Turning blogging into work

Questions from David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth blog posting. of June 29.

• What did you read in order to write this blog entry?
• What do you think is important about your blog entry?
• What are both sides of your issue?
• What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do?
• What else do you need to say?

David, how do these questions take advantage of this new medium?

Doug's 2.0 questions:

• What experiences or insights have you shared that make this entry unique?
• How will you generate feedback from your readers?
• Are you upfront about your biases?
• How do you want to make your readers feel?
• What are you doing to make people come back to your blog? Do you care or should you?
  

Other "composition" questions that are specific to social writing?

David, I am still a huge fan and admirer. Glad the librarians treated you well in New Orleans!

The joys of throwing things away

It's been a quiet week here in Lake Woebegone. (Oh, I think that line's been used.) But it has been a fairly quiet week here in the district. Lots of folks using up those last vacation days before our new fiscal year starts in July. No equipment from next year's budget can be received until next week by state law. A big WAN upgrade project that was to be done this week had to be postponed. But the "quiet" week has allowed me to do something I love to do. (No, not nap.) Clean my office.

 One big source of motivation was some work our entire department has been doing over the past couple weeks - cleaning the work area of our AV technician. The position was eliminated this year. There is just no economic incentive for repairing $39 DVD players. The old fellow who had the position was retiring. The time was right. In cleaning out the "bench" area where the AV tech had been housed, we discovered a treasure trove of, well, junk. Hundreds of broken machines cannibalized for parts; various testing machines that could have come directly from Dr. Frankenstein's lab; lots of parts for equipment we no longer owned; repair manuals for equipment I'd never heard of. Need sealed sets of the Macintosh operating system 7.1? Piles and piles and piles of detritus some 20 years in the making by two techs who could simply not throw anything away. There was enough to fill two dumpsters of the size pictured above. We now have  a space that is usable.

Combine this  experience with having had a mom who demanded you wear clean underwear just in case you were struck by a car and had to be taken to the hospital. One wouldn't want the word getting out that the Johnsons didn't wear clean BVDs. With the upcoming trip to Ireland, I wouldn't want the word getting out that I didn't keep a clean office either if I was in an accident there and I didn't make it back.  So I cleaned house - drawers, bookcases and files.

It was great fun, actually. Among the things I tossed were:

• a 1989 promotional videotape for the school district
• Our district's Y2K plan
• Large notebooks from various state planning initiatives
  
• Lots and lots of technology planning books from the 1980s
• A whole drawer full of orphaned cables
• My well-loved manual for FileMaker Pro 3
• All my blank 5 1/4 floppy disks
  

Anyway, I am now down to  two filing cabinet drawers from a dozen fifteen years ago. I have space on my shelves and room in my desk drawers. My desktop is orderly. All my books are in one place. My Jesse Ventura bobble-head and Nancy Pearle librarian action figure have regained places of prominence on my shelves.

 
A couple things struck me very hard while cleaning. We have been trying to figure out what to do with technology in education for what seems like a very, very long time. Glancing at the old guides from the 1980s, the same questions were being asked that are being blogged about today. Here is an excerpt from the (typed) Technology Utilization Plan of District 77, Mankato Public Schools, November 1983:

"... As society is evolving, it is apparent that technology will be a major factor in the lives of all individuals and that, in order to be productive, and individual will need to be able to adjust to the changes that technology will introduce... It is critical, then, for an educational institution to help all citizens accommodate the implications of technology by providing opportunities for people of all ages, including females, minorities and the disabled to be com literate in the developing levels of technology."

The tech survey showed the district using Apple II, Apple II Plus, Apple IIe, TRS-80 computers, and Burroughs Remote Terminals. As plans go, however, it was well done and pretty far sighted. 

If only our pedagogy had improved as rapidly as our hardware over the past 25 years!

The other thing that tickled me, though, was going through old articles I had clipped and saved. (Yes, my children, before the days of del.icio.us we actually had to take scissors and use file folders to save and keep things we might want to read again - provided we could find them.)

One "found" article I was particularly struck by was by Michael G. Fullan called "Change: A Guide for the Perplexed," from his work, Doubts and Certainties, NEA National Center for Innovation (1992).  He lists "8 lessons that emerge from looking at change as non-linear, as paradoxical, as demanding the togetherness of elements that appear at first glance to be mutually exclusive." These are:

1. You can't mandate what matters.
2. Change is a journey, not a blueprint.
3. Problems are our friends.
4. Vision and strategic planning come later in the process, not at the beginning.
5. Individualism and collectivism must have equal power.
6. Neither centralism nor decentralism works.
7. Connect with the environment.
8. Every person needs to be his or her own change agent.

Take a few minutes to clean your office/work area this summer. You will be delighted by the things you find. And if you are in an accident, you won't embarrass your mother by leaving a cluttered work space.

 Now, to clean those old files from my computer hard drive, delete those old e-mails, label and arrange my 3649 photos in iPhoto...

A trick question?

The stumper, it seemed, during yesterday's interviews for our new high school library media specialist was:

How will you demonstrate that the library media program is having a positive impact on student achievement in the school?

How did that evil question get in there with "Tell us a little about yourself" and "Describe a successful lesson you've taught"? - those questions most of us could answer with one frontal lobe tied behind our backs.

Given the increased emphasis on accountability and data-driven practices, it's question all of us, librarians and technologists alike, need to be ready to answer - even if we are not looking for a new job. (Of the four candidates we interviewed yesterday, three were looking for a job because their previous positions had been cut.)

 While I would never be quick enough to have said this without knowing the question was coming, I believe the best response to the question would be another question: "How does your school measure student achievement?"

If the answer was simply, "Our school measures student achievement by standardized or state test scores," I would have had to have replied, "There is an empirical way of determining whether the library program has an impact on such scores, but I don't think you'd really want to run the study. Are you willing to have a significant portion of your students (and teachers) go without library services and resources as part of a control group? Are you willing to wait 3-4 years for reliable longitudinal data? Are willing to measure only those students who are here their entire educational career? Are you willing to change nothing else in the school to eliminate all other factors that might influence test scores? Will the groups we analyze be large enough to be considered statistically significant?" No school I know of has the will to run such as study. Nor do many of us have the statistical or research expertise to conduct it any who.

If the answer to the question "How does your school measure student achievement?" was more complex - though successful completion of rigorous course work, through  authentically assessed mastery of problem-solving skills, through reports of post-secondary success by graduates, through successful participation in extra-curricular activities, though high graduation rates, through alumni or employer satisfaction surveys, etc.., then my response could not be so flip.

How can we hold ourselves accountable/answerable in an education environment in which a empirical means to demonstrate our value is impractical if not impossible?

Joyce Valenza's exemplary "End of Year" report that she shares in a recent Neverending Search blog entry is one example of demonstrating a program's (and the program director's) impact on student and school success. Why do I think Joyce's position will probably never be cut so long as she is in it?

OK, Joyce is probably among the half dozen smartest and hardest working people in all library-land.  Nobody should be expected to create a report as good as Joyce's. But we can all steal really good stuff from the report. I especially like the idea of exit interviews with seniors. (OK, making videos is annoyingly over-achieving, but regular interviews or a survey is do-able.) Replicate a mini-OHIO study  (TODD, KUHLTHAU, AND OELMA, 2004). Track the circ and use statistics and make the numbers meaningful. (Is there a spike in checkouts after a particular initiative?) David Loertcher has been on the bandwagon for use to compile lists of units we work with teachers on and the skills being taught in them.

And I would still advocate creating and then reporting on the successful completion of annual goals that are owned by not just the librarian, but the staff and administration too. That's how my department remains "answerable."

 How will you demonstrate that the library media (or technology) program is having a positive impact on student achievement in the school?

Think about it. I bet you'll be asked in the near future. How will you answer?