#AASL11 reflections: technotreats

I’m always interested in how others are using technology (and technotools) intelligently in their schools – after all, we know that technology is only a tool, it’s not the answer to our pedagogical/programatic problems. Right? Here are some of my takeaways (and one rant) from the conference.

Let’s talk about PDA (part two)

(see Part One)

In addition to the questions of findability and privacy and information overload, the question of who actually owns the materials you’re acquiring arises. Let’s say a student is studying Portugal’s involvement (some might argue creation of) the Atlantic Slave Trade. I could purchase a physical copy of Hugh Thomas’ The Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 knowing that it would be on the shelves for students to use for many years to come. If it was available in e-book format, I could purchase a digital copy. However, I’d have to think about whether I wanted to be locked into a device (Kindle, Nook, Kobo or ???) or if I were going to support a BYOD program that allows patrons to download or read the book on their own device. What if we change devices, from Kindle to something soon-to-be-invented – how do we take that copy with us? The same holds for “purchase” via a consortium or content provider (say, Follett Shelf or OverDrive): if we don’t re-up our fees every year, how can I provide that content to my students year after year (the same question holds if the provider goes out of business)?

This might be a good idea if the books “purchased” are multiple copies of current popular fiction. When the demand for yet another copy of Twilight or the newest Sarah Dessen goes down, just stop renewing that title. But for research, it seems to me that this might not be the best model from a fiscal or a rights perspective.

Finally, there’s the question of note-taking. How easy would it be to take notes on digital content? The Kindle does allow for bookmarking and note taking, but not in quite the same way I see students currently taking notes and marking pages (using post-its or making copies/scans of relevant pages, of course). How easy is it to flip from e-book to e-book, comparing one fact or explanation or discussion to another? Again, this is one of the areas that a strong PDA program needs to address. And if we’re opening up the notes to the public, what are the odds that plagiarism will flourish?

So many questions to consider, and so many conversations still to be had. Let’s start them at AASL11.

Let’s talk about PDA (part one)

I’m not talking about allowing Public Displays of Affection in one’s library. Nor am I talking about a Personal Digital Assistant. This post is about Patron Driven Acquisition, a topic that I’m hearing more and more about given the rise of e-readers and e-books in our collections. How do we adjust our existing policies to include PDA? Do we adjust our existing policies? What limitations, if any, do we put on PDA within our institutions? What about findability: do these items go into our catalogs, or not? How do we measure the success of a PDA program?

Some schools are allowing students to recommend (or purchase) books via their Kindle/Nook programs but this isn’t quite what PDA means. Barbara Fister has a good description of PDA in her Inside Higher Ed column:

This new way of building collections emphasizes speed and choice, things that are popular these days. No need to wait for interlibrary loan; just click on the title in a large shopping mall of e-books and you can have what you want right away. One model that’s popular is to enter the e-book options into the library’s catalog. Browsing for a short period of time is free; browsing for a longer period is treated as a rental and the library pays a fee; and if a book is “rented” four times, the library automatically purchases the book.

During the recent LJ/SLJ E-Book Summit, I “attended” the academic library thread to see how I could better prepare my K-12 students for their next academic experience and was surprised by the conversation that was had about PDA.

The librarians were all very much in the Pro-PDA camp, with findability being the major issue they faced. One university was actually creating its own app to assist students! What about privacy? Well, as danah boyd often points out, teens think of privacy differently than adults do and in the academic realm, it could be very helpful to know that when you’re researching the Boxer Rebellion or the environmental changes brought about by El Nino that previous researchers found certain books and articles to be helpful. On the other hand, it could also be argued that part of doing research is to do the search part on your own, to see what information you can find on the topic (and if you miss something critical because you didn’t search well, or hard enough, that’s part of the learning process). That conversation, of course, leads to questions of academic integrity and what role research should play in the educational process.

But back to PDA. Shortly after the Summit, Barbara Fister posted The Revolution Will Not Be Subscription-Based, in which she discusses the financial implications of this mode of acquisition. Having recently had the experience of spending over $500,000 in six months to replenish a K-12 print collection, I’m painfully aware of the financial discussions. There are a great number of books that were purchased that haven’t circulated, books that should have been purchased in digital format, and books that have (already) outlived their usefulness. While we have added books requested by patrons (teachers and students) as soon as we can, the immediacy of acquisition in the PDA programs at the panelist’s colleges hasn’t been there.

Would joining a consortium that offers hundreds of titles for potential immediate purchase be a good thing? What about the financial side and the DRM issues (see my upcoming part two)?

As AASL11 approaches, I look forward to having these conversations with my peers and colleagues.

Be careful: there’s a baby in that bathwater

The other day I realized my iPod had decided that its time had come, so I made plans to go to the nearby Apple Store in Danbury. I also checked the online store to see what the possibilities are and learned that there was nothing that really met my needs: the Nano was only 16gig and the iPod was 160 – I needed “only” 30-40. Sigh. One friend asked why I wasn’t using my iPhone to hold all my music and my response was that I like having different machines for different functions. There’s less to go wrong, and if one part dies/malfunctions, I don’t lose everything (this hearkens back to my decision not to get an all-in-one tv/vcr).

That led me to reflect on some recent trends, particularly this idea that New!Improved!Shiny! technology tools are better than what we have already.

Making a hash of tags

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend Senator Gillbrand’s first Women’s Economic Empowerment Summit, but this isn’t a post about the content of that summit. Instead, it’s about the social media aspect. When I got there, I asked about an official hashtag – one of the Senator’s legislative aides (she had her NY and DC office staff there, as well as several staffers from around the state) told me that “[she] really knew nothing about this twitter stuff” and, apparently, she was not the only 20-something there that was ignorant. The older aides kept reminding us to turn off our mobile devices, as though live-tweeting or otherwise capturing the sessions as they were going on was inconceivable (although NY1 and several news people were there).

After two panel discussions we had two breakout sessions, and in one the hashtag #runwomenrun was displayed. Was this the official summit hashtag? Apparently not – I learned in the second session that it was #nyuwomensforum. Nowhere, in any of the literature I was handed, was this mentioned.

I contrast that to the work being done on the upcoming American Association of School Librarians conference. At virtually every turn I’m told that the hashtag is #AASL11. Now, things haven’t always been that clear – at the previous conference, in Charlotte, there was some confusion as to whether it was #AASL09 or #AASL2009. And at a couple of other conferences there have also been confusion (full date vs. last two digits, usually, but sometimes the acronym to be used was in question). But there was never a question that there would be tweeting, and that a hashtag would be needed, and that some sort of consensus needed to form.

After the summit I had lunch with a friend, someone who is not on Twitter (she’s an arts therapist, so probably doesn’t need to be) and I gave her a quick primer on what different social media things she might want to get involved with. Then she asked about the hashtag and I told her that they could be confusing… and brought up the example I gave during my YALSA webinar. #bbw to librarians means “Banned Books Week”, but to the tv audience it means “Basketball Wives” and to a certain population of men it means “Big Beautiful Women”. That’s the beauty of, and problem with, folksonomies.

Tool Time

Every now and then I come across a new tool that might help me do my job better.  Now that I have some time to play, here’s what’s attracted my attention.

Curation tools

• Scoop.it
• Notefish
• Bag the Web
• WebSlides

Presentation tools

• Reel
• Concept Board
• Atlas
• Springnote

Other tools

• Noobsearch (search engine)
• Fuego (twitter news link collector)
• Buffer (tweet scheduler)
• ShowMeWhatsWrong (screen capture)
• Embedit.in (embed documents, files)
• Fakebook tools
• Convore (create a backchannel)

One place too many? or, I don’t communicate that way

As I was preparing for my upcoming YALSA Webinar on teens, social media and information literacy (what, you haven’t signed up yet?  I’ll wait while you do so) I thought about the places teens will go to get information for research.  I even asked a few teens about their experiences, and the “usual suspects” popped up – Twitter, FaceBook and blogs found through Google’s search.  What about Nings or Google+, I asked.  Their response was the equivalent of a blank face.

One had heard of a Ning, but didn’t see it as a place to gather information for school work.  It seems that Google+ hasn’t even crossed their radar.  As someone who has joined two or three Nings, I have to agree that it’s not my first stop for anything.   Even on the Ning I created, I feel that sometimes it’s difficult to find the time to go there to comment and participate.

I was also thinking about how we use social media, and how several of my friends won’t use it at all.  These are intelligent women, with accomplished careers, and they just don’t see the point of using Facebook or Twitter (much less the closed Ning I created for the class, or the web forum set up five years ago, or the Yahoo group discussion list…) One, a copyright lawyer (her motto is “making the world safe for logos”) even refused to participate in a special, one-time online-only edition of the alumnae newsletter.   Contrast that to a college friend who, I believe, has accounts on virtually every social media site out there, including a slew of them he never uses or goes to.  They’re there “just in case”.  One interesting trend I’ve seen among my students is that once they’ve left high school, their use of Facebook and other social tools dies down (until vacation, of course).  They seem to be busy living their lives, establishing themselves in their careers or growing their families.

It’s clear that younger generations are comfortable with being online, far more comfortable than my generation or those above mine.  And given my profession, I’ve had to become comfortable with it – but I’ve reached my limits I think.  Unless I can see a real value to joining a site, or learning a new online tool, I’m going to take a “wait and see” approach.  Yes, I have Google+ invitations, but thus far I haven’t responded: prove to me that the time spent there will be of more value than the time I spend elsewhere.  Nings?  Ditto.

Anyone else staring to have that “one place/tool too many” feeling?

 

Native? Immigrant? Inhabitant? Visitor? Who cares?

In April I heard John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, speak.  Thanks to his book, we now use the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant” – terms that have annoyed me since they first emerged.

Why?  Because I don’t believe that they’re good descriptions of a generation.  What I mean is, I – a member of the Baby Boomer generation – am considered an “immigrant” because I didn’t grow up with computers.  Or did I?  My father (whose original training was in electrical engineering) created what we referred to as “blinky lights”, a series of lightbulbs that we could program to blink in patterns or randomly (like those on a marquee, only small enough to be a night light).  He brought home a Commodore PET and I learned BASIC as a teen; my first post-college job had me learning CalcStar and WordStar (remember those?).  I’ve helped business offices automate, creating templates for mail merges in WordPerfect (still a better program than MSWord!), and installed upgrades to Windows OS.  Why haven’t I gone Mac?  I like getting to the C:> and feeling more in control of my computer (much as I prefer driving manual).  My other “native” creds?  My cousin created the first version of spell check.

A couple of months ago I was doing something with Photoshop and one of my students was amazed at the control I had over my mouse.  “I can’t believe you’re so good”, he said, “because I’m not and I’m supposed to be a digital native.”  My argument isn’t that I’m special, but that those of us that have used computers longer than college students have been alive shouldn’t be considered “immigrants”.  We’re natives, too – just a different kind.

Maybe we all need to stop using that term, because it’s really more like the stages of life: I’m a digital adult.  My students?  Digital teens (playing, practicing, still learning but not needing training wheels).  And my father, who taught a course on how to build computers and use them in the 70s?  Clearly he’s a digital grandfather.

Summertime = Conferences + Presentations

I’ve got quite the schedule this summer, and already I’m tired.   The disaster preparation/recovery presentation to ASLA came and went, but if you’re heading to ALA next week, you’ll find me here:

• Disaster Preparedness for School Librarians
• From Gutenberg to Google and Glogs, From Books to Vooks
• Best Practices in Library Websites for Teens

(that’s in addition to the semi-annual ARC hunt, attending several sessions and other professional meetings, of course)

Then in July, it’s off to the Taft Education Centers for a guest appearance at A Whole New Animal? 21st Century Collection Development. Finally, in August, I’m doing a webinar for YALSA, From 140 Characters to 10 Pages: Teens, Social Media and Information Literacy.

Hope to see some of you there!

SLJ’s App Squad

A while ago I was invited to SLJ’s offices to talk about book apps (along with Jennifer Hubert Swan, Lisa von Drasek, Linda Braun, Elizabeth Bird and a number of other amazing people).  The edited transcript has been released!