Deep Thinking

What differentiates blogging for library media specialists from writing for the generalist biblioblogs?

Our profession demands so many areas of expertise rather than focusing upon one specific area of librarianship, so I try to provide a glimpse of the activities occurring in a school library and the deep thought that occurs in our planning and implementing. For too many people their last experience in a school library was when they were young and not cognizant of the professionalism behind the scenes. They don’t have a realistic concept of the modern school library.

While a generalist blogger may focus on one philosophical issue, I intend to show that we must spend time thinking about the bigger picture while conquering practical concerns. I have to move between teaching and supporting all subjects for six grade levels and providing library service. School libraries have changed greatly and hopefully through blogging, the general public can see how exciting they are.

What are your professional objectives for blogging?
Professionally I want to share, inspire, and connect with my audience. I hope that sharing my thoughts will help connect the philosophical nature of our field with the practical needs of my students. I want someone to experience our dynamic environment through the eyes of a child.

How much time do you devote to blogging?

I blog 4 times a week at least. Three for School Library Journal and at least once for my personal blog. Some posts are written in quick fifteen minute spurts, but many of them result from a week or two of thinking about an idea, gathering information, writing, rewriting, and critiquing. I like the deep hours of the night to contemplate and wonder if anyone else is thinking about the same topics I am. I find that I view events happening around me with an eye to sharing them on my blog to the invisible audience.

How does having a professional blog impact your work with students?

My students know that I am a writer and an author of a blog. Several parents have seen my blog with their children and found it helpful to glimpse behind the scenes. Those students feel that blogging is a natural step in reflecting on a job. We seem to be experiencing spring author fever because a large number of students are bringing in their personal writing from home to share with me, to add to the collection, or to simply show me that they are authors, too. They understand that writers need readers and sometimes feedback.

What are the pitfalls for a school librarian to be writing a blog?

Blogging can be addictive and reading blogs can take all your time if you don’t set limits. There are so many topics to write about. It would be easy to complain about the problems we face daily. I want to convey a sense of optimism because these students deserve the best.

How does blogging affect your interaction with nonlibrarian colleagues?

My words carry more authority (rightly or wrongly) because I blog and my colleagues know I have a world-wide audience. Several teachers have asked how they can benefit from blogging and how to begin. Teachers willingly participate in providing ideas for my blog topics. My exposure has grown and doors have opened for other activities.

What has been the response of your faculty and/or administration to your blog?

To quote my principal Bob Wolfgang, “I think that it is great. The issue is and always will be the appropriate use of the tool.” He went on to say that he has complete faith in my judgment in those matters. In fact, he has posted on my blog. My district level administration has been supportive.

If your administration was wary of you blogging, how did you allay those fears?

No one has expressed fears about my blogging. Our local educator’s union included a warning in their newsletter about revealing too much in personal blogs that could be used against us. I chatted with our public information and communication office about the district implementing a blog for the community to participate and their concerns revolved around the amount of staff time needed to monitor a blog and to maintain safety and civility.

What is the greatest benefit to blogging about school libraries?

The Wow! affect. So many people outside the school library field tell me they have learned more than they ever dreamed about our profession. Blogging about how to humorously handle intellectual freedom concerns shows that we deal with the deep issues of our profession in a real, practical manner. We are both educators and librarians. Both fields need to hear us.

I can remember being interviewed for a position once and was asked how I intended to stay current in my profession. Blogging has passed participating in specific email lists because I am no longer limited to reading the posts of and writing to only school librarians, but I am part of the larger communities in education and librarianship.

How do you see the evolution of blogging (i.e., the growth of online video) as intersecting with the job of school media professionals?

Tools like technorati, google reader, and bloglines search for blogs using tags, but the human factor is still the essential piece of the puzzle. We work in a people industry. A personal recommendation of blog favorites is worth more to busy educators who want to expand their horizons in a practical fashion than long lists of general blogs. Interactivity will continue to grow as we learn how to rank our tagging (perhaps by people trust factors) and adjust our focus. I’m excited to watch more professionals participate and try new techniques as they find practical reasons overcoming perceived risks.

Beyond the training in how to blog, school library media specialists will be needed to teach the higher order thinking skills behind communicating and creating new ideas. It’s our job to make people feel comfortable with the present technologies and to inspire them to develop new Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) skills in order to keep abreast with society. It’s an exciting time to be a library media specialist and our voices need to be heard whether in print (traditional or electronic) or video.

Here is my letter posted to LM_NET today:

Dear Peter and all LM_NET friends,

I appreciate our having this conversation in the open and discussing our feelings. I, too, protested ALA’s neglecting school librarians from the blogging article and wrote a letter to the editor which I also placed on my blog. They responded and asked me questions with Beverly listening to my suggestions for how we can open the conversation using newer means (Second Life, online communities, online conferences). I do believe they are sorry and are working quickly to atone for this particular error.

ALA does have much more to offer us beyond our divisional organization (AASL). The joint youth group meetings for general members and for special committees (like the legislation committee) help all of the members of AASL, ALSC, and YALSA. The Legislative Assembly comprises members from committees and the divisions (including AASL) They listen actively to our particular needs and ask us how AASL feels about all general library issues, so the entire organization of ALA can represent the full gamut of our library needs.

The Washington Office is part of ALA and works daily on behalf of school librarians. Their only problem is that school librarians DON’T contact legislators as often as they need to. I appreciate how hard Emily, Melanie, and Erin in particular have worked on our behalf. They continue to make changes to the ALAWO website to include the new technologies that WE tell them about (podcasting, second life, blogs, flickr). Communication is a two-way street and we are working on a simplified guide to enabling everyone to easily advocate and stay in touch with federal issues. AASL alone could not do this.

Sara Kelly Johns mentioned Intellectual Freedom. If we were to divide up our dues into the different pieces that ALA fulfills, our members are not paying anywhere near the “real” percentage of services we receive. The rest of ALA helps make up the cost of that issue.

Conferences and Meetings. Yes, AASL offers a fantastic conference every two years with a smaller Fall Forum on the alternate years. We are able to attend a focused conference on our issues with our own vendors and people that understand us. In many ways this is like being in a bubble. The ALA Annual Conference doesn’t have as many programs, but they are well attended by school librarians AND other types of librarians who seek to understand our issues and programs. The AASL president’s program is well-attended by many other types of librarians; many of whom return to their real worlds and blog about us. The yearly Midwinter meetings are the workhorses of the organization where you can see how ALA functions. If you volunteer for a committee, you can get involved quickly and other types of librarians are very welcoming to us when we give them a chance.

I appreciate the non-scheduled, casual times of conferences when you can chat with other people from a wide variety of backgrounds. If I hadn’t participated, I would not have realized how important the EPA closings of their libraries could become to all types of government libraries as it signals a disregard for the librarians and their expertise and potential conflicts of interest in availabilities of services to those who need them while digitalization is occurring. (Talk about a thoughtful!)

There are so many other ways that we benefit - ALA publications, roundtables, SHOOT! I don’t even know how we benefit entirely, but I do recognize that so much of our professional integration relies upon us and OUR involvement. If we sit on the sidelines, don’t volunteer for committees, and don’t continue to complain when the larger organization forgets us, then we won’t be able to change things for the better. We have a large division in ALA, but on non-AASL conference years, the numbers diminish and that HURTS our cause. Also, we don’t have a large enough percentage of members who VOTE. If we were to compare divisions, I believe you would see that AASL has a lower percentage of members voting that other divisions like ACRL and PLA.

If you want to fix something, sometimes you have to be willing to step up to the plate. This past January while I was waiting for a take-out order in a hotel, I was approached by someone in ALA’s involved leadership asking for their help in getting more school librarians on the ballot for ALA council so our voices would be heard. He told me that the nominating group had approached many school librarians who said “NO” because they were too busy and it was too expensive. I understand that. Still, during the AASL Affiliate Assembly meeting Linda Williams and I decided to send around a petition ballot to gather signatures and we are running for council. There are many good youth candidates on the list and they need members of ALA and AASL to vote for them. If you want to effect change, you have to change what you have been doing.

Thanks for tolerating my long-winded commentary. I really believe we will be a better-represented organization within ALA, but only if we continue to reach out, reach up, reach around, and sometimes JUMP UP AND DOWN so they pay better attention to us.

Since I have fulfilled my Sunday morning commitments, now I have time to laze around and think. I love these quiet moments. Today I am pondering how I can make my school library better and more responsive to the needs of my users.

We finished our SACS (Southern Association of College and Schools) review right before Spring Break. One of the responses for our school as a whole was that we needed to provide more opportunities for parents and stakeholders to communicate. They suggested we put in a “Suggestion Box” in the front office so people could put in anonymous comments. We discussed the fact that any parent who emails us from the website is not anonymous so may feel stifled. So, what do you do?

I’d like to ramp up this area of communication and have been searching for the right tools to extend beyond those patrons who come into the school. As I was thinking I remembered how much fun I have participating in quizzes, surveys, and polls online from MySpace and other accounts particularly when I am with others (like my hubby-dear or my sons). Couldn’t I easily use Web 2.0 tools that are already developed by someone else to gather the information I like? It’s been over 5 years since I paper-surveyed my students with their smiling faces, frowning faces, and blank faces choices. I want to improve and gather feedback.

One of the websites GoToQuiz looked really promising until I carefully read the Terms. It doesn’t allow users under the age of 15. With the recent federal judge ruling against COPA I wonder if these terms will begin to change around the web.

Most of the sites I found charge you a monthly fee and have limits on the number of responses. You may think 1000 responses a month is sufficient, but let’s look at my situation. I have 540 students approximately (with a 41% mobility rate this changes daily). 2-4 parents and significant adults plus the student. Right there we are looking at closer to 2000 responses that could be gathered regarding one survey. I might be surveying about the library. A classroom teacher might be surveying parents on their communication preferences. The school could be surveying about dress codes. A grade level could be surveying about field trip preferences. I know that we will only get a small portion of responses, but I cannot waste my learning time on a product that will very quickly be limiting.

We need more flexibility that doesn’t cost anything. Yes, I mean free. I don’t have funds to finances surveys. I want to use the existing free tools of web 2.0. I also want to avoid Bad Survey Design. I took several quizzes, polls and surveys this morning while playing and I believe 90% of what I found was garbage. Both garbage in and garbage out. Fortunately there are good guides to survey design like the one posted by Creative Research Systems.

Help! Does anyone have a reliable tool to use?

One of the latest meme’s tagging bloggers involves writing about the process of how we develop topics for our blogs. I read with interest Miguel Guhlin’s post and Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog. Vicki Davis at Cool Cat Teacher Blog includes in her top 5: Truth, Variety, Passion, Inspiration, Technical Precision.
So what are the tipping points for me to login and write:
Interesting and Unusual (this means whatever I decide is not typical in someone else’s life)
Frustrating and Emotional Provoking (if it irritates me, I hope it irritates someone else out there)
Innovative (new stuff that you should know about or think about)
Practical (let’s ground this in reality - meaning the students - whenever possible)
Thought-provoking (I want to go beyond corporate speak and organizational motives to dwell on ideas). Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe opens In the Company of Cheerful Ladies in a cafe choosing to “sit by oneself and think about the events of the week and the state of the world.” Someone needs to be doing the sitting and thinking. I know people read this blog because they talk to me about it. Hopefully someone is inspired to do some extended thinking periodically.

The authors of the Head First book series (Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, and Eric Freeman) blog entry on Incremental vs Revolutionary Improvements have an illustration showing when it is necessary to continue to make small incremental changes and then what happens when we hit the wall - necessitating revolutionary changes.

Two passages stand out in my mind: “The true art of product or service development might come down to this: Knowing when it’s appropriate to make incremental improvements and knowing when you need a revolutionary leap.”

So “revolutionary” often just means “revolutionary in THIS context.” And that’s also a way to think about where to find ideas for revolutionary improvements… look at what’s being done in other domains, that might work in yours.”

The authors took a look at classroom experiences and books, then changed how they wrote their Head First series.

Take a look at the school library program. Have we hit any walls lately? What about in the area of advocacy for school libraries? Do we continually implement new PR campaigns, marketing strategies, and reiterate the same litany of complaints? When do we look at the big picture and make revolutionary changes?

A simple revolutionary change in my elementary library this year is this approach I am using with every group: “You are responsible for everyone learning this strategy. If one doesn’t get it, none of you got it. If you have truly learned it, you can help teach it to your teammate.” I know they are hearing this because as soon as I begin the phrase, “If one doesn’t get it…” all the students chime in. I grade everything they do regarding instruction. I give the team a star or none. It’s A or F. Nothing in between. Throughout formal instruction, I pause and remind them to check the learning of all their teammates. If they are having trouble reteaching it, I will help. I have found that this teammate approach has resulted in students getting up from groups and going over to help others. The students are extending the meaning of my saying to the entire class now. If one group doesn’t get it, none of them get it. How does this translate? Students are teaching each other. Show and tell is alive and well in computer and internet usage. Students move around, teach older and younger students, and actively seek new ways to do things so they can teach something new.

Why did I make the revolutionary approach this year? My assistant was cut to half time. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving students from 20 classrooms out of 28 came to the library. Nine classes needed me for direct instruction. There was no assistant to help. I laid it on the line with students this year. We are a team. We have to help each other. I am no longer the only teacher in this room. Rule #3 is “Take care of your library.” The students understand that the library is a thinking, learning place and they have to help enable that to occur. Never have we emphasized the “your” as much as this year. It shows.

David Weinberger’s article on The New Is is worth reading again. For those of you who haven’t sampled and linked to it, here is a paragraph that might spark some interest:

“Until now, the structure of knowledge has mirrored the way we’ve structured the physical world: We take a pile – think of your laundry – and split it into lumps, and then split those lumps into further lumps, until we have piles that are not worth splitting any more. So, we create a library classification system such as the Dewey Decimal System, or a Periodic Table of the Elements, a Tree of Life, or a business organizational chart. But when we’re dividing up our laundry, we have to put our socks into one pile or another, but not both (the Law of Identity). Why should the same restriction hold when we’re dealing with ideas? Why can’t ideas go in many piles? Why can’t a single intellectual leaf hang from many branches?”

If you haven’t explored the ideas on tagging, this may be the introduction to the reason for tagging. As a librarian I look at this in much the same way I viewed keyword searching in the 1980’s when I put my hands on my first cd-rom: Dissertations Abstract on CD. As a graduate assistant helping instructors with their book topics, searching DA in print was extremely time-consuming and often fruitless. When DA on CD arrived at the University of Iowa, I happened to see it and begged privileges to try it out. Fantastic! Keyword searching. Access through multiple points. I didn’t have to remember the esoteric, confusing ,often whimsical and capricious terms cataloguers chose (which were often incorrect, too, because they hadn’t read the documents). Instead I could attempt multiple search strategies to hit many documents. The next month Eric on CD arrived. Access to the world was coming. For those who were raised in the era of the internet, try to picture the dark ages of searching texts using those millions of cards in the card catalog at UI. Filing catalog cards was ALWAYS backed up and my access was never perfect.

Now, view the internet in a different light. The term Web 2.0 is bandied about frequently. I see it as just another arbitrary division in our search for ultimate access. We are no longer on a continuum of perfection but face branches of access that link back, cross over, and grow in their own direction. Back to Weinberger’s article we read “On the Net, documents – pages – get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to. ”

So, I ask you to explore the article and add to the internet’s connectivity by posting in this blog and in your own. Add your ideas and personal expression to the internet. Someone else will come along and tag you. Maybe you will agree. Maybe you won’t. How will you view this? Will I be rememberd as a gatekeeper to knowledge or a guide along the road to wisdom? Hmmm. Something to think about.