Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center. Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons! As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources: news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases. We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.
I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.  Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area!Â
“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “
All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal. Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.  If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal. Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well! Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless! Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available.Â
For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:
1. Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens: I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall. We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.
2. Classroom Teacher Lens: As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research. We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki. I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.
My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project. This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?
I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away! If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist. Stay tuned!
A footnote:Â Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September!Â
Calling all Grizzly patrons! Are you looking for a cool multimedia tool to show your teachers what you have learned this fall? Check out Mixwit, a fun “media playground” that allows you to artwork, photos, and music in a format that can be easily shared! Read about how this teacher, Konrad Glogowski , used this tool as part of a novel study (hit the play button above to play his mix); you can also visit and see student examples by going to the link beneath this screenshot.
Konrad Glogowski:  I just discovered this blogger, educator, and teacher in recent days, but he has some really interesting posts and experiences to share with us. You can visit his blog and read more at http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/.Â
The NECC wrap-up and review show. EduBloggerCon, NECC Unplugged, the Bloggers’ Cafe, and all the rest. The best links, leads, streams, podcasts, vlogs, and blogs. What you loved, what you didn’t. We’ll try and document all in a special 90-minute show.
Go to http://www.elluminate.com/support/Â to make sure you have everything installed needed to participate in the live session and to configure your Elluminate software that you can download at this site; it takes no more than 5-8 minutes to do this.
Whether you attended NECC 2008 in person or not, this live discussion will be a great way to see the highlights of the conference and get ideas for your library or classroom!
ISTE has released the newly revamped NETS for Teachers 2008 at the NECC2008 Conference.  Take a look at this newly released document and the five new major standards for teachers. I know I will certainly reflect on this in the upcoming weeks and figure out where I am on the continuum and how I can strive to improve in all five areas as a teacher-librarian and as an English teacher.
It is a work in progress, and it will have to be moved in a few weeks as our district moves from FrontPage to Sharepoint (boo hoo!), but here is my current resource page on teaching the multigenre paper.
Sample papers written by real high school students
My favorite resources on teaching and learning with multigenre papers
While I have dabbled with this project with short stories, this is the first full scale effort I have completed with a general research topic. I would like to do a full scale project of this nature with a novel next year…it is just hard sometimes with my night school pumpkins, especially with the EOCT course, because of the time factor. However, I am really pleased with my efforts this summer, and I already have ideas on what I will do again, and what I will do to make this project even better!
I need a few days to clear my mind, rest, and reflect before I write my final blog post about this research experience. However, I can say that I highly recommend it! I will be writing more soon on what I feel that my students and I learned from this research experience.
There is an old cliche that says, “Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Over the last year, I have been focused on trees. Those trees have consisted of web 2.0 tools and how to incorporate those web 2.0 tools into my library program and information literacy instruction. Those trees have included things like social bookmarking (del.icio.us), RSS, wikis, Google Scholar, Google Books, Pageflakes, podcasts, vodcasts, and blogging (of course!) to name just a few. The buzzword “Library 2.0″ seems to be on the radar of many school library media specialists these days thanks to pioneers like Joyce Valenza. As Joyce pointed out in her September 27 blog post, “Shift [has] happened. Our response is not optional.“  She points out the urgency of librarians recognizing the shifting landscape of our profession, observing:
I am seeing a huge librarian divide between the 2.0-type library folks and those who are barely 1.0. I am worried.I am worried about many of the librarians across the state, and in programs like ours in other states. What happens when the tech coach comes in new to the school? What happens when the librarian finds him/herself far less trained for integration than the newly trained, newly empowered tech coach? What happens when a librarian and a library program cannot even demonstrate awareness of the shifts in the information landscape?Â
Joyce also included comments from participants in the Classrooms for the Future “Boot Camp”:
My librarian doesn’t get it. She is only interested in quiet and books. She doesn’t let the kids work together. She could never create an online pathfinder. She never told me about Creative Commons or open source. Does she even know about that stuff? My librarian won’t event let the kids use Wikipedia. Help teachers with 2.0 applications? Are you kidding? My librarian is afraid of blogs and podcasts and wikis.Â
In two weeks, I am teaching a class about valid or authoritative resources (which is slated to look at traditional sources, web 2.0 tools, and of course, Wikipedia). We all know that we want our students and patrons to use authoritative sources. Heavens knows that I have done my share of hand wringing and worrying (quietly and vocally!) as we have tried to convince our students there is another world of information outside the Googlesphere.  Many of us have expressed concern about students perceiving Wikipedia as an authoritative source and their underdeveloped website evaluation skills.
Lately, though, I have been thinking long and hard about what exactly constitutes an authoritative source in our web 2.0 world. We all know from experience as researchers and school library students about traditional and long revered authoritative sources: reference books, scholarly journals, research databases.  We know the power of those resources from firsthand experience. Yet I also know from personal experience in the last year that I have found incredible sources of information and a wealth of knowledge through web 2.0 tools like blogs and del.icio.us.Â
As I was rereading Joyce’s article on “Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency” last week in preparation for the course I’m teaching, I could not help but start thinking again about how web 2.0 intersects with authoritative sources of information and how they are shaping that concept of “authority.” Other events that have prompted me to revisit my concept of what falls under the umbrella of authoritative sources include:Â
Various blog entries I have read by other librarians and scholars
E-conversations with colleagues
Podcasts and vodcasts by other librarians and information literacy gurus
My own experiences in designing pathfinders for research with our students ( as well as pathfinders I’ve designed for my 11th grades students I teach at our district evening school).
While doing some research on library 2.0 this weekend, I happened upon a blog by newly retired academic librarian Laura Cohen and her entries about social scholarship. What started as a research effort about library 2.0 and additional resources I could share in my class turned into a whole new research endeavor about social scholarship, digital scholarship, and the concept of Authority 3.0.Â
In the first blog post I read by Ms. Cohen, this quote from Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer of the scholarly publisher Ingenta, jumped off the screen:Â
Web 2.0 makes it easier for anyone to publish information online, and search engines make content more easily findable. But how do users know what information is authoritative? Do they even understand what “authoritative” means? And who defines that something is “authoritative” in the first place?
In scholarly publishing, the peer review process is an indicator of quality. But as content is increasingly mashed-up, syndicated and blogged in many different locations, how do users differentiate between peer reviewed content, and “user generated content”? And is there a natural progression from the creative chaos of Wikipedia, through the “gentle expert oversight” of Citizendium to, ultimately, the closed rigorous approach of double-blind peer review?
So what does social scholarship have to do with “Library 2.0″?Â
In a word, everything.
Scholar Michael Jensen outlines what he sees as Authority 3.0 that he feels will come to pass in 10-15 years: a whole new matrix or set of matrices that will influence scholarly authority. You can read his June 2007 full article here at The Chronicle  of Higher Education, but in short, he feels resources like blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 tools will change the landscape of authoritative sources. Â
Why should we care about these concepts? What do they have to do with us as school librarians?
First, we have to be able to see this “forest”. I have been focused on the web 2.0 trees, but it is just in the last few months that I’ve started to see the “forest”—the implications of how these web 2.0 tools ARE shaping the information world and what counts as an authoritative source. I haven’t even jumped into GALILEO yet to research these ideas, and look at how much knowledge I have already gleaned from blogs of respected scholars and librarians! Can we not assume the same will be, if not already to some extent, true for our students?Â
Blogs are also used to discuss matters that never make it into the journal or monographic literature, or even into magazine columns - and therefore their great value. In any case, you’re among the critical mass of individuals who read blogs as an important part of your professional engagement.
What do these web 2.0 tools really mean for our students? My primary focus has been using these tools to help facilitate information to our students, but now I see my focus must shift to thinking about how these tools will be actual information sources for my students and teaching them how to evaluate them. Does this mean I abandon my beloved databases and other reliable sources of information, such as books? No, but I would be putting my head in the sand to ignore the fact that web 2.0 is changing the landscape of scholarship even as I write this blog post.Â
In her blog post, “Resistance is Futile“, Laura Cohen discusses an article from Information Week that goes to the very heart of why being Librarian 2.0 is a necessity, not an option:
The article in question is titled “Resistance is Futile Fatal.” Yes, you read that right, strikeout and all. You can read it online. The article states, plainly enough, that “Today’s social networking and digital content sites are shaping IT users’ expectations and experiences for years to come….Businesses must take a longer-term view of these emerging applications and recognize that they’re being driven by forces that are more likely to gain momentum than die out. Rather than fight the inevitable, business technology managers must start exploring ways to leverage the new digital content ecosystem to meet their companies’ objectives.“
Substitute “libraries” for “businesses” and this statement sounds familiar to those of us advocating for changes in the information culture of libraries. And did I see the word “must”? Dare to suggest in the library world that these changes are imperative and you need to duck for cover.
She concludes with this observation:
Our profession, as a whole, still hasn’t taken much of this seriously. How routinely do we use social networking to practice our profession? …I’m bringing all this up to make a point: as the information culture changes around us, the pressures for us to make wise use of this culture in our own practice will grow. Is resistance futile, or truly fatal? You tell me.
I have always felt “Library 2.0″ and “Librarian 2.0″ are not passing fads, but instead, concepts that describe how our profession should be and is changing to reflect the world around us and the needs of our users. While we may struggle with the challenge of keeping up with these dizzying changes, we have to make the effort to do so.Â
My research this weekend has truly been a revelation. While I have heard and read all kinds of articles about web 2.0 and “Library 2.0″, this is the first I’ve really heard of “social scholarship”, “digital scholarship”, and “Authority 3.0″. Yes, I have been blogging, and yes, I have been using del.icio.us with our students as a pathfinder tool. Yes, I have experimented with wikis with our students. I truly thought I was on my way to being a “Librarian 2.0″!
However,  I see now that what I have been doing is not enough. I share my findings with you to help us all rethink and reenvision the concepts of “authority” and “authoritative research.” Is it messy? Yes.  Does the shifting landscape of web 2.0 require us to be open to redefining what we always held to be true? Yes.Â
If you think that perhaps the concept of social scholarship is mere rhetoric, I challenge you to “Google” terms like social scholarship or Authority 3.0. Once I started digging this weekend, I was astonished at what I found. As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t even yet had the chance to research these concepts through GALILEO, but stay tuned…I will bookmark anything I find there to http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/social.scholarship. My  mind is still reeling even as I write this post, and I know I have barely scratched the surface.  Take a look at this person’s “Dissertation 2.0″—a Pageflakes mashup of digital scholarship! Be sure to visit the actual link as my “Kwuot” capture didn’t quite get the “live” version of the screencast).
Laura Cohen goes on to warn us that, “Authoritative bias is messy. It’s not as clear-cut as peer review vs. popular publishing. Its metrics have yet to be figured out. But the neat little world of beware-of-bias is fast disappearing. Information literacy needs to acknowledge this, and train students to watch for the train coming around the bend.”
Cohen also warns us that we must be open to change and to rethink how we define authority:
How do we do this? Cohen cites these strategies and action steps:
Make students aware of the emergence of social scholarship.
Teach students about Authority 3.0 - or whatever you want to call it. Alert them to the expanding world of scholarly communication.
In conjunction with this, abandon of the notion that there is a clear distinction between traditional peer-reviewed authority and authority derived from social scholarship. To put this another way, introduce the notion that there are emerging metrics of authority that can be derived from social scholarship.
Use social tools (blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, etc.) as part of the research process in their courses.
Assign readings from authoritative blogs in the research areas students are asked to explore.
Practice social scholarship, and show these activities as examples of what’s on the horizon.
Incorporate this new material in tutorials on their library’s Web site.
I am not advocating we abandon our traditional sources and ideas about authority and authoritative resources.  Instead, I am asking us all to think about if we as individuals and as  a group are being responsive to the needs of our patrons, needs that are rooted in the world around all of us. We are already fighting to show our legislators that we make a difference;  in some communities, the challenge to show the validity and importance of today’s librarian spills even into the classrooms as we try to bring our teachers, students, and administrators into the world of Learning 2.0 and Library 2.0.  Here is a golden opportunity to seize the moment to lead and become an even more integral part of learning in our schools.
We cannot wait for change to envelop us. Now is the time for us to be more proactive than ever and to be part of the change, not a mere spectator.
In a nutshell, Ruth and I had a “moment” this week that honestly caused us to scratch our heads and then consider banging our heads against the wall (thankfully, our wise clerk, Tammy, talked us out of that!).Â
Many of you, especially in the 7-12 secondary school scene, will relate to the frustration we felt this week: the struggle to get all teachers on board with your library program and to “buy” into the great services and resources your program has to offer. Ruth and I wrote to Joyce Valenza, one of the most forward thinking media specialists out there in Library2.0 Land. She graciously offered to help us brainstorm with our community of school librarians by writing a post about our plight (and I suspect, the plight of many.)Â
We are not afraid to ask for help because we care fiercely about our library program and nurturing it so that we as librarians and a library program truly make a difference in our learning community at our school.  Many may say, “Well, you know that is how it is in high school.” Well, I don’t care how it HAS been—Ruth and I care about how it COULD be and SHOULD be!
Yes, we definitely have a positive impact on many students and teachers, but Ruth and I know we have the potential to do more. With a faculty that has increased by over 50 members this year, we are finding we are having difficulty getting as many teachers from all subject areas into our media center this academic year. We are especially troubled that seasoned teachers as well as rookie teachers are sending their students to the world wide web instead of working with us to develop pathfinders and utilizing library resources first.Â
We provide hands on instruction and incorporate balanced resources–books, our virtual books, databases, quality websites; teachers and students seem pleased when we work with them on a research project. Yet many teachers do not seem interested in our offers of help or fall back into the “send’m to the web” habit after working with us (and seeming very pleased with what we have done!). Many teachers comment with amazement that they have never had librarians do what we do for them, so effort is definitely not the issue here.Â
We are baffled. I think this challenge goes beyond the frequent explanation that teachers are under pressure to teach in a manner that is geared toward standardized test prep and being sure to “cover” material, a pedagogy that leaves little room for project based learning and inquiry. We are a Max Thompson “Learning Focused School”—should research, questioning, and inquiry not be vital parts of the way teachers teach and students learn? While high school has always suffered from the “Lone Ranger” syndrome, neither Ruth nor I have experienced this problem to the degree we are this year.
Joyce has posted some initial ideas and strategies to help everyone who may be looking for ideas to get their teachers to buy into databases, books, and other great web 2.0 resources. I am happy to report that we are already doing a good bit of this, but of course, there is always room for improvement.Â
Here is what Joyce had to say and where we are with the suggested strategy:
Joyce says: I am surprised that so many young teachers I meet get through their own pre-service research without ever discovering a database. Some I meet reveal that they Googled through their undergrad research. That’s okay, I suppose if they used it to discover quality content. At the beginning of each school year I am lucky to be granted a full day with new teachers to discuss our research culture, our resources, our expectations. I suspect our administrators are happy that I can fill a day with this stuff.  So are we! I honestly cannot fathom how you can go through four years of college without using a research database, but that is another discussion for another day. I agree, though, that teachers’ lack of experience makes them reluctant to use something they feel they don’t know. If you don’t come to the library, though, how are you going to learn the database and/or skill? We as teachers should always be open to learning, especially if it is about something that will make us better teachers and that will help our students.
Joyce says: We have an eighth grade unit on evaluation that we’ve placed in the social studies curriculum. I present this PowerPoint on evaluating sources (I know, it needs a makeover), and I show a bit of the filmI worked on for Schlessinger Video. While the Georgia Performance Standards are jam packed with many skills and learning standards, very few tie into information literacy at the 9-12 level. If more media specialists were included on the committees (state and local level) that write these standards, perhaps we then could have a louder voice in making sure information literacy skills are infused more seamlessly across the curriculum in an authentic and relevant manner.
Joyce says: I volunteer to assess students’ preliminary works cited pages for major papers and projects. This takes some of the work and onus off the classroom teacher and promotes my efforts as an instructional partner. Students know my expectations are high, that they include use of databases, and they are a little afraid of my scrutiny.  While I truly admire this initiative, there is no way Ruth and I would have time to do this. We are already up to three lunch periods and 1100 students; our other high schools typically deal with 2000+ students and four lunch periods that last an hour. Ruth and I already work about an hour extra each day, plus we rarely take a lunch and get no planning period. However, we do provide intensive NoodleTools instruction and hands on assistance with our students to help students make sure they cite their sources correctly. We have already had positive feedback this year from our English teachers on our efforts in this area.
Joyce says: We have to work with teachers to ensure their project rubrics include use of quality sources in general. When it makes sense, the rubrics should include use of relevant databases. I agree 110% on this…..but many teachers do not seem to want help or do not seem interested in our suggestion for incorporating criteria about the use of quality information sources.  How can we help our teachers see as a partner who can assist them in the creation of rubrics or as someone who can be sounding board for creating quality rubrics?
Joyce says: We need to do better database marketing. My students did a film for me last year and I did a Voicethread I’d love folks to contribute to. But having seen many new streaming video strategies I want to make a better one this year. Imagine if we could create some in the far more clever style of CommonCraft. I still want to create a LibraryTube for us to share our best video efforts. Again, I agree 100%. Ruth and I hope that we can do more creative “marketing” as part of our Media 21 classes we are beginning this year—podcasts, videos, tutorials created with Camtasia, VoiceThreads—we are all for tapping into Web 2.0 tools to better promote our goods!
Joyce says: We need widgets/gadgets so that teachers and students can pull the databases they most need into their iGoogle pages. Vendors, are you listening? AMEN! For us, though, we have to first get our users to actually create iGoogle pages. We are amazed at how little our patrons actually use web 2.0 tools we take for granted—del.icou.us, blogs, iGoogle, etc. I do applaud EBSCOhost and GALE, though, for recently adding RSS feeds for searches. Again, though, we are finding that few of our teachers or students even know what RSS is—again, part of our mission to educate….we hope to be in a position for 2008-09 to provide training for our patrons that will educate and empower them to the power of Web 2.0!
Joyce says: We need an affordable federated search (to search across all our online resources–search tools, OPAC, databases). This federated search should not cost as much as a database itself. It should not force us to make further budget sacrifices. It should understand the idiosyncratic nature of the many databases we own. It should make it easier for teachers and students to discover the beauty of databases. Another loud AMEN from us! We also need vendors to deliver on their promises when we purchase a federated search….ahem…..GALE/CENGAGE….are you listening?????
Joyce says: We need to de-crimilalize use of Google in libraries. Sometimes we act like the research Gestapo in our scrutiny of search behavior. Google works. Google rocks. And yes, we can all use it better. We have made steps on this front by tapping into the power of Google Books and creating our own Google Library account that we incorporate into our pathfinders with the Google Library RSS feed. We also use Google Scholar to tap into JSTOR and make it more user friendly to our high school students. We would love to do mini-lessons on how to search Google effectively….but teachers don’t feel they can give up the time for it even though they agree it needs to be taught. A symptom of the fallout from testing and NCLB.
Joyce says: We need to do a better job describing our resources. No teacher (or kid) knows what EBSCO is or what individual databases live it its large suite. Our pathfinders must bust these tools out of their traps and describe them in teacher- and kid-friendly language. This is an area that we will work on—the link Joyce has provided will be another tool in our “toolbox” that we use to try to take something so abstract and make it concrete for all of our patrons.
Now here are a few musings I have……..
The key issue is here expectations….it is not enough the media specialists have the expectation that we will be the heart of learning. Our teachers, administrators, and students also need to have this expectation. Perhaps if this can be conveyed more overtly by all of us faculty members, then it will become a reality and not just an empty mantra.
Perhaps NCATE needs to consider incorporating information literacy as a required course or competency type requirement for undergraduate teachers. As Joyce alluded, it is astonishing at how lacking our new teachers are in this area (and I am not knocking them—it is just a fact).Â
What if Google Scholar made it more affordable for public school libraries to tie in their databases to Google Scholar the way many college libraries do? This would go a long way in marketing our products.Â
If library programs can become more integral parts of School Improvement Plans, I think teachers, students, and parents are more likely to see the library importance of media centers in student achievement and lifelong learning. I would be thrilled if our library program could be incorporated as a vital part of our 2008-09 SIP!
At the end of the day, it is our students who suffer when the library program and resources are not a regular part of their instruction and learning activities in ALL subject areas. I hope that this post will help us all think about additional strategies we can devise to make our programs more effective and for our programs to truly reach all students!
For all of you still testing the Classroom 2.0 water, here is a great article from the 10/1 issue of School Library Journal about a wonderful Ning called Classroom 2.0. This article outlines the possibilities and benefits of belonging to a Ning learning community; I think this article is a snapshot of how we could use our Grizzly Ning! The Classroom 2.0 Ning network is open to anyone who would like to join.
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