Do You Need Your School Librarian?

I’ve been the primary state contact at my worksite (NH Dept of Ed) for school librarians for several years now. It’s just one of the hats I wear. While I do not have an LMS credential, I’ve sure learned a whole lot about what it takes to be a Library Media Specialist. And these folks are really key players (or should be) in schools that want to be successful 21st century learning places. Sure, there are some librarians who are having a harder time adopting new strategies and new ideas, just like other teachers. Well, I just read Joyce Valenza’s post about this topic and thought it so perfect that it needed to be referenced. She begins by discussing their state’s push toward 1:1 laptop initiatives… then explains what this has to do with the school librarians. A lot! Read Joyce’s post….

Remembering Sue Janosz

Susan Janosz was a cool person and an excellent educator. She was so respected as an educator that the NHSTE organization created an award in her memory. This year, I was the lucky recipient of this award, announced at the Wednesday morning session of the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference. How cool is that! This was pretty special to be honored by peers, and not only that, to have so many people congratulating me afterwards.

It was also quite bittersweet because it reminded me of my first few years living and working in New Hampshire. I was introduced to Sue within my first few months on the job at the NHDOE, as we assembled the first team of educators to design the NHEON website. Sue provided tremendous help with the functionality as well as the content of the site. NHEON has gone through a few “facelifts” since 1999 when it first came online, but the work she did was critical to the overall purpose of the site even today. She was really wonderful to work with. She was a gracious, cheerful, and intelligent woman. I’m very glad that NHSTE created this award in her memory.

Examples of CommentPress

There is a very useful WordPress theme called CommentPress. It was created by the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book. I came across it about a month ago and made a mental note to go back to the site and download it. I wanted to use it to encourage a collaborative online approach to revising our state ed tech plan. Unfortunately, their site has been down for weeks. So how does one locate a copy of it when the source is down? Well, I went searching everywhere. Here and there I found blog posts about it, but never the downloadable files. I tried emailing the curator at the future of the book, but of course that bounced because their server was down. I tried emailing other folks that seemed to be connected in some way to the project, but their emails bounced too. Finally, Rob Gray of the PETAL project at the University of South Alabama, came to my rescue with a fresh copy of the install files. (Thank you!) And then I discovered that Edublogs has the theme available. I had originally intended to do an install on NHEON.org, but time was running short for me (the conference session for using it is in 3 days). So I set up a blog on Edublogs and started editing away. (Note: ask me if you get stuck because I ran into a few setup issues.)

I didn’t find alot of examples of blogs with CommentPress. I especially wanted to see examples with images, colors, embedded video, etc. That’s when I decided I needed to write this post and start sharing links to the few blogs I have found:

• PETAL is hosted by the University of South Alabama. They managed to insert the
• Innovation Nation in the UK has customized CommentPress quite nicely. The site is hosted by a UK government agency called the “Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills.” If you really like this version, they have a “happy to share on request” link on the bottom of their site.
• Here’s a journal article called “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” which was published as a regular article in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and then also in CommentPress formet.
• Here’s a white paper called the Evolution of Communication, released by the New Media Consortium. This one also appears to be slightly customized to include the NMC logo below the table of contents.
• View my CommentPress blog for state tech planning at Edublogs.
• Other installs? As I said, there are people blogging about CommentPress but I didn’t find too many installs.
  

The list of installs grows:

• Yale University Press has a nice site (thanks, Joss Winn for this addition to the list)

Wisdom of Crowds

I’ve known about Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, for quite awhile, but it’s just been one of those many cool books that I never got around to reading. A few weeks ago, I saw it on my brother-in-law’s bookshelf and asked to borrow it. It was perfect to take on the flight last week. A few key points that have stuck with me… Surowiecki says sociologists always use the analogies of flocks of birds and schools of fish to explain some behaviors of crowds. He also describes how important it is for individuals in crowds to maintain a certain amount of independence in their thinking, yet how smart crowds usually come up with more accurate answers in aggregate than if you were to just consult an “expert” on the topic at hand. He mentions the fact that decentralization in a system is a good thing, except that there also seems to be a need for some aggregating, overarching entity to pull together the wisdom from a group, else the best wisdom of the group sometimes will simply not surface. (Click the book link to read from the source.)

I just read his description of the Matthew effect, which is a phenomena that occurs in scientific publishing but is based on the Gospel lines “from unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Surowiecki, 2005, p. 170). When scientists are co-authors of a scientific article, apparently the more famous of the authors tends to get all the credit for a discovery, even if they truly collaborated and all contributed equally.

So that got me thinking about an article about digital portfolios and assessment that I just co-authored with Helen Barrett. It’s been submitted for publication in the New Hampshire Journal of Education (sorry, no website link for you — I’m still waiting for their website to go live). My part of the article was largely an edited version of my dissertation research. As the article began to take shape, she suggested that I be listed as the first author. Helen added some content from other of her work, then we added some further thoughts about future efforts. It all came together pretty quickly and easily. Helen was great to work with on the article because she’s a collaborator, dedicated educator, and thoughtful observer of the way digital portfolios have emerged across the globe in the educational arena. Look for the article in the 2009 issue of the New Hampshire Journal of Education!

Wish List for Schools

Today I’m reading discussion posts in one of the courses I co-developed. I was reminded of some of my pet peeves — things that I really wish schools had the time, talent, resources, and determination to change. Perhaps some schools already do. Perhaps others don’t know they can. Perhaps some schools are simply so overwhelmed with more urgent responsibilities that they just cannot get to it. This is where I think larger organizations and larger funding sources can sometimes help. So here is my wish list to remind myself of what I think we still need to do to help our schools to accomplish.

Visual Literacy

A few days ago I came across the most fascinating webpage called “Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.” It is formatted to look like the periodic table of elements, but each element is a type of visual. The table is impressive enough, but when you mouse over each element, an example of the type of visual pops up. This is very cool.

Does the Digital Divide Still Exist?

I just read this article by Eszter Hargittai in which she very clearly describes why we should still be concerned about teaching media literacy to our K-12 students. Here’s one statement from the article that pretty much sums up why we should still be concerned about digital access:

“Differentiated uses of digital media have the potential to lead to increasing inequalities benefiting those who are already in advantageous positions and denying access to better resources to the underprivileged” (Hargittai, 2008, p. 943).

I highly recommend reading the article. So how do we address this issue when we plan for school improvement, when we update curriculum materials, when we think about professional development for teachers, when we update our district technology plans, etc.? As the Internet becomes more and more woven into the things we use as part of our daily life, we must think about creative ways to ensure that all kids are better prepared to use the web effectively for their own futures. Does the web promise to improve everyone’s life? The quick answer/assumption is yes, but in reality, it can actually increase the gaps between sections of society.

Citation

Hargittai, E. (2008). The Digital Reproduction of Inequality. In Social Stratification. Edited by David Grusky. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 936-944.

Creativity in a Digital World

Today I logged into my iGoogle page, checked to see who was Twittering among the folks I’m following on Twitter, and noticed that Maria had twittered about Roxik Pictaps. Since I have great respect for Maria’s ability to find all sorts of very cool stuff, I checked it out. Interesting digital toys, but more importantly, I went to the “about me” page to see who created this stuff. Stay with me now… you know how you can get lost on the web when you start exploring…

When I clicked, I found the Roxik guy staring me in the face from a TV sort of frame. So now I’m curious about his work and notice Roxik is “represented internationally by Unit 9.” Now I’m on the Unit 9 website exploring their work. I click on House Reel to see a gallery of their work. Fascinating and creative. A few examples include the very cute UPS widget, the Haagen-Daas “help the honey bees” website where you can even create your own little honey bee graphic, and more.

So how did these folks learn to create all this stuff? Are they digital geniuses? Did they go to school where our kids go to school? Come to think of it, are our kids going to learn skills that can help them create sites like this? Admittedly, not every kid is going to be a digital genius and follow the path that the folks at Unit 9 followed, but go take a look at Scratch and Alice. I think we have lots of digital toys, tools, resources to help nurture creativity in a digital world. We have to be willing and daring enough to use them. Is creativity important? You bet. Listen to James Paul Gee talk about creativity and how video games can and should be used in education.

Making Learning Visible

Goodness, it’s been far too long since I’ve posted! Tomorrow I will join other e-portfolio enthusiasts at Boston University for the Making Learning Visible Symposium. I was asked to bring a few other NH educators with me to share our experiences with digital portfolios in K-12 schools. So that’s what we will do! Here’s the Powerpoint of our brief presentation.

Handhelds in Education

I’ve been spending some time this week looking at handheld learning information. I’m impressed with what’s happening in the UK these days in this regard. Some good research and conferencing going on. I’m trying to get a better handle on what’s working and what it takes to pull of an initiative with handhelds. So I’ve decided there’s no way around it. I simply have to dedicate some time to reading the research and compiling a short list of resources and recommendations. Here’s my first bit of info:

i-Guide is one piece of software for handhelds. Here’s how the company describes it:

i-Guide from StreetAccess provides web-based services for schools and colleges, and for museums, galleries and other public spaces. i-Guide gives any school, museum or gallery the capability to create their own bespoke, interactive, online learning materials and guides.

These ‘Trails’ can be viewed on any internet-capable device, including PDAs and mobile phones as well as desktop or laptop computers. Every individual visit or lesson is captured as it happens and can be revisited later. The results can be downloaded to paste into coursework, or simply to keep as a memento.

Now that sounds pretty cool with definite possibilities.