Use of these social media resources provides students with the information literacy skills that will be required in the 21st century workplace and world. In order to ensure fluency in these skills, the West High School Library is dedicated to instructing students about the safe and effective use of these resources and to guiding students towards becoming independent users and communicators.

When using social media resources, individuals should consider the following guidelines:

• Use good judgment: Think about the image you wish to convey about yourself when you’re posting to social networks and social media sites. Remember that what you post will be viewed and stored permanently online once you publish it. Also, never post personal information, such as an address or phone number, for public viewing.

• Avoid online arguments: If you have a difference of opinion with someone online or wish to post about a controversial matter, you must take care to do so in an appropriate manner. Voice your opinion, but don’t use social media for personal attacks or inflammatory arguments.

• Be respectful: Do not publish private information about others. Let others decide what information they wish to share about themselves.

• Be responsible: Post accurate information. Never post any comment or other information that could be libelous. Remember that what you post is not private, and, ultimately, you are responsible for everything you publish to a social networking site.

Inappropriate publishing to social media resources while using them at West High School will result in disciplinary consequences, just as any other infraction of school rules would.

When using social media on school computers, the posting of any of the following content could result in the loss of social media privileges:

— Obscene or racist remarks
— Personal attacks, insults, or threatening language
— Private, personal information published without another’s consent
— Hyperlinks to obscene material
— Potentially libelous statements
— Photos or other images that fall into any of the above categories

While attending the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference this week in Philadelphia, many of the sessions I saw revolved around the integration of technology into the English curriculum. And these have raised some interesting questions, asked both within my own head and also by other conference attendees.

First, most of the sessions revolving around technology have focused on teaching students how to use new technologies to create content and share it with others. So is there an assumption that students simply “know” how to navigate their way through the internet, find information, and evaluate it effectively? The focus of the English / Language Arts curriculum is supposed to be on teaching students to read and analyze information (not just literature)… So why is it that the year’s conference for sharing “best practice” in this area seems to ignore (almost completely) the information that most adolescents seem to be accessing and reading (almost exclusively) on regular basis? If our focus is supposed to be on helping students to read deeply and critically, why are we ignoring the primary medium through which they’re accessing their material and need to be thinking most critically? ?

Often I hear English teachers lamenting about the additional burden that teaching Information Literacy adds to their already overflowing curriculum. Is it possible for Librarians and English teachers to truly collaborate on the teaching of these information literacy skills? Would collaboration with a librarian open teachers’ minds to the possibility of effective integration? Or will there continue to be this constant struggle over workload and responsibility? Could the integration of the Library/School Media Center with the English/Language Arts department—to create one combined department—help to ease this struggle and support an effective multiple literacies curriculum? Perhaps this would help English teachers and Librarians to see each other as “on the same team” instead of on separate teams that must promote their own agendas.

“Learning for the 21st Century:
A Report and Mile Guide for 21st Century Skills”

“A simple question to ask is, ‘How has the world of a child changed in the last 150 years?” And the answer is, “It’s hard to imagine any way in which it hasn’t changed! But if you look at school today versus 100 years ago, it is more similar than dissimilar.”
— Peter Senge, senior lecturer Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This report discusses how technology must result in changing the way we think about teaching young people. It also defines the Six Key Elements of 21st century learning—explaining how the core subject areas must be expanded in order to maintain relevance to the future lives of students. As part of this, the report defines Media Literacy as one of the fundamental higher-order thinking skills needed for success in the 21st century.

ID: The Quest For Identity In The 21st Century
A book by Susan Greenfield, neuroscientist

Currently I’ve read an excerpt from the book (to be found in my delicious bookmarks), which discusses the human brain and our concept of our own identities. She speculates that the nature of the brain will inevitably be altered by our new digital environment.
She believes that our “individuality” is under attack by new technologies and our dependence upon them, and this threatens to change the way our own minds and society as a whole functions. Very interesting stuff from a highly respected British neruoscientist. I’m awaiting the book itself from Amazon.

“Reading This Will Change Your Brain”
–Newsweek article about the findings of Dr. Gary Small, UCLA neuroscientist

According to Dr. Gary Small’s book, iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has started a rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. Small writes, “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.” I am planning to start reading his book this week to get a more in-depth understanding of his research.

“How Technology is Changing our Brains”
– a radio interview with Dr. Gary Small

Interview with the author listed above. This discussion focuses on the impaired abilities of young people to conduct successful face-to-face communication because of changed patterns in behaviors due to increased time spent with digital communications. Brief but useful information.

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
–a book by Maggie Jackson

Jackson examines the effects that our constant motion lifestyle is having on our ATTENTION SPANS. This is a crucial area to examine because much of what I know about learning is that it requires a process of THINKING. And without the ability to pay attention, we lose that ability to engage in deep, critical and analytical thought.

“information behaviour of the researcher of the future”
— a report commissioned by the British Library and the JISC (University College of London)

This article studies the “Google Generation” (those born after 1993) to observe their behaviors for interacting with information. The focus question for this study is “whether or not, as a result of the digital transition and the vast range of information resources being digitally created, young people are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behavior as mature researchers.” It seems as if the study conducted here will give me information about how young people are interacting with information, which will hopefully inform my questions about how they are reading and learning differently, and how this will affect their learning patterns.

*** Next I plan to search out…

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of this book. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the internet, which puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading we have practiced for so long.

“We are at a crossroads.  There are two possible paths before us—one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet and about how young people use it, and one in which we make smart choices and head toward a bright future in a digital age.” Thus begins the argument in John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.

This book, which discusses the change today’s digital age has brought to how people— especially the young, the “Digital Natives”— learn and interact with information, should be required reading for everyone like me.  That is, anyone who approaches today’s digital culture with some trepidation, some concern, about how the instant access to information and the seemingly reckless sharing of personal information is affecting our society.  Unlike some books about today’s emerging technologies, this one acknowledges that there are dangers within this culture that must be addressed; however, the authors stress that the biggest risk today is that “we, as a society, will fail to harness the good that can come from these opportunities, as we seek to head off the worst of the problems. Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could give rise to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we are erecting” (9).

And this is why this book is so important for those who fear today’s digital influence—while we may believe that we can halt negative affects by stopping kids from using these technologies without our consent and constant monitoring, this approach might ease our fear, but it won’t “stop” a thing.  These changes have happened.  The culture is shifting.  We can either bury our heads in the sand and continue to talk of how we want things to be, or we can participate in the changes by guiding our young people towards success in what will be their future environment.  As Palfrey and Gasser explain: “These changes, to be sure, are not all good, but they will be enduring” (7).

Throughout their book, the authors explain the reasons they’ve discovered for some of the online behaviors of Digital Natives, as well as the many positive results of these behaviors. Among the positives are the Ditial Native’s connections to information; they tend to view information as malleable, and so they can not only control information but also become creators of information.  As they are learning from information, they are also gaining the “ability to shape and reshape their cultural understanding” (125).  So they are not simply passive consumers of information—which has been the theme behind many an educational pedagogy over the past century— but, rather, they are active participants in the creation of information and knowledge.  And encouraging young people to create and disburse information could be one of the best ways to teach them to also analyze and understand the information they encounter (159).

Of course, Palfrey and Gasser also discuss the problems with the Digital Native’s online interaction that we should be concerned with and that we must address.  Among these issues are the massive “digital dossiers,” which include the digital information  held about each of us, in many different places, that are out of our own control.  There are also privacy issues, including the potential for the rules about privacy to change “at the discretion” of an online site, so that the information we post today, believing it to be private and protected, may not stay that way (57).  Also, in terms of privacy, much of the information about an individual, available via search engines, has been input by someone else (58).  So the ability of an individual to control their own digital presence is less possible every day.

But the beauty of this book is that the authors do not simply drop these problems in the reader’s lap; they do offer valuable solutions and suggestions.  In fact, one of the biggest hindrances they point out is the “unnecessary technology gap between young people and many of their parents and teachers” (109). This gap is often what reinforces the fear that non-natives have about the digital future. But instead of banning technologies, much can be done to help young people find their way.

And this is where schools, libraries, and school libraries are key.  Palfrey and Gasser emphasize that “schools and libraries should start by putting the learners first.  Teachers and administrators need to get serious about figuring out how kids are learning, and they must build digital literacy skills into their core curricula” (253).   Schools must teach kids how to navigate the digital environment by allowing them to “do” in digital environments, and technology should be used to support the existing pedagogy (247).  In addition, librarians must provide services that adjust to how Digital Natives are now accessing information; they must guide students towards understanding and evaluating the information that they find.  One method of doing this could include encouraging young people to use sites that offer recommendations for popular articles, such as Digg.com, providing a “filter” to counteract information overload (199).

In the dawn of this digital age, Born Digital instructs us to join and participate in the transition, instead of attempting to stop it.  The Digital Natives of today need librarians who will help them to navigate their new information world, rather than try to shut them out of it.

For the social networking assignment I decided to try out Library Thing.  I’ve been meaning to keep a better journal of books I’ve read, to help with reader advisory once I actually become a librarian, so I thought a site such as this would really help. Everytime I’ve tried starting a pen and paper journal I enter about three titles and then promptly lose it or just never pick it up again.

I’ve had an account on GoodReads for a year or two, about which I was really excited when I first signed up.  My only problem with this site was that I only knew one other person who was using it.  And we have very similar reading interests, so most of our entries were the same, and it didn’t produce very helpful recommendations.  So my excitement eventually fizzled out, and I pretty much stopped using the site all together.

But it never even occurred to me that you could connect a site such as this to your Facebook account!  The ability to do this completely revives my interest in sites such as GoodReads or LibraryThing.  So I created a new account.

So far, I really like the LibraryThing site.  It allows you to rate, review, create tags, and even create different libraries for yourself.  It’s easy to search for and find books; once you’ve found them it’s simple to add them to your collection and create a rating or comment for them.

I’ve only noticed a few downsides with LibraryThing so far.  One is that when you link to your facebook account, the application doesn’t show any images for the covers of the books in your collection.  (Perhaps because it is not an official “facebook approved” application.) This is a small issue, but it just makes the list look boring. From a librarian’s perspective, I think more facebook visitors would actually look at my “collection” if there were images to go with the titles.  While exploring the LibraryThing “Help” page, there was a question posted about this, and the answer said that they were working on a fix to this problem.  So hopefully this will be available soon.  LibraryThing does, however, create a special box on the left hand side of my facebook page, so it has its own space that allows it to be viewed easily.

Along with LibraryThing, I decided to check out a few of the other book social networking sites that also offer facebook applications.  One of the ones I found is called Living Social.  I had no idea this application was so popular. My facebook account informed me that almost 50 of my facebook friends use this Living Social application!  Like LibraryThing, it allows you to search, rate, and review books for your collection.  It also provides recommendations based upon the books you rate and add to your collection.  The only thing I noticed that it lacks is LibraryThing’s “statistics/memes” tab, which tallies the books in your collection according to a wide range of different criteria (female vs. male authors, award-winners, dates of publication, etc.).  This is a really cool feature for a librarian, as you can keep track of your reading patterns for improving your reader’s advisory services.

But what Living Social has going for it, which LibraryThing so far lacks, is a large number of users who are already connected to my profile via facebook.  If this trend is common amongst other facebook users (besides those who are my friends) then this would seem to be a big plus for Living Social.  The more people using the application, the more potentials users a library’s facebook page could connect with. Living Social also contains categories for movies, albums, and restaurants, in addition to books, so it’s potential to grow and gain more users might be larger.

So for now, I think I’ll start building my collections in both LibraryThing and Living Social and see which one ultimately remains more user friendly and becomes most useful.

See my LibraryThing account

I’m completely intrigued by my context book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives… I started it this weekend and flew through it, so I’m flipping back to page one and starting it again— a bit more slowly this time to actually let some of it sink in!  Then I’d like to focus my research paper around some of these ideas.  I’m particularly struck by one of the insights made by the authors about the nature of today’s digitally connected society: “These changes, to be sure, are not all good, but they will be enduring” (Palfrey and Gasser 7).

Because these changes WILL be enduring, we need to decide how to change along with our students. So I would like to examine the following questions:

How is the instant and constant access to information via the internet affecting the way students learn and process information?  Is the digital environment truly changing the way people/teenagers think?  Is it my imagination, or have student attention spans shortened during the last 11 years?  What will be the effects of this? What can librarian teachers do to promote literacy in the midst of these changes?

As students increasingly rely on search engines and Wikipedia for their research activities, how do we promote the relevance of the library as an integral part of the research process?

How can we use 2.0 technologies to reach out to students and keep the library relevant as a center for research activities?

Because they often erroneously believe that “Digital Natives” know everything there is to know about using technology, many teachers have told me they think the librarian is becoming an obsolete in the world of student research.   But how much do students truly understand about using technology? About navigating the plethora of information on the internet? About finding what they need?  What do they need to know? What skills should we focus on in this new digital era?  Are there some things we can leave behind, to make our instruction more relevant?

How can we use library 2.0 to reach out to teachers and faculty, in order to keep the library relevant to their curricula (so they continue to use the library themselves and bring their classes to use it as well)?

Which 2.0 tools and services have been implemented successfully in other school libraries?  How have they been used?  What are their benefits?  How are they evaluated for their effectiveness?  If they aren’t effective, why not?