Not a long-term strategy

“asshole” is not a long-term strategy - Tamson McMahon (great post - read it)

I loved Nathan Mielke's comment on last week's blog post about the changing role of the CTO. He summarized the change as: 

"....soft skills are hard and hard skills can be outsourced."

Made me think of my number 2 rule in Machines Are the Easy Part: People Are the Hard Part [free download]:

2.            It’s always, always, always better to be a nice person than an ass.

You will make mistakes at home and on the job. So keep this in mind: People will forgive your mistakes if you are generally a nice person; they never forget them if you behave like an ass.

One of my technicians once warned a teacher: “I am beginning to think it is easier to make you mad than to make you happy. Remember, you are a lot more fun to watch when you are mad.” The teacher got nicer.

 Thus endeth this Sunday's sermon.

BFTP: Personal Use of the Internet

A Saturday Blue Skunk "feature" will be the revision of an old post. I am calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. This post originally appeared November 27, 2005.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a line from Frances Jacobson’s book, I Found It on the Internet. [A second edition has been published in 2010!] She worries libraries suffer from comparison to the Internet in students’ minds when, “Libraries become places to look for information other people want you to find, not for information that you yourself find intrinsically compelling or valuable.”

On our state media association list, a Minnesota media specialist recently asked a question all of us have asked at one time or another:

     …what do you allow students to do on the Internet? I started the year (in a high school) with a pretty loose policy, then had to step it up to no games, videos, quizzes, chat rooms, email, discussion boards, IMing, etc. Now I am battling eBay and anime sites and I am tempted to squash Internet use for personal things altogether.
     However, I also had a student today looking at different religions and I get students researching signs of depression and serious topics that they should be able to learn about on their own. I need to find a balance between no personal use and free access.

Below is a snippet from a book chapter I wrote for Carol Simpson’s Ethics in School Librarianship: A Reader which summarizes my answer to the above question:

The pursuit of information by students to meet personal needs should be encouraged in schools. Life-long learning strategies, practice in information evaluation, and experiences in building effective communication strategies are all reinforced when students use information technologies to meet personal goals.

As library media specialists and technologists, we need to lighten up a little in regard to what students are doing with the Internet in our libraries and classrooms as well. The Internet has vast resources that are not directly related to the curriculum but are of high interest to students at all grade levels. Information about sports, fashion, movies, games, celebrities, and music in bright and exciting formats abounds.

The use of the Internet for class work of course must be given priority, but computer terminals should never sit empty. And there are some good reasons to allow students personal use of the Internet:

• It gives kids a chance to practice skills. After all that’s why we have “recreational” reading materials in our libraries. Do we really subscribe to Hot Rod or Seventeen because they’re used for research? If we want kids who can do an effective Internet search, read fluently, and love to learn, does it make much difference if they are learning by finding and reading webpages on the Civil War or Civil War games?
• It gives weight to the penalty of having Internet access taken away. The penalty for misuse of the Internet is often a suspension of Internet us privileges. As a student, if I were restricted to only school work uses of the Internet and had my Internet rights revoked, I’d pretty much say, “So what?” and wonder what I had to do to get my textbooks taken away as well. But if I am accustomed to using the Internet each morning before school to check on how my favorite sports team was faring, the loss of Internet access as a consequence of misbehavior would be far more serious.
• It makes the library media center a place kids want to be. Many of our students love the library for the simple reason that it is often the only place that allows them to read books of personal interest, work on projects that are meaningful, and explore interests that fall outside the curriculum in an atmosphere of relative freedom. Kids need a place like that, and we should provide it – even at the Internet terminals.

Granted, my thoughts on this are idealistic. Recreational/personal use of the Interent in schools can and does cause problems. But we risk losing kids as library users, both now and as adults, if we take a hard line approach. Unless you only want kids in your library when they HAVE to be there, it must be cool and meaningful place to be.

Where is the happy medium? Is there one? How would you answer the question 'What do you allow students to do on the Internet?"

Do you provide a student's worth of value?

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence…on pain of liquidation. George Bernard Shaw

Gary Hatzell made an interesting comment at our library media specialist workshop last summer. He said something to the effect that cutting library positions really has little impact on class sizes. Something about this observation niggled at me. Not that I doubted Gary, but I did a little calculation for our own district.

We have approximately 4,100 elementary students, 178 classroom FTE elementary classroom teachers and 8 FTE elementary library media specialists. So the current mean class size is 23.03 students* (4,100/178).

If we replaced the 8 library positions with classroom teachers, we would get a mean class size of 22.04 (4,100/178+8) students per class. A class size reduction of .99 students. About less one kid per classroom.

A bigger difference than I thought. As a classroom teacher I vividly remember that every student means:

• one more student to supervise, counsel, guide, get to know
• one more set of papers, tests and quizzes to correct
• one more set of copies to make
• one more line in the gradebook
• one more attendance to account for
• one more set of parent-teacher conferences
• one more set of data to analyze
• one more bit of planning time, thought and care about how that individual can be reached
• one more voice to listen to and one more set of problems to help solve

So here is my question: Do teachers see you adding a student's worth of value in their classrooms? Does your presence balance the extra work each body in a classroom creates? Do teachers see your value in:

• Creating independent readers (that raise test scores)?
• Teaching technology and research skills (taking some important curriculum off their plates)?
• Providing time for planning (fixed schedule)?
• Providing immediate in-building tech support and training?
• Adding constructive teaching materials, methods and ideas to a teacher's toolkit?
• And???

I heard some very ugly, ugly budget numbers predicted for our state and district at a meeting this morning. There is a distinct possibility that we may need to make double the (very painful) amount of cuts we've made over the past two years just next year. The question like the one above is a hard one to ask - for librarians, for tech specialists and even for tech directors.

But ignoring reality is harder come budget crunch time. And I am afraid it is coming.

*Because of funding formulas, attendance areas, etc., our class sizes actually range from between about 17 to 31 students. Like in most schools, I am sure.

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