"... and I turned out okay."

Scott McLeod took some geezers to task in his post, "We didn't have [x] when I was a kid and I turned out okay".  He writes:

Here's a statement that I'm getting really tired of hearing:

"We didn't have computers when I was in school and I turned out okay. There's no reason why kids today need 'em."

I'm sure that this argument was offered in the past as well:

"Buses? We walked to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways!"

"I don't want to pay for indoor plumbing for the school. We didn't have it when I was a student and I turned out alright."

"Electricity? Pshaw! Do you know how dangerous those wires are? When we were kids we had oil lamps and candles and everything was fine."

I suspect quite a few of the folks who say they turned out OK without [x] actually did turn out OK. They raised families, made a comfortable living, and contributed to their communities. And they did do so without the benefit of computers, the Internet, cell phones or even Facebook.

But I would also remind these folks who turned out OK despite not having today's technologies that there were a few other things they didn't have as well, including:

• International competition for both blue and white collar jobs.
• Automated factories and farms that require less human labor.
• Increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence on customer support lines and elsewhere that eliminate the need for "routine cognitive tasks."
• A lack of support from organized labor.
• Competition for small business from big box stores and online merchants.
• A labor market that requires post-secondary training as the entry point to a decent paying job.
• The need to establish professional networks and develop an online portfolio of work.
• Openly partisan cable news channels and thousand of online pundits.
• The requirement that one must be creative, solve problems, and evaluate sources of information in order to be a valued member of an organization.

I don't doubt the sincerity of people who believed that they "turned out OK." But I do wonder if they could make an accurate assessment of their chances for success in today's technology-infused economy (with a national 9%+ unemployment rate).

Personally, I don't hear parents or employers doubting the need for students to have access to technology in schools and good technology skills. There is certainly debate and even a lack of understanding about how one defines and how one achieves IT literacy, but the recognition for its need by parents has been around since the mid-90s at least.

Our school has a tech referendum renewal on the ballot for this Tuesday. I hope I'm right that parents and the community DO see that kids and teachers need the access to technology that these funds will provide.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

BFTP: Librarian-proofing library programs

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this Blast From the Past Original post January 31, 2007. Thinking still about the mood and conversations I had at AASL in Minneapolis a week or so ago. We librarians are an anxious profession.

If a librarian cannot lead his or her learning community, perhaps that librarian really is obsolete. -Joyce Valenza

Librarians are the last gasp of an educational system that believes in information gatekeepers, master archivists who work like priests. It's about time we did away with these intermediaries to the words and ideas of people like you and me, and helped everyone accept information literacy as their own personal responsibility (oh, I wanted to write "saviour" but it wouldn't fly...). - Miguel Guhlin, (much tongue in cheek)

Become the thing that replaces you. - Kathy Sierra 

(This post started as a reply left to Joyce Valenza's blog posting, linked above and here. You should read it now if you haven't.)

I've been finding my hope for the future of the school library field rises and falls in direct relationship to the last librarian with whom I've talked. When I visit with Joyce Valenza, Adam Janowski, Ron Darow, [and more recently Buffy Hamilton, Gwynth Jones, Shannon Miller, Cathy Jo Nelson, Jennifer LaGarde], the librarians in my own district, and other progressive, thoughtful professionals, I know the future for school libraries is limitless. But when the last librarian I talked to is negative and reactionary, I wonder how we survived this long, and tend to think much more like Miguel in his quote above than I'd like to admit.

My question is: How can we remove the individual as a factor in whether the library position in a school is in jeopardy? You get a bad science teacher, you don't eliminate the science program. You get a poor reading teacher, you don't stop teaching kids to read. Tell me one position in the school - not guidance counselor, not PE teacher, not art teacher, not custodian, not vice-principal, not even tech director - that the person in the position is routinely eliminated by eliminating the position itself.

What do librarians do that is so damned important that school would not go on were the position not to exist?

In my column The M Word, I suggested that our district's librarians and library staff were less vulnerable to cuts because:

1. Our district’s elementary librarians teach and assess a required part of the state standards and give grades to all students on information literacy, technology skills, life-long reading behaviors, and appropriate use. (This includes Internet safety instruction now required by CIPA.)
2. Our district’s elementary media specialists cover prep time.
3. Our district’s media specialists are the webmasters for their buildings.
4. Our district’s media specialists have network administration duties.
5. Our district’s media specialists help administer computeized reading and math programs in the buildings that use them.
6. Our district’s media specialists do staff development in technology.
7. Our district’s media specialists serve on building leadership and technology teams.
8. Our district’s media specialists participate in our PTAs.
9. Our district’s media specialists serve on curriculum committees.
10. Our district’s media specialists meet each year with their building principals to make sure they know their buildings' goals and work with the building leadership to make sure the library’s goals and budget directly support the building goals.

I would suggest that if things REALLY got bad, only items 1 and 2 will really save positions, even in our district. The rest of the list is great to do since it adds job security, but does not make the job indispensable since others could take these roles on.  I would encourage all librarians to find, articulate, and be held accountable for a piece of building learning interventions (like item 5). I don't see that happening.

Using fix schedules as a means of achieving permanent positions in schools is demeaning if it is only seen as babysitting by the rest of the staff. Fixed schedules alone should not be why librarians are employed.

To me that leaves one main area that we need to continue to develop: having a mandated curriculum that we are responsible for teaching, assessing and reporting. If our roles did not exist, our kids would not get these skills - yes, much like being the math or reading teacher. (I've explored this idea before.) I am fighting for mandated IL/IT skills at both a state and national level. I'm doing this primarily because it is right for kids who will need these skills to survive in the 21st century economies. But I will happily accept job security as a side benefit.

A good question to ask ourselves is what do we do as librarians that justifies having us on the job - the cost of which results in more kids in a classroom, less technology, older curriculum materials or higher taxes? If the offer were made to your classroom teachers to have a couple fewer kids in class or better technology or a new reading series or a professional librarian in the school, which would they chose? What would parents choose? What would your principal chose? And most importantly, what would your kids choose?

You can build all the lists you want about why librarians are important. But in the end it comes down to "Why are MY librarians important in MY school?" When I last visited with library guru Mike Eisenberg, he stated that we all need to be important in our own ways in meeting the needs of our individual buildings and teachers. Some schools will want a reading specialist, some a computer geek, some a Chief Information Officer or uber-reseacher, and some an information literacy teacher.  "Be what your school needs you to be," he recommends. Good advice.

If you won the lottery and retired tomorrow, would your school replace you - and why? Is your position librarian-proof?

Image in this post is from the Library of Congress American Memories project. 

Opting out of "presenting" online

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.
W. C. Fields

I gave two talks for Libraries 2.0 yesterday and went to bed feeling incompetent. While a feeling of inadequacy is not exactly a rare occurrence in my life, feeling like I'd done a poor job as a presenter is pretty darned rare.

I'm still not quite sure why things didn't feel right. The evening talk was essentially the same one I gave (live) at AASL last Saturday that went well. I've done webinars before that felt positive and useful to participants. The Library 2.0 event itself was well organized.

There were some technical challenges, epecially in the evening session. I could not see the chat window and needed to rely on my moderator (who seemed to often be otherwise occupied) to relay comments and questions to me. No one attending seemed to use the hand raise, smiley/frowny face icons during the talk. I could load only a limited number of slides to the Blackboard platform.  And I have to admit, by 8PM my energy level is not what it is at 8AM which may have been the major problem.

I am tempted to just take a pledge never to attempt another webinar - as presenter, anyway. It doesn't fit my style, temperament, abilities, etc. Just take Fields's advice above and stop being a damn fool about this one thing.

The bigger question is "Do we let all educators "opt out" of a method or tool that does not seem to work with their teaching style? I am tempted to say yes, but I am curious what reader's thoughts might be.