Library ethics for non-librarians scenarios

I am leading a session at our state school library/tech conference ITEM on Friday. Here's the description:

Whether called librarians, media specialists, technology integrationists or the job title du jour, students and staff deserve service guided by professional ethics. What do those who may be running our libraries but may not by training be librarians need to know about intellectual freedom, copyright, privacy, and other essential concepts? And how do make sure all schools have an advocate for ethical information and technology use?

The core of the session will be the Code of Ethics of the American Library Association which we will review. But the bulk of the time will be spent apply the code to what I hope are real-world situations.

I've found:

In doing workshops on library and tech ethics for a long time, I've found one of the most effective ways to help others "find" and clarify their ethical values is through the discussion of situations where such choices must be made. So here are the scenarios from which participants will be able to choose in their small groups

1. The building tech specialist decides to subscribe to an e-book service that offers a wide-range of reading materials rather than purchase any new print resources for the media center.
2. The principal decides that if a student is caught accessing an inappropriate site on the Internet, their computer access will be suspended for two weeks, with multiple violations increasing the length of suspension.
3. Ms Sanchez is an early adopter of technology at Trump Elementary School and has managed to acquire 20 iPads for her 4th grade classroom through donations and fundraisers. No effort has been made to supply classroom devices for classrooms in the building.
4. The rules for the 1:1 project at Clinton Middle School are that the devices are to be used for "school work only" and both media services (YouTube, Pandora, Netflix etc) and social networking sites (Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, etc) are blocked by the Internet content filter.
5. A parent e-mails the technology integration specialist demanding that the Planned Parenthood website be blocked at school.
6. Teachers lobby the building tech specialist to purchase a program which allows the remote monitoring of student devices. The cost of the system, which is significant, will be paid with funds that normally pay for full-text databases.
7. The school secretary has created a publicly-accessible website of all students who have overdue books and other materials along with the titles of those materials.
8. A teacher has asked the lab manager for a list of the sites a student has visited during the previous hour to determine if the student is on task, looking for materials related to the research requirement and of a suitable reading level.
9. The district technology director regularly visits classrooms throughout the district, taking photos of students using technology. He tweets these photos out to the public using a school-associated hashtag.
10. The teachers at Sanders HS rely on Turniitin to detect plagiarism without teaching the concept to their students or adjusting research assignments to encourage personalization or application of the research findings.
11. A teacher asks the tech specialist how to download a YouTube video and then add it to his learning management system.
12. The building technician is asked to load licensed software on all computers in a lab for which the district only has a license for 10. The teacher who asks this states that no more than 10 students at any one time will be using the software.
13. The tech specialist in the building when working on a teacher's computer sees in the browser history that the teacher has been doing online shopping using his classroom computer and reports this to the building principal.
14. At a conference, the technology director is invited to dinner by a major computer company who openly solicits the district's business. The cost of the meal and drinks is about $50.00.
15. The local computer store sells Chromebooks for approximately 20% more than a national vendor. The technology director buys from the local company citing better customer service.
16. As an avid environmentalist, a teacher does not allow her students to print any of their digital products, insisting they be share only electronically.
17. The principal gathers input from her parent advisory committee to determine building policies on things like cell phone use, use of computers in the library, and filtering questions. Some teachers object on the grounds that these decisions should be made by professional educators.
18. The curriculum department chair refuses to purchase any online reference materials, stating that all the information students need is free on the Internet.
19. The digital learning specialist refuses to attend the state technology conference stating that all she needs to know about current practices in educational technology can be gained through her Twitter feed.
20. The district decides to implement a reading program as part of an intervention program for struggling students. A classroom teacher who firmly believes that such programs kill the joy of reading refuses to use the program.

For their selected scenario, participants will discuss:

• Is there an ethical choice that must be made?

• What additional information would be helpful in making this decision?

• What might be the consequences of a poorly made decision be on students?

• Under which ALA Code principle might this fall?

• How might librarians help non-librarians facing these decisions

If lucky, all of us will come out of the session confused at a higher level!

BFTP: Defeating the one-right-answer mentality

Like most Americans, I am thoroughly disgusted with the politics surrounding budget talks at both the federal and state level. While common sense seems to dictate both spending cuts and tax increases will be needed to put most governments back on some sort of sustainable path and not leave increasingly larger financial messes for our kids and grandkids to clean up, our politicos on both sides seem to want only "one right answer" with no compromise or creativity in sight.

To what extent is our educational system complicit in this mentality?

I reflected on the little game I played with the grandsons on our recent road trip to the Black Hills last week:

We bought a set of Grade One Brain Quest cards to play with while driving - simple short answer trivia questions that Miles was not interested in and Paul found way too simple. So we invented a new game. Answer the question with a defensible answer that was not the one given as correct. For example: What makes the ground white when it falls from the sky? Given answer: snow. Our challenge answers: sleet, hail, frozen ground fog, flower petals, etc. (My daughter was surprised bird poop wasn't mentioned.)

I thought this was a wonderfully subversive thing for a grandfather to teach his grandsons - challenge the common "right answer." I hope Paul and Miles remember this and defend their own "correct" answers when they don't agree with the one in the text book, answer key to the test, or teacher's worksheet key. If they get a chance.

I get tickled when classroom teachers actually encourage this sort of thinking. One of my most memorable examples was my own chemistry teacher who required that in order to get an A in the class, one needed to find an error in the textbook and offer proof why it was wrong. A history teacher in one of our high schools asks students to make a correction to a Wikipedia entry that stays in place for at least two weeks. Formal debate should be a required class for all students.

One of my earliest columns (1995) was titled "Embracing Ambiguity." It began:

As a teacher, I can construct activities which either discourage or invite ambiguity in my classroom.

Let’s say my class is studying camels. If I want predictability, I would ask my class to fill out a worksheet based on information found in a textbook or taken from my lecture. The worksheet even has exactly three blanks to match the exact information for which I’m looking from my students. Easy to correct, easy to measure, done by every student in a set amount of time. My class stays in the secure world of answers I’ve determined to be right or wrong.

Let’s change the assignment a little. I will narrow the topic and ask my students to answer the question, ‘What allows camels to survive in the desert?” And this time instead of sending them to the textbook or lecture notes, they’ll head to the media center with a blank paper instead of a paper with blanks. Students might use print and electronic encyclopedias, a variety of books, the Internet, magazines, filmstrips, and phone calls to local experts. 

What happens? Some students come back with a dozen facts; some with only one or two or none. Some facts are relevant; some are not. Some kids are done in 10 minutes; some need all hour. We’ve left “right” and “wrong” answers behind, and responses now are subject to interpretation, evaluation, and categorization. Now who decides what constitutes a correct answer? Hopefully, it’s not the text nor teacher, but the students themselves as a result of discussion. 

It takes a special teacher to create a classroom like the second one which doesn’t just accept ambiguity and the open ended discussion it engenders, but embraces it. Some of us have been lucky enough to have had those teachers Their discussions may have been about the interpretation of poem, an incident in history, or a contradiction in science, and they didn’t end when the bell rang - excited students carried the talk into the hallways, lunchrooms and all the way home on the bus.

Ambiguity, creative thinking, challenging the " one correct answer" mindset is more important than ever. If all educators took the multiple solution approach, might our next generation of leaders be more successful in solving our problems? (I have no hope for the current crop.)

Oh, embracing ambiguity and lots of correct answers is not a bad attribute of educational leaders either.

Original post, August 13, 2011

Social networking: connecting to the past

When I read blogs, newsfeeds, Facebook, Tweets or other social media communications, it is the future that primary comes up and hits me between the eyes. The latest political blunders, the newest gizmos, and the de rigueur buzzwords in education are typically front and center - exacerbating the FOMO (fear of missing out) that these technologies engender.

But on a fairly regular basis the past sneaks up on me as well. I was surprised to find this comment left on a blog post, In Praise of Guides, from 2009:

Hi Doug! I just googled "Kopavi glamour shots" and this article popped up! Your writing brought a wave of great memories, thanks for writing this great blog and your kind words :) hope you are well and thriving! October 3, 2016 | Kopavi

Kopavi, as you might have guessed, was one of the guides a small group of hiking friends used when doing the Rim to Rim hike of the Grand Canyon a few years ago. His note, of course, led me to re-read and re-live the great trip on which we met.

My blog and social networking accounts have connected me with people (relatives and friends from a distant childhood), events (Al Bell, anyone?), and experiences such as the hike above.

We warn out students that anything we post online is more or less on one's permanent record, assuming that kids will post things they will later regret.

But I would argue that what most of we post are things we wish to remember - poems we've written, photos we've taken, narratives of our days, insights into our lives, remembrances of what and who we loved. I am glad mine are available for myself and others to find.

Oh, go right ahead and Google your name followed by "glamour shots.' Hope you have better luck than I did.