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!
Is it me, or did the NECC convention generate more buzz? I have been part of an amazing NECC Convention Ning, and read all kinds of wonderful Tweets about the convention on Twitter. I barely heard a gurgling sound from the ALA Convention….again, it could just be my vantage point, but other than one blog post and a SLJ article, I have heard nary a word about the ALA Convention whereas I am saturated with the NECC buzz!
How about you other librarians/media specialists out there? Did you hear/read/virtually participate more in NECC or ALA this past week?  Should ALA or ALA members have offered more participation virtually like NECC/NECC participants did?
Are you like me, unable to attend NECC in person? If you can’t be in San Antonio, then being a part of the NECC Ning is the next best thing. I joined up about a month ago, and it has been a blast to hear and learn about what has been happening out there through the Ning. It’s not too late to join and to get in on all the buzz!
As most of you know, not only am I a high school librarian by day, but I also still teach 10th and 11th English courses by night for our district evening school during the regular academic school year. I should probably take more time to write about my observations on students’ information literacy skills and perceptions about research (and perhaps I will during 2008-09), but as many of you can relate, it is hard to find time to stop, reflect, and then actually blog about what is happening “out there” because time seemingly just gets way so quickly.
Today marks the beginning of Week 2 of our three week summer school session. While many express shock and skepticism about the feasibility of trying to do a 90 day course in 15 days, we do meet four and a half hours per course—the economy of time forces both teachers and students to focus on what really matters!Â
On Friday, we began our multigenre research project in my afternoon 10B Literature/Composition course. This type of research paper can incorporate traditional elements of the “written” research paper (and mine does), but it also calls upon students to interpret and represent key learnings and findings of their research in creative and alternate genres. For more information, see my links at http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/multigenre .
At first, most students seemed a bit dazed and confused. What is multigenre? What are learning artifacts? You want me to do what? Present information I’ve learned in an alternative way? Think? Huh? Many vocalized these questions, and for those who didn’t….I only had to look at their faces to read their thoughts! After we had reviewed the assignment, though, and the students had an opportunity to look at real projects/papers and examples, several began getting excited and were already brainstorming ideas. My 10A students probably have a slight advantage because we are incorporating a few multigenre elements into our short story project and our Georgia Peach Book project. I am hopeful the little gurgles and spurts of enthusiasm I saw in some of my students Friday afternoon will become a full blown “gush” this week as we essentially spend about two and half hours in the library each day this week.
One young man looked dismayed and sad during our class break after we had reviewed the assignment and discussed the project. When I asked him what was wrong, he cried, “I can write a paper no problem and give you the facts, but interpret the information….that is going to be hard!” I asked him what seemed difficult or challenging about the multigenre artifacts because in my mind, those are the creative and exciting parts of the project.Â
With dismay he sputtered, “Because I will have to think and really show what I have learned“!
With a wry smile on my face, I replied, “That is exactly the purpose of this research!”
I thought his response was very telling about what our “NCLB” generation kids are used to doing in the classroom and what they have been trained to do: regurgitate information and move on. No synthesis, no analysis, no evaluation of information—just “learn” it and “cover it” for a test. Of course, we as librarians have seen how the emphasis on standardized testing has killed inquiry and research in our media centers, so his comments were not really surprising. However, they are troublesome just the same.
I will be interested to see how he and the rest of his classmates evaluate this project in about eight days from now. In the past, I have done this project as a literature based project, and while students at first looked like deer in the headlights, nearly all became excited and engaged in what they were doing; projects pulling in multigenre elements have gotten high marks from my students in the last two years, but this is the first time I have made the entire research project a multigenre paper. They are doing topics all over the map, and I honestly can’t wait to see what they do with this….stay tuned!
A few months ago, I blogged about the Georgia Archives Digital Vaults, but have you seen the National Archives Digital Vaults? Many thanks to Sandi Adams for pointing me to this FABULOUS resource!Â
What can you do with the resources in TheNational Archives Digital Vaults?
Create a movie
Create a poster
Search by tag or keyword
Collect primary source documents and images for a project
For lesson plans and ideas, go to the Educator and Student Resource Page at http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/. In addition to great resources for teachers and students, teachers can find wonderful guides and handouts to use with students that explain primary sources and analysis worksheets for an array of primary sources, including written documents, photographs, maps, cartoons, sound recordings, posters, and motion pictures.Â
This is a resource that can make history come alive for students! We would love to collaborate with you as a teacher and develop a project or research unit that incorporates this treasure trove of primary source documents.  Please let me know if you would like to explore ways to incorporate the digital archives into your instruction!
This is a conference dedicated to integrating Web 2.0 tools seamlessly into your library program and harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to improve your service to your patrons. You can go to http://library.msstate.edu/mslibrarysummit/2007summit/index.html to view last year’s conference agenda as well as hear podcasts from last year’s session.
Here is a preview of this year’s conference focus:
What if we had something like this for Georgia librarians? What about a Georgia Libraries 2.0 Summit for 2008? Anyone out there interested in exploring and organizing this venture?Â
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.
Whether you are a librarian or a regular classroom teacher, check out this post, “Lifelong Abilities, Behaviors, and Attitudes” by Doug Johnson. It is a great column and really struck me as it dovetails with some of my comments in my previous post today on my Media 21 blog.
 Take time to read Doug’s post—it is brilliantly thought-provoking.
Today Ruth and I introduced our 11th Jazz Age Research Pathfinder to Ms. Pickart’s 11th Honors American Literature/Composition classes. Of course, we always want to create effective pathfinders for all our students, but I felt the impetus to do with this group.Â
Why? Of all the students at CRHS, our juniors are the ones I feel we have impacted the least. We mainly saw them in English classes last year, and that was it. We have seen them even less this year as juniors when the trend should be the opposite as they should be doing more research and more rigorous coursework. Let’s also not forget they are now less than two years from being college freshmen! I was so troubled by the lack of progress I saw with information literacy skills during 2006-07 that  I even raised this concern about this group in my end of the year report last May.Â
However, this post is not about that challenge. Instead, I wanted to briefly blog about how students reacted to our introduction to our Creekview HS Library del.icio.us account and how we integrated it into our pathfinder.  Because the honors juniors seemed to be so resistant to our research databases as sophomores and because we have not seen them using them this academic year, I wanted to be sure to try and bookmark some “goodies” from our GALE databases into our del.icio.us pathfinder for this project as did Ruth. Sometimes if you can lead the horse to water, he will indeed drink! :-)  I found with that our del.icio.us bookmarks to JSTOR and GALE articles (those are the only databases I can do direct article links for right now) seemed to be a great entry point for our honors sophomores in December, so I thought it would prudent to try this approach with our honors juniors.
While many students tuned out the mini-lessons on the pathfinder in the 5th period class, one student actually wanted to create a del.icio.us account from that class, so I showed him how, and then I showed him how to add our “network” to his so that he could get to our del.icio.us account more easily. He seemed really excited about having his own account and tapping into it; I also showed him how he could do infomarks with the GALE articles at his request! Yeah!
The 7th period class seemed more receptive to the mini-lesson, and many of them seemed very impressed by what del.icio.us can do. They asked some good questions about this service, and I noticed many of them right away to our del.icio.us links, including the ones to specific searches and articles we had bookmarked in our account. Yes! I decided to add two additional links to our pathfinder this afternoon: one is to the “about” page from del.icio.us, and the other links to the “getting started and creating your account” page.Â
IfI have any time tomorrow, I will try to create a little quizlet or survey (Quibblo?) they can do quickly to get feedback on how helpful del.icio.us was to them.  Stay tuned!
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