A heart felt thank you

My introduction at Friday night's ISLMA banquet was one of the nicest I had ever received. The librarian, rather than listing off my publications, work experience, and other dubious reasons one may wish to pay attention to what I had to say, told the group of some specific ways my writings had helped her become more effective as a librarian. I actually choked up.

A couple years ago I wrote:

On the way home Saturday morning from a very enjoyable NHEMA conference, I ran into my friend Nick Glass who runs TeachingBooks in the Minneapolis airport. He asked: "Are you doing good?"

I thought he was asking how I was doing financially. I mumbled something about keeping a roof over my head and keeping the LWW living in the style to which she has become accustomed.

"No," Nick clarified, "What I am asking is if feel you are doing any good? Do you feel your speaking and workshops are making any difference?"

It's a scary question to reflect upon.

Some days I feel great about what I do - when someone e-mails or comes up to me at a conference to say that I have been helpful to them. But I also wonder what the hell I have been doing for the past 20 years when more school library positions and programs are in greater peril than ever. Either my strategies are flawed or the message hasn't gotten through in my work trying to make the profession more relevant, more critical, and less dispensable to schools.

Anyway, to the lovely woman who gave my introduction last Friday, I don't think you can imagine the depth of my gratitude. Thank you. Thank you.

Push and pull technologies

A friend and colleague blogger recently bemoaned:

The new assistant superintendent for our department here in the overly-large school district says he wants to improve communications both within the organization and with his office.

To that end, a couple of months ago he started writing a weekly email message to all of us. Lots of text, one-way message.

This week his efforts took several steps even farther backwards when his message showed up as a PDF newsletter-formatted attachment.

We continue preaching “21st century” skills for kids while modeling methods from the 20th.

My response was basically: cut the guy some slack.

Tim wants the new sup to be using more interactive tools - a blog, Twitter, a Facebook fan page, a podcast, or an infographic. (I'm just guessing here.) To be a model communicator with the latest and greatest tools. 

Yet these "21st Century" tools have their limitations. Twitter assumes your message needs no more nuance or detail than what 140 characters can convey - and that your entire staff will "follow" you. The Facebook fan page is fine if your school doesn't block Facebook, you really don't want any feedback, and that your entire staff will "friend" you. Blogs, podcasts, or infographics are great communication tools provided they are supplemented by and additional communication method that allows readers to know they have been updated. I rather doubt all my staff regularly have or check RSS feed readers.

In our haste to be more interactive, we too often denigrate the power of pull technologies - the newsletter, the website, the magazine article, or book. But we also forget that if they are to be seen, they need to be accompanied by "push" efforts as well.

I'm not sure whether the terms "push" and "pull" are used in describing digital communication types any more. In my 1998 book The Indispensable Guide to Computer Skills, I wrote:

Do you not only want to read the news that is important to you, but be able to do so as soon as it happens? “Push” technologies used by programs like PointCast  and Educast*  are making this possible. After installing the software, the user selects what topics, news sources, and locales he or she wishes to have “pushed’ to his computer and how often. For a teacher with a direct network connection, this means having an up-to-the-minute, customized newspaper waiting on the classroom computer for use with the class.

Are the concepts "push" and "pull" still relevant? I think so.

If Tim's supervisor, the school public relations department, or the building librarian simply publishes a static document - a webpage or a blog post - he or she cannot depend on the intended audience taking the initiative (or remembering) to check the site for updates on a regular basis. Without a means of letting people know that new content has been published, the likelihood of people reading it is slim. But if the pull technology is supplemented by a "push" technology - an e-mail, a text message, a Tweet or a RSS feed - the audience knows new content has been added. My analogy has always been that going to the newsstand to get the paper is relying on "pull"; getting the paper delivered is using "push."

In some ways, Tim's superintendent sending an e-mail with a pdf attachment is an elegant solution. He gets the "push" of the e-mail to which on can respond as well but also the "pull" of formatted text that can convey a complex message that includes visuals. And modern webbrowsers even open pdf files automatically.

Just because it's old, doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Thank god.

*PointCast and Educast were the GoogleReader and Diigo for those of us who grew up playing with dinosaurs. (The name Educast seems to have been adopted by a number of more recent ventures and I don't seem to be able to find a link to a description of the real deal back in the mid-90s.)

Top 10 school library game changers

I'll be giving a banquet talk at the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA) conference this Friday night. The program chair requested: 

Since ISLMA is celebrating their 25 years as an Association, would it be possible to include how school libraries have changed over the past 25 years?

So, I've been thinking a lot about this charge over the past few weeks. In 1988 I was an K-9 librarian in an oil company ARAMCO school in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia with about a dozen years of classroom teaching and library experience under my belt, feeling I had more or less "mastered" my craft and was a little bored. During that school year I decided that I needed to move back to the US if I were to keep up with some of the changes in school libraries that I was reading about - changes due to corporate policies that seemed impossible to make in the company schools. 

 

Little did I, or any of us know, the kinds of changes in store for us. From about 1989 onward, being a school librarian has been a pretty wild ride. Those who entered the profession out of a love for books and quiet places were in for a world of hurt. But for many of us, this has been a great time to be a librarian.

 

Here are my top 10 game changers for school libraries from the past 25 years and why I chose them. Feel free to disagree - and add your own. You have until Friday evening to change my mind.

1. Library automation. Retrospective conversion. Heard that term lately? But it was something many of us were doing in the late 80s and early 90s, digitizing our paper card catalog records. So much per record. The Winnebago stand-alone with the catalog screen showing a digital card with a digital hole at the bottom of it. Automation made us worthy of computers in the library since we had a practical use for them. Following our library terminal(s) came the stand-alone CD-based The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992). Libraries entered the digital age.
2. LM_Net. Not long after e-mail became available (for me through my position as adjunct at the local university), came mailing lists. And LM_Net around 1993 was the granddaddy of these. Suddenly, one had access to thousands of other fellow school librarians who could answer questions, offer opinions, and, above all, empathize. This was the first Personal Learning Network. Sure, blogs, RSS feeds, Nings, and Twitter followed in the coming years, but LM_Net was the first inkling that learning about new library stuff was no longer done just by reading journals or attending conferences. And it may well have been the one thing that widened the gulf between the progressive librarians and the reactionary.
3. Mosaic and the World Wide Web. For the truly nerdy, Archie and Gopher offered means of searching the line interface Internet . But it wasn't until Mosaic in 1993 and tools like WebCrawler that the Internet came to the masses and librarians saw both a huge resource - and a huge competitor for patron attention. The Web also created a new dynamic of establishing the veracity of information. No longer were only professionally selected items available on the library shelves, but now librarians had a mission to teach patrons how to self-evaluate the quality of the information found. Anyone remember the spoof sites: the Mankato site, the Tree Octopus, or the Failure of the Velcro crop?
4. The Big6. Eisenberg and Berkowitz's model (1987) gave librarians a unique skill set to teach. Information literacy was a large component of a variety of 21st Century Skill models and the Big6 was an articulation of a process that was understandable. No longer just kiddie book pushers or reference librarians, the Big6 turned librarians in to real teachers. By adding technology to the model (Eisenberg, Johnson, 1996), educational technology's most powerful use became as a research and problem-solving tool - and librarians taught others how to use it.
5. LANs. As buildings ran networks to every classroom, office, desk and computer lab in the early to mid-90s the need for physical spaces, including libraries, started to be called into question. When a teacher or student could find information through the networks, librarians had to re-envision the purpose of the physical facility, asking "Why do people need to come to my library, when my library will come to them?" This is an ongoing discussion.
6. NCLB. Empahsis on test scores and accountability presented new challenges to librarians. "How can we demonstrate that the library program is having a positive impact on student achievement?" Books like The Power of Reading by Stephen Krashen and studies done by Keith Curry Lance that tied library programs to improved test scores became incredibly important in advocacy efforts for library programs. Unfortunately, librarians started to be replaced by reading specialists and reading software as test scores drove school improvement efforts. And local library accountability that demonstrated impact on test scores remains difficult.
7. CIPA. The Childhood Internet Protection Act of 2000 mandated filtering for schools that wished to continue to receive federal e-rate funding. And thus began the intellectual freedom battle for student (and often staff) access to an uncensored Internet. The battle over keeping The Power of Lucky on the shelves  seemed less critical that the battle over keeping Wikipedia, Facebook, and YouTube unblocked. Again, a fight that is still going on.
8. Wikipedia and Web 2.0. Crowd-sourced information turned the determination of the authority of information on its head. Almost overnight the wisdom of the masses became more credible than the college professor with a string of letters after his/her name. TripAdvisor trumped Fodors. What we as librarians learned in library school about selecting authoritative information seemed quaint. And teaching students how to evaluate information became more important, but trickier, than ever. And with Web 2.0, we started to help students consider the impact of their own digital footprint - for good and for ill.
9. Kindle/iPad. Kindle of 2007 was the first device that people actually used in mass to read e-books. The iPad in 2010 was the first device that demonstrated that books themselves were evolving into creatures that could sing, dance and interact - not just remain static.  How librarians select, promote, maintain, and evaluate e-book collections, especially in the face of a constantly changing e-book market, remains a huge challenge.
10. BYOD. As an increasing number of schools not only allow, but encourage, student to bring their personal laptops, cell phones, and tablets to school, the library's role again morphs. How do we provide resources that are useable on multiple hardware and operating system platforms? Do we need computer labs in our libraries? Do we need library apps instead of terminals? What kinds of rules and guidelines need to be in place for the productive use of student-owened devices? And again, why do students and staff need to come to the library, when resources are ubiquitous, portable, and instantaneous?

I am going to spare the banquet attendees my predictions for the next 25 years, but I am going to suggest some strategies we as librarians ought to using to remain relevant during this ongoing digital revolution. For if there is one prediction about which I feel confident, it's that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to change!

ISLMA was one of the first organizations who asked me to do a keynote presentation in 1995.  And they survived! 

Page from my 1988-89 school year book....