1. Morning Keynote:  Moving from Nice to Necessary: Academic Libraries and Communities Collaboratively Composing Participatory Practices of Learning

PDF:  Moving from Nice to Necessary: Academic Libraries and Communities Collaboratively Composing Participatory Practices of Learning

2.  Afternoon Small to Large Group Conversation:  Assessing Student Learning –we met in small groups to discuss conversation points about assessing student learning and then shared our thinking as a large group.  I invite you to keep the conversation going in this public Google Document where I gathered our large group responses and invite you to contribute your thoughts/experiences/questions.  

Today I was part of the panel for the final webinar, “Teens and the Future of Libraries:  Sharing Best Practices,” in the collaborative month long series of conversations about  Teens and the Future of Libraries facilitated by YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) and Connected Learning TV, an initiative of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

A Google Document with highlights from today’s conversation as well as a PDF of the Livestream Chat transcript will be available soon on the webinar page.  You can also watch the video archive of today’s panel discussion by clicking here.  I’m including below some of my talking points I included at the beginning of the conversation as well as a few that didn’t make the panel discussion but that relate to the larger conversation.

Many thanks to Jon Barilone, the “glue” who brings everything together, all the panelists and our host Jack Martin, and everyone who participated in the chat and/or Twitter conversation.

My Thinking and Wondering Aloud

I’d like to begin framing my thoughts and questions with a short story about something I observed last week.  Last week marked the beginning of the filming of Captain America 2 here in downtown Cleveland.  While I had heard a good bit of buzz and excitement about the filming and knew they would be shooting right behind our library, I was not particularly pumped up since I’m not into action/adventure movies.  However, I found myself more than fascinated and intrigued by what I saw once the filming began.  I was amazed at the army of people it took to make just one small filming sequence happen as well as the diversity of their talents.  I also noted they would shoot the same film sequence over and over–sometimes from the seemingly exact same angle, but at other times, from a completely different vantage point.  Assorted cameras and equipment were used to capture the shots from as many perspectives as possible.  By the end of the week, I found myself wanting to be an embedded librarian on a movie set!

You might be wondering what the filming of Captain America 2 has to do with libraries.  Much like our work as a profession at large–a bigger team of different members (as librarians, mentors, teens/patrons/communities we serve, our teens) all inform the bigger conversation with multiple perspectives as we explore questions/themes and add to this story of learning and libraries.  As I think about what practices of impact look like in libraries trying to embrace a model of connected learning, I find it helpful to take an inquiry stance on digital literacy and to look at our work through a lens of participatory learning and culture.  As I look back over the conversations from the webinars over the last month and my own thinking about my work as a librarian, four sets of emerging questions emerge for me:

1.  What theoretical frameworks/lenses are we using to contextualize our work to inform our understanding of connected learning model and to go deeper with our conceptualization?   A lens of critical literacy (Freire, Bakhtin, bell hooks/ work of people like Lisa Delpit, Deborah Brandt, Shirley Brice Heath)  can help us think more about alternative interpretations what we see in our libraries.   When we think about teens leveraging social media for learning, civic engagement, building online identity/digital footprint, cultural capital—-how do we do so in a way that is reflective and looks at our work from multiple angles?  What are the social/cultural/dialogic threads to explore, and how do we identify them and pull those for closer examination?  What blind spots might we have as public youth librarians and school librarians?  What trends/patterns do we see in our learning communities that inform the ways digital literacy is accessed and leveraged across multiple boundaries/spaces of learning/work/play for teens?  What is visible?  What is not?  What are the gaps?  How do we make the invisible more visible?  Who is absent and why?  How do we better engage our communities at large as what Chris Brogan calls “trust agents”?  Who else can help us?  I worry that certain forms of discourse in the narrative of libraries and learning may get privileged and that others may be excluded if we don’t utilize a lens of critical literacy to help interpret the practices and structures of power.

I’m also wondering how we might engage a little more intentionally about the skills and processes we cultivate related to academic interests/needs.  The work of academic and school library colleagues inform my thinking about this piece of the puzzle as well as work by people like Wendy Drexler and her researched on networked students as learners.  I’d like for our conversations to move toward more specific processes such as appropriation, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment and evaluation, negotiation, and transmedia navigation and how we help learners leverage those processes in other contexts to sustain and grow their capacity to cultivate “playful” practices of creation, circulation, collaboration, and connecting and what those processes look like in participatory learning enviornements.

2.  What are our guiding pedagogical frameworks?  Learning outcomes?  Tools/strategies for assessing impact?  Qualitative/quantitative data? How do we keep learning (formal, informal) and people/human interaction/relationships at the center of what we do rather than becoming fixated on social media tools themselves; how do we better explore the ways they can either amplify learning opportunities OR how they may limit learning opportunities for others? What is empowering for one may not be for another–choices are important.

3.  Access is a starting point on a continuum but we must go beyond this starting point.  Issues of access may include:  A.  equity issues to content and learning opps as Mimi Ito has documented  as well as access to mentors/librarians/learning opportunities to grow capacity to utilize social media in ways that can help them (geographic barrier, funding issues for staffing and infrastructure, lack of innovative culture)  B.  filtered material, particularly in schools and the resistance teachers and librarians often get from IT directors who have more conservative interpretations of what CIPA and similar mandates require C.  access to a culture of learning that values and invites participation/provides opps for participation, collaborative knowledge building, multiple ways of knowing and participating.  These issues are happening against a backdrop of thinking about digital literacy in the context of Shirley Brice Heath’s work and that of others whose work reflects themes of critical literacy that showed how literacy is acquired, utilized, leveraged–how does the culture of the community impact opportunities for digital literacy?  How are those opportunities informed by economic, geographic factors AND community cultural discourse?  What gets valued? What gets discounted?

4.  Networking:  when we talk about cultviating networked learners (of any age), I think it’s hard to model that authentically if we don’t hone that capacity within ourselves.  I’m thinking about networking in three primary ways right now:

• With our immediate communities (our colleagues, our community, our patrons)

• As a profession, how might we think of ourselves as a larger learning community that is less siloed, and how might we cultivate more awareness of services/programming/educational opportunities  offered by our colleagues across different kinds of library spaces/types?   Who else has expertise we should tune into  and how are enlisting their help in this work we are doing?  How do we as professionals grow our own participatory literacy to be lifelong AND networked learners and more effective (and reflective) practitioners as well as leaders/ contributors to a culture of innovation in our library community?  How do position ourselves as co-learners with our teens, faculty, community mentors?    How do we nurture our colleagues at all points on the learning continuum? 

• Partnerships between public and school librarians–how do we get beyond low hanging fruit (library cards, collection related aspects) to more fundamental partnerships to support common learning outcomes?  How are we supporting classroom teachers?  We both bring different kinds of expertise about learning and pedagogy to table–how do we harness and co-locate our expertise, translate that into action for our teens?  How do we acknowledge and honor differences in learning spaces without creating a binary or dichotomy that can be counterproductive to our collective work?

The roles of librarians are being remixed and re-interpreted by these challenges, issues, and lines of questions; in addition, the work we do will be more organic and strategic if we have the humility to truly listen to those we serve and engage in conversations.   Consequently, I think it is important that we acknowledge and honor the discomfort that often comes with the messiness of change.   As we forge forward (wherever we may be on the continuum) and think about innovation, I think adopting a discursive cycle of ideation, building and implementation, ongoing assessment, and reflection dovetails with the idea that theory informs practice and practice informs theory.   Looking at our work through these lenses and seeing ourselves as co-learners can help us be more inclusive in interpreting what we see (or don’t see) in our work and to better embrace these challenges as points of possibility.

Original photo by Buffy Hamilton

I’d like to thank the Texas Library Association and all of the attendees for their gracious hospitality and big warm Texas welcome to their annual conference here in gorgeous Fort Worth, Texas!  It was my honor to present two sessions today:

• Transliteracy and Participatory Practices of Learning:  Praxis for Transformation of Today’s School Libraries and Learning Communities
• Illuminating Learning Communities Through School Libraries and Makerspaces—Creating, Constructing, Collaborating, Contributing

What I enjoy the most about these conferences is the opportunity to interact with others and learn from their experiences and insights.  We had some rich discussions today that came out of our small group discussion and then large group share in the morning session on transliterate practices; I left with many new ideas simmering that I want to purse from that conversation!  I also appreciated the rich dialogue with fellow librarians and educators after that session as well as the afternoon makerspace session—it’s humbling to have such wonderful opportunities to network with colleagues and learn from their insights, questions, and experiences.  Thank you to everyone who shared such positive feedback and who posed questions in person or via Twitter—I will work this weekend to catch up on threads I missed or need to do some follow-up communication with in the next few days.   I’m also appreciative of time spent over lunch, dinner, and coffee with friends today, conversations with vendors in the exhibit hall, and of the feeling of belonging everyone extended to me—thank you for making me feel like one of your very own here in Texas.  I’d also like to give a special thank you to Julie Briggs and Elise Walker for their help in making my being a part of TLA a reality.

You can grab the PDFs of today’s slides either from SlideShare, or you can grab them PDFs directly below.

TLA Transliteracy and Participatory Practices of Learning–Praxis for Transformation of Today’s School Libraries and Learning Communities

TLA 2013 Illuminating Learning Communities Through School Libraries and Makerspaces–Creating, Constructing, Collaborating, Contributing

You can also view and grab the PDFs of the slides here:

Below are my slides from my opening keynote as well as my concurrent session that was a conversation exploring the concept of transliteracy.

“Connected learning is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success, or civic engagement.”
from Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design

For the last month or so, I’ve been dwelling in Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design, a research synthesis report that outlines the research and findings of the Connected Learning Research Network, a group chaired by Dr. Mimi Ito.  In addition to the report, I’ve enjoyed the series of recent webinars centered around the report:

• The Essence of Connected Learning Environments
• Effective Mentorship Through Shared Purpose
• The Realities of Youth and Peer Culture: Balancing Learning Opportunities and Risks
• Connected Learning As Pathway to Equity & Opportunity
• Assessing Connected Learning Outcomes (of all the excellent webinars, this is the one that provided a powerful push in my thinking and resonated most deeply with me)

Supplementary readings have also informed my understanding of this report:

• What’s All the Fuss About Connected Learning, Dr. Henry Jenkins
• Connected Learning and the Unclear Road to Equity, Justin Reich
• Connected Learning: Interdisciplinary Researchers Recommend Core Changes, Dr. Mimi Ito
• Connected Learning: An Agenda for Social Change, Dr. Mimi Ito (an especially powerful primer to the report)
• National Writing Project Connected Learning Inquiry Group
• The Connected Learning Google Plus Community
• Connected Learning videos at the DML Research Hub YouTube Channel

Additional definitions and explanations can be found here; the infographic embedded here is also a helpful visualization.

In “Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Social Change”, Dr. Ito asserts that connected learning:

“…is not about any particular platform, technology, or teaching technique, like blended learning or the flipped classroom or Khan Academy or massive open online courses. It’s agnostic about the method and content area. Instead, it’s about asking what is the optimal experience for each learner and for a high-functioning learning community?”

In the Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design report, the authors describe connected learning as a design model:

“Our approach draws on sociocultural learning theory in valuing learning that is embedded within meaningful practices and supportive relationships, and that recognizes diverse pathways and forms of knowledge and expertise. Our design model builds on this approach by focusing on supports and mechanisms for building environments that connect learning across the spheres of interests, peer culture, and academic life. We propose a set of design features that help build shared purpose, opportunities for production, and openly networked resources and infrastructure” (5).

I’ve recreated this visualization embedded in the report to provide another way of looking at connected learning and thinking about how this model seeks to “knit” together the contexts of peer-supported, interest powered, and academically oriented for learning (12):

I’m still coding and organizing my notes from the report as I try to pull out the big takeaways for me, but as I review these notes and the ones I took from the webinar on assessing connected learning outcomes last week, I’m thinking about this first wave of big ideas and questions:

• How do libraries develop learning agendas that are aligned with agendas for social change in their community?  How do the two inform each other?
• How can libraries embrace this approach to designing learning environments to help us move from “nice to necessary?”, a question that was posed at ALA Midwinter in 2013, and that I’m attempting to flesh out in my work here as a Learning Strategist at Cleveland Public Library (and that I hope to share with you later this year).
• How do we create learning environments and experiences as well as relationships with those we serve to move beyond the initial “sweet spot” of attachment to building a deeper level of engagement?  How do we as librarians (with the help of our community) design learning environments that provide diverse entry points and access for people to form communities of learning where they can create more nuanced narratives of learning as they create, share, and connect with others?  How do we design learning spaces and experiences that create more “pathways to opportunity” and participation?
• How might libraries of all kinds serve as an “open network” that is a medium and a mentor to helping people connect and move more meaningfully across multiple learning spaces and spheres within their local community as well as a larger and more global community of learners?  Kris Gutierrez’s metaphor of “learning as movement” across many kinds of contexts has spurred this thinking.
• Kris Gutierrez and Bill Penuel discussed concepts of horizontal learning and boundary crossing in their webinar and explored the question of how do we help people leverage the practices, disposition, and expertises honed in one learning space to another to go deeper with that learning and expand the possibilities for action and participation.  How do libraries support communities of learning in engaging in this boundary crossing and engaging in horizontal learning to build greater personal as well as civic capacity?
• Both Gutierrez and Penuel emphasized the need to further contemplate and explore individual and collective assessment of these practices.  In the words of Dr. Gutierrez, “What tools, dispositions, practices, forms of expertises TRAVEL and how do we know it when we see it?”  I’m also thinking about how we frame formative and summative assessments as touchpoints for learning.
• How can librarians help people take deep “vertical knowledge” in a specific content area and apply it across multiple learning contexts and spaces?  This question relates to horizontal learning and boundary crossing.  I like to think of these concepts as cross-pollination of ideas and learning.
• How do more effectively build vocabulary for this kind of learning in our learning communities?
• How do we more effectively thread and address issues of equity across our instructional design and assessment processes?
• How do libraries cultivate deeper and more meaningful partnerships and connections with other institutions of learning in their communities for more strategic impact?
• How do we as librarians facilitate the creation of sustained networks to help people make connections between social, academic, and interest driven learning? ( see page pp.46-47 in the report for more on this question)

As you can see, these learning and design principles as well as the findings and concerns shared in the report have saturated my thinking.  As I make additional readings and passes through my notes from the report, I will continue to take an inquiry stance to further unpack the concepts and language embedded in this work.  I’ll also revisit the case studies included in the report to further develop ideas on what this work could look like in practice in different library settings.  In addition, I will carve out more time to listen as well as contribute to conversations about connected learning in the NWP study group as well as the Connected Learning Google Plus group.

The slides are also available on SlideShare:

On Monday afternoon, we attended an introductory presentation to community participatory mapping with Dr. Wansoo Im, a well-respected and widely known scholar and pioneer in the GIS (geographic information system) community.  The session, hosted by the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, gave us an overview of the work that Dr. Im has done with young people using the GIS mapping application Mappler to identify and address issues in their communities.  The Monday session focused primarily on the remarkable Hurricane Sandy Gas Station Mapping project that was created by Dr. Im and his students; this mapping project quickly became the primary source of reliable information used not only by citizens impacted in the Northeast by Hurricane Sandy, but it was also utilized and recognized by federal agencies including FEMA and the Department of Energy.  This project was just one of many that Dr. Im has implemented to help young citizens identify and take action on a community challenge through IMSOCIO, Scholars Organizing Culturally Innovative Opportunities, an organization facilitated by Dr. Im that works with young people in the Franklin Township in New Jersey; IMSOCIO seeks to “…encourage the academic progress of Hispanic high school students in Franklin Township by providing the support and resources necessary to facilitate their progression to higher education” (“What is IMSOCIO?”)

On Tuesday, we attended a more intensive daylong workshop with Dr. Im; not only did we have the opportunity to learn more details about Dr. Im’s efforts, but we also had the chance to interact with other community members representing a diverse range of organizations, institutions, non-profits, and businesses from various parts of Cleveland.  The common thread we all shared was learning more about how the GIS technology Mappler could be used to collect and track data in meaningful ways that could help each of us address specific community needs.  We also had the chance to apply the Mappler technology first hand by working in small groups to collect assorted data around the Cleveland State University campus; our groups used the Mappler app to collect and map data about bike racks, food, trees, and vacant buildings.   Before going out into the field, small groups first took time to brainstorm categories and variables for the data we wanted to map; we then came back together as a large group to discuss the process of inputting those data fields into the backend of the Mappler platform.  With the help of Dr. Im, Dr. Mark Salling, and Dr. Salling’s graduate assistant Gregory Soltis, each group was able to set up the data fields in Mappler so that we could then go and use the Mappler app to collect that data and map our findings.  In addition, a user name and password for each group was established to ensure quality control of the data collection.  My group focused on types of food sources on and around the Cleveland State Campus; it was great fun working together as a group because we discovered that we often needed to consult each other with questions about the data we were collecting, such as whether or not a food source was more of a fast food establishment vs. a restaurant.  You can see our map we created (still a work in progress)  by clicking here.

Anastasia and I left the workshop energized and inspired by the possibilities of how we might use this type of GIS application not only for data collecting and sharing purposes, but also as an avenue for critical literacy and participatory learning with people of all ages, including learning experiences that could empower our CPL community to identify and act on community needs and social justice issues.  What I particularly admire about Dr. Im is his focus on community engagement; he views the GIS technology as a tool that can help connect people and ultimately empower communities to advocate for change.  As Dr. Im showed in his case studies and work with IMSOCIO, community mapping also provides the opportunity for all community members, including those who may feel marginalized and a lack of investment in their community, to have an entry point into engaging with their community in meaningful ways that in Dr. Im’s words, gives people “hope and courage to make a difference.”  Through his workshop and case studies, Dr. Im adeptly demonstrated that participatory community mapping can also help local government be more effective and responsive to a community need by acting on this kind of crowdsourced data.  The workshop was also a poignant reminder that participatory mediums and technologies for learning can provide us the opportunity to honor the idea that “novice” and “expert” are fluid roles as we learn together; as librarians and educators, participatory community mapping is one of those technologies that can provide us the chance to better understand our communities, their ideas, and their insights to push our own thinking and understanding.

If you are interested in learning more about these concepts, I encourage you to visit the links in this blog post; you may also want to check out this short video of a lecture from Dr. Im that while slightly dated, captures many of his big ideas.

As many of you know, I’ve had a silly but beloved habit of saying, “Goodnight, library” every afternoon when I leave.  Today, I said farewell to my students, fellow teachers, and the library that has been like my child for the last time.  May others always love you as I and our students have; may you always be a place of inspiration, enchantment, learning, and joy—thank you for giving me the time of my life.  I will carry you all with me in my heart as I begin the next chapter with the amazing Cleveland Public Library in Ohio.

With love, Buffy

This fall, The Unquiet Library has hosted a unique art installation inspired by student research this past spring.  Some of you may remember Teagan from this past winter and her unique approach to creating mindmaps.  Teagan and her partner Kristiena (whom you may remember as one of my co-authors from this fall for a Knowledge Quest article) created a digital multigenre research composition on veterans and PTSD.  Both Teagan and Kristiena were part of a group of students who generously shared their insights and reflections on being immersed in a participatory culture of learning.   In their words, they set out to explore “…PTSD, the effects it has on veterans, and how veterans can receive help from this mental illness. It is very important to understand the severity of this undermined illness because without knowing about the organizations that help these veterans, the specific treatments these organizations use, and what we can do as a community to help, we are letting our country’s veterans down.”  Their inquiry was inspired by their readings of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac, and Ghosts of War by Ryan Smithson.

Teagan, who is a gifted photographer, decided to create her own original images to depict some of the key ideas and findings from their research and integrate them into the multigenre digital text.  I was so struck by the artistry of her work that this fall, I asked her if she would consider letting the library create prints of her work and have a research inspired art gallery.  She graciously gave me permission and used excerpts of her research to create informational placards for each print.  After we mounted the prints and placards on art easels, we arranged Teagan’s artwork in the sequence she outlined for us so that viewers could follow the narrative of her artistic creations.  Students and teachers alike have been impressed not only with her moving and striking photography, but they have also been pleasantly surprised to learn that it was sparked by the information she discovered in her research and that the gallery is an alternative representation of those findings.  Not only did Teagan photograph and process the photographs, but she and her father both served as models for the prints.

The research inspired art gallery has not only helped others learn about PTSD and its impact on veterans, but it has also nudged people to see research as something more than an assignment and that it is a mode of learning that can far beyond a class assignment.  I am hopeful that future galleries featuring inquiry inspired creative works will be commonplace and can incorporate additional participatory mediums for interacting with the gallery with a feature like panels coated in IdeaPaint where people can respond to the art and ideas. On behalf of the library and our learning community, I would like to thank Teagan for generously sharing her talent and wisdom with us.