Post Semester 1: Media 21 Students Reflect on Digital Composition and Participatory Learning

In November and December, I wrote two rather lengthy reflective posts about efforts to help students take a more explicit inquiry driven, participatory stance on literacy and learning as well as digital composition; these were preceded by an October post about the use of the Fishbowl approach to giving students more ownership of class conversation and for developing their own lines of questions/inquiries/points for exploration with peers.

• Students Creating Conversations for Learning with the Fishbowl  (October 2011)
• The Possibilities and Challenges of a Participatory Learning Environment: Students and Teachers Speak (November 2011)
• Midyear Reflections:  Challenges of Supporting Student Digital Nonfiction Composition (December 2011)

This unit of study, which began with our book tasting in September 2011, was an extended inquiry into student selected issues that included child soldiers, treatment of women in the Middle East, immigration laws,  the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa, racial profiling, fear and prejudice in a post 9/11 world, and genocide.  At the end of the semester, Susan Lester and I asked our students to reflect on their learning experiences with a series of questions and class time to compose their responses.  Embedded below is a summary of student responses and some additional questions (that piggyback on those from the December blog post) for next semester.    Susan and I are meeting this week together to brainstorm and explore the implications of this feedback as well as new strategies for learning and how to tweak some existing learning strategies; we’ll also meet  with our students in class this week to discuss the feedback and to invite student opinion on their ideas for addressing some of the challenges as well as celebrate the progress and accomplishments of first semester.  I’m excited to see how we can work together as a community of learners to build on our successes and find ways together to address some of the student identified challenges of these approaches to learning.

I’m interested in any thoughts or patterns you may notice, or if you are doing similar work, any ideas or insights you might have to share that will help all of us expand our thinking and improve the learning experiences we’re trying to create with our students.

Transliterate Libraries: Creating Conversations for Portable, Participatory, and Personalized Learning

I was extremely honored to present “Transliterate Libraries: Creating Conversations for Portable, Participatory, and Personalized Learning” yesterday at the 79th ABQLA Conference in Montreal (please see http://www.abqla.qc.ca/).  I am most grateful for this opportunity to share and learn with others as well as the incredible hospitality from everyone who participated in the conference—thank you for making me feel so welcome and for letting me learn from you.

Dr. Joanne de Groot, Leticia Cuenca, Buffy Hamilton

I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Dr. Michael Stephens’ morning keynote, Maria Savova’s presentation on McGill University’s ebook initiative, and Linda Hazzan’s inspiring session on Toronto Public Library’s Human Library  (also see this article), a program/initiative I hope to replicate. My only regret was that I had to miss seeing/hearing Amanda Etches-Johnson’s keynote so that I could catch my flight home!

If you’d like to learn more about the concepts in the slidedeck, please explore these resources:

• Inviting Participation into Your Library Program (geared for K12 school libraries but adaptable to any library setting)
• My Resource Page on Participatory Librarianship and Learning
• Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment:  The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions
• Seth Godin, “The Problem with Putting It All on the Line“

Buffy Hamilton and Wendy Wayling

I want to give a special thanks to the conference committee as well as committee member Wendy Wayling of the Westmount Public Library for inviting me to the conference and for making me feel so welcome during my stay in Montreal; a heartfelt thank you also goes out to Babar Books, my session sponsor.  A heartfelt thank you also to Julie-Anne Cardella and her husband Pierre, Lora Baiocco, Leticia Cuenca, Lisa Milner, and Wendy Wayling for organizing our fun (and delicious!) dinner Wednesday evening—I am very happy to say I now the joys of fried goat cheese drizzled in honey and caramelized onions!

Igniting Conversations for Learning: Librarians Leading Professional Development

 

CC Image via http://bit.ly/aKfULs

 

Probably the most cited reason I hear for attending conferences (both library and edtech) is, “I get to be with like-minded people.”   While this reason is fine and good and often inspiring and energizing, I personally leave these events more determined to make my own corner of the world one in which people are aspiring to be lifelong learners and to take risks whether they are classroom teachers, students, or librarians.  I think our ultimate goal should be to cultivate a culture of inquiry, curiosity, and conversation in our learning spaces.

Access to new hardware and access to information doesn’t mean that teachers and students automatically have buy-in to 21st century teaching and learning frameworks.  Asking people to critically interrogate their teaching philosophy and pedagogy is something that really should be at the forefront of technology integration because ultimately, the integration requires a significant shift away from teacher centered instruction.    I truly believe that conversations about learning are critical in order for teachers and students to rethink and question what we mean by “education”, “learning”, and “achievement.”

In our work as “instructional partners” and “leaders” in our learning communities, school librarians collaborate with teachers and students to help cultivate participation literacy and transliterate practices to facilitate learning experiences.    These collaborative efforts can become powerful grass-roots advocacy for meaningful change when other students and teachers take note of the kind of work their peers are engaging in with the assistance of the library program and librarian.

I’m excited to share that by request, I’ll be working with two of our departments this fall to provide half day professional development workshops in which we’ll explore:

• How we can use Google Sites as a tool for instruction and information sharing as well as a medium for hosting content creation by both teachers and students? (Foreign Language Department, coming December 2010)
• How can we tweak our research assignments to engage students in higher level questioning and exploration to minimize opportunities for plagiarism ( I think Jamie McKenzie refers this kind of “topical” research as scooping) and maximize students’ opportunities to think critically and inquire?  (Social Studies Department, TBA)

I’m also excited that my principal has given me the green light for my facilitating an additional professional development opportunity based loosely on the EdCamp concept. While I think the EdCamp concept is terrific, how powerful could it be to be host this in-house with your faculty and students as the experts leading the conversations as well as virtual guests from around the world who can also lead and join the conversation via Skype?  For many educators,  means for travel (personal and professional funds, professional leave time) is limited, so why not bring the experience to your local learning community in-house?

I’m still sketching out the details for this professional development with input from interested faculty and students, but I’m excited to help ignite this type of learning experience in my own school and for the library program to contribute to our learning community in a way that I think will have a direct and profound impact on teaching and learning in our building as we work together.

Inviting Participation with Illegal Art

Illegal Art via kwout

Many thanks to colleague and fellow librarian Brian Mathews for pointing me to a super cool project, To Do, at his library, the University of California at Santa Barbara Library.  This project, a creation as a result of the collaboration between library staff, students, and Illegal Art, will be on display from September 20 until October 31.  What is the To Do project about?  The UCSB Library blog describes To Do :

Come see an interactive art installation that invites you to write down your own “to-do” lists and add to the collective consciousness of personal promises, social commitments and the yet to be done. The mural made entirely out of post-it notes will be on display on the first floor of the Davidson Library at UC Santa Barbara, across from the main elevators.

Illegal Art (www.illegalart.org) is a New York City based public art collective, whose goal is to create interactive public art to inspire self reflection, thought and human connection. Each piece is then presented or distributed in a manner in which participation is simple and
encouraged. For more information, on Illegal Art, visit, www.illegalart.org.

I think this is an original and unique way to invite patron participation and to create content that captures an aspect or snapshot of patron life and culture.  Kudos to librarian Lisa Koch who organized the installation of this project.  After viewing the photos from this library project as well as other projects facilitated by Illegal Art, I’m contemplating the possibilities for creating this type of participatory, cultural, and artistic project with my students at The Unquiet Library!  See other projects from Illegal Art by clicking here.

Oh, the Places We Hope to Go: Mapping Program and Learning Themes 2010-11 FTW!

Unquiet Library Learning and Program Themes, 2010-11

Once again, I am using Mindomo to help me pull together the swirling mass of ideas for 2010-11 that have been simmering in my mind throughout the summer.    You can see the working draft (which is subject to change and evolution throughout the next ten months) of the map that outlines the major program and learning initiatives for The Unquiet Library in 2010-11.     These goals and initiatives will take place against the backdrop of reduced staff as our district lost all of its media clerks for the 2010-11 year; protecting instructional services is our priority as is minimizing the ease and flow of access to the physical library space.

In a nutshell, here is where I hope to see the library program grow and go in 2010-11:

Media 21

This learning model will once again be the centerpiece of the program and will be the vehicle for a mini-pilot of the embedded librarian model.    Details will not be finalized until August 2, but tentatively, I have a team of four English teachers and one science teacher who are looking to scale out the work that Susan Lester and I did with our students in 2009-10. I will be writing a separate blog post outlining the goals, framework, tools, themes, and challenges of Media 21 for the upcoming year within the next two weeks;  I’ll also be outlining how I plan to grow my own instructional literacy and my past and present interests in looking at what happens next year through an anthropological lens, so please watch for that impending post.  This year, I hope to frame the Media 21 work as action research and/or ethnography to better understand and analyze student learning and the dynamics of what I hope will be a mini professional learning community.  In addition, I will also compose an additional post outlining and exploring my working conceptualization of participation literacy and its overarching influence on the design of Media 21.

eBooks/eReaders/eReading

This goal feels very much like a moving target in spite of my best efforts to approach our first efforts to roll out ereaders in a methodical and thoughtful way.   I’ll be meeting with the stakeholders who will be helping me in this process over the next weeks, but the preliminary plan at this time is to start with a small set of Kindles for circulation to students and faculty and hopefully expand the menu to include iPads and/or some other tablet device.   I want to have a mix so that students and teachers have options; in addition, I want a mix of dedicated ereaders as well as tablet devices with educational and productivity apps for learning.  The waters feel muddy as the library community grapples with digital rights management issues and the blitz of devices that are either in development or are on the brink of release, such as the Pandigital Novel. I definitely plan to continue collaboration with my personal learning network as we try to share our knowledge and criteria for evaluating these resources that will best fit the needs of our patrons.

I should also add that the initial plan is to purchase Kindles (and possibly Nooks) and to collect a considerable amount of student feedback and qualitative data from the students who use the initial set of devices.  I’ll be using student feedback and the results of their experiences to drive additional purchases and future directions with ereaders.

Gaming

The Unquiet Library will be purchasing additional board games using Libraries Got Game as one of our compasses for purchasing materials that are engaging and aligned to the AASL Standards for 21st Century Learners.  In addition, Kimberly Hirsh has been doing some cool work in aligning games to the standards as well, and her work will inform the decision making process; Justin Hoenke is another friend and colleague whose experience and wisdom I’ll be calling upon to help me develop my gaming collection.   I am also working on assembling a team of gaming bloggers who will post directly to The Unquiet Library blog and share their insights and experiences on games of their choosing.

Student Virtual Collection

I want to step up last year’s focus on student content creation while providing a virtual space for hosting student learning artifacts that they may create either in collaboration with teachers and the library or that they may create out of their own learning interests.  I feel this student virtual collection is a way of celebrating student learning while providing an archive and space to explore the evolution and diversity of student learning.

Community/Tribe Building

I’ll be exploring and crowdsourcing strategies for stepping up our current degree of transparency as well as for  inviting even more participation in 2010-11 not only from students, but from parents, administrators, faculty, and other community stakeholders.     I’m working to recruit a team of stakeholders who will be guest bloggers for The Unquiet Library blog as well as finding more ways to crowdsource library policies, events, purchases, and learning experiences that better reflect the needs and wishes of all of our patrons.  In addition, I’m working with other educators to hopefully implement more learning experiences that tap into a larger global network to connect our learning community with others outside of our corner of the world.  My goal is to get more voices participating in the conversations we’re having in and outside of our learning space in the library.

Mobile Learning and Library Services

I plan for the library to lead the way in increasing integration of mobile devices and computing into instruction while finding ways to better tap into students’ mobile devices for access to library services and materials.  In addition, I’m planning on incorporating essential educational apps into our catalog.

Bring It

Although I don’t report back to work officially until July 27, my summer has been a hive of activity and thinking although I certainly wish I could have a few more weeks for collaboration, contemplation, reading, listening, and reflection.   Each of these initiatives presents its own challenges, but I will once again use this blog space to share the journey with you in hopes that others can not only learn from my successes and failures, but  also help me problem solve the challenges along the way and inform my thinking, which I plan to keep fluid and open throughout the next school year.     I am excited to see where we’ll go this year and what we’ll all learn together!