YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults

Wow.  Just... wow.  I won election to the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Committee for 2012!  Wondering what that means?  LizB explains it all (she's on the committee this year). This officially changes what (and how much) I'll be reading next year.  Luckily, I'm a pretty fast reader, and besides Liz,…

It’s not to late to vote (and why more of us need to be involved with ALA!)

Polling for ALA's annual elections closes Friday - have you voted yet? Be honest.  Have you? If not, you're like many of your ALA colleagues.  Voting seems to be something "someone else" does, and certainly not something that youth services members (those of us in AASL, ALSC and YALSA) do.  Yet we love to complain…

Musings on Ross Todd at SWBOCES

Nothing Dr. Todd said was particularly new to me, but much of it bears repeating... The library should be the heart of the school, and the heart of the library should be innovative learning/innovative teaching Our current culture of testing and teaching to the test leads to superficial knowledge (what do I need to know…

Thoughts and notes from #CIL11

One of the things I dislike about keynotes is that they're canned: the speaker usually comes with a “yay! Librarians!!” message or to sell a point-of-view/product, all very slick and PowerPointed.  Thanks to weather conditions, the keynote speaker was unable to get to CIL in time.  Now, I'd been interested to hear him because he…

Final thoughts on #TEDxNYED

My first thought is that while everyone stressed how we need to expand student horizons, to be “global”, the more interesting projects (poetry, farming) were local in nature.  As this blog post points out, we have to take care of ourselves before wearing ourselves out caring for others . Secondly, why are we seeing/hearing from…