Courage of our convictions

Two library bloggers have recently questioned the wisdom of particular acquisitions they have made for their school libraries. With VP nominee Palin being rumored to have tried to censor library material, I suspect many librarians are a bit sensitive about intellectual freedom right now.

Jeri Hurd has a thoughtful "rant" about how Arabs are treated in the media, whether a book with a great text but an inciteful cover belongs on her shelves, and questions the role of schools and libraries in teaching multi-culturalism and tolerance. READ IT!

And Cathy Nelson wonders if permanently checking out a book on teen-pregnancy to the guidance counselor is a form of censorship.

Members of ALA and AASL on their respective listservs are discussing whether member commentary about Palin places ALA's non-profit status in jeopardy.

Let's review:

We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. We do not believe they need the help of censors to assist them in this task.  American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights

Young people have First Amendment rights. American Library Association

These are deceptively frightening statements for a large percentage of our parents, teachers and administrators. It takes a deceptively large amount of courage to fight censorship, to defend a wide variety of viewpoints - especially in a politically charged climate.

In the late 70s when I was a high school librarian, the superintendent requested that I take the magazine Psychology Today off the shelves. He objected to the ads for condoms in the back, as I remember.  I didn't remove it, but I didn't make an issue of it either. He just never checked to see if I had actually complied or not. Had the issue been pressed, I'd like to think I would have fought for my students' rights to the information in the magazine. I'd like to think so...

Techs, this certainly not an issue the library alone owns. How will you respond when a parent asks you to block Planned Parenthood, PETA or The Flying Spaghetti Monster websites? Do you have a review process in place or will you be blown about with every political wind? Good time to think about it before the gales of campaigning get stronger...

Found at: decemberangel29.blogspot.com/2007/08/courage.html

What shape are your packets in?

A common reason often given by school technology departments for blocking a particular Internet resource is that it uses too much bandwidth. YouTube, Google Video and Images, and iTunes are among those sites often singled out.

If any district in Minnesota needs to conserve bandwidth, it is probably ours. Mankato's 7000 students and 1000 staff all share a paltry 14MG pipe from the district's WAN to the Internet cloud. And we use our connection pretty hard. When the Internet is slow, we do hear about it.

Just a fair warning here, I will be speaking somewhere between 5 and 50 miles outside my areas of expertise. As my IT manager likes to remind me - "Your role in the department is pointy-haired boss, remember?" So, caveat lector.

We installed a packet shaper on our network last year. What our packet shaper (or traffic shaper or layer seven switch) allows us to do is prioritize traffic on our network. We can tell the network to allow some websites or some Internet protocols "to go first" and delay other websites and protocols. Until last week, this seems to have made only a small difference.

But the degree to which we can specify what traffic has priority became more granular with a recent software release. We can now give YouTube (not all Flash) a "Priority 0" rating. The yearbook people can use Flash to do their pages unimpeded; middle school kids can look for videos of fart lighting on YouTube with what bandwidth is left over. (Click on the small image at the left to see a larger version of the control module screen shot.) This has made a big difference.

So, if your district is blocking valuable educational resources because of bandwidth limitations think about using a packet shaper.  (Since people will ask, we paid about $15K for ours in a consortium purchase.)

I'm thinking of changing our department's mission statement to: Providing solutions to problems that you didn't have before there was technology. Like it?

 

Intellectual Freedom 101

Just last week I was complaining that I felt like a lone voice in speaking about intellectual freedom. And today I get this via the AASLForum listserv:

The current (Nov/Dec) issue of Knowledge Quest, the AASL membership journal which probably arrived in your mailbox this week, addresses the theme Intellectual Freedom 101, focusing on the many issues we face dealing with intellectual freedom in the school setting. Providing a thorough introduction and education on current IF issues and how to handle them, this KQ issue features fundamental IF documents such as the Library Bill of Rights and Code of Ethics, articles such as “Getting Started with Social Technology in Your Library” by Annette Lamb, “Preparing for a Challenge” by Ann Martin, “A Patriot Act Primer for School Librarians” by Barbara Bailey, "Championing Intellectual Freedom: A School Administrator's Guide" by former principal Jeff Gibson, an interview with children’s author/illustrator Laurie Lazarro Knowlton (author of Red, White, and Blue), and a guest editor’s column by Helen Adams, chair of the AASL Intellectual Freedom Committee. And did you know that much of this outstanding journal’s content is also available online via KQ Web at http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/kqweb/kqweb.cfm?  Do yourself a favor and spend some quality time delving into both the print and online journals!

Is AASL a responsive organization or what? I know I am looking forward to reading this issue and the online materials as well.