Blessing or Curse?

Several years ago Doug mentioned that he did most of his reading on his Kindle (he still does whether it’s on an actual Kindle or the app on another device) and that one of the blessings was the ability to quickly search for information while reading.  Back in the “good old days” you had to remember what you were interested in, or confused about, and then look it up rather than quickly go to your browser and – voila! – answers.

My Kindle is rarely connected to wifi, and I use it mostly for longer articles (uploaded via Instapaper) and ARCs, but I take Doug’s point.  The other day I was reading an ARC and wondered about one of the facts mentioned – I’m being a little vague because 1. it was an Alex book and 2. I honestly don’t remember exactly what it was I was wondering – so I picked up my iPhone and looked up… whatever it was. 30 minutes later, I’d found my answer, checked my email and looked at Twitter.  30 minutes later.

Which is, of course, both the blessing and curse of having one of those fancy ereaders that allow you to quickly go online: the rabbit hole and the added distractions.  It’s one of the things that several of my star reading students prefer about print, that lack of distraction and the ability to focus on the book and world it’s creating. But if we’re being honest, the problem isn’t the device (or lack thereof) it’s more about willpower.  Is your phone one of those always on, always notifying ones?  Do you have a tablet right next to you?  In the early days of ereaders, we didn’t have those additional tools and unless your laptop or desktop was always on, going online immediately was difficult.  Today? Those 30 minutes I “lost” could easily become an hour… two hours… and then where was I in the book again?  What exactly was going on?

My resolution for 2018 is to be less easily distracted from my reading.  Who knows how much more I could read?!

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Minor Musings

A holiday gift of sorts from me to you: linky goodness from the past few months.  Enjoy!

Books, Reading, etc.

• I so want to try this at work!  BPL now has personalized RA via email.
• Ever wonder what is required reading in another country? Wonder no more.
• They’ve got him, babe: The Sonny Bono Memorial Archive Collection of post-1923 books.
• How to teach [previously] spoon-fed students to really read. Important for anyone teaching incoming students.
• Tis the season to spend gift cards.  But also, maybe, add this extension to find books at your local library?

School Life

• How to teach your students (or children) to spot fake news. And remember, you may be as much to blame for it as social media is! (ps – teens really are worried about privacy)
• Ask your teachers: can algorithms be biased?  The ACLU thinks so. You can also check out the Data Harm Record.
• A Must Read: Framing failure as a necessary educational experience.
• So cool: PBS has archived The Newshour (and all previous iterations)
• An incredibly powerful site, the virtual Victims of Communism Memorial (think Stalin and the Ukraine famine)  should be part of your curated website lists.

Tech Stuff

• While some of the tools that students in this Harvard course use to stay organized are course-specific, some intrigue me and might work for my team.  Which? Asana, Vizia, Quip,  Slido and VideoNot.Es,
• Read Kris Shaffer’s two-part series on digital minimism (and how to delete your old tweets).  I’ll be thinking about this a lot over the next few weeks.
• Speaking of Twitter, here’s a tool that can help you find that tweet you know someone sent, but forget when (or they tweet so much you’ll never find it again without help!)
• Are you a GAFE school?  Worried about privacy?  Try these platforms to take back some of yours.

Miscellany

• FB admits that spending time on social media is bad for you.  Whoda thunk?
• Backlash against Design Thinking.

Minor Musings

Doug has a wonderful post entitled Just another shill for educational companies? that I encourage everyone to read. Here’s my policy: all ideas in any of my posts, from these Minor Musings to other, more detailed commentary, are mine – possibly inspired by others but not paid for or encouraged by a company.  One of these days I’ll go back and do a round-up of what’s worked and what hasn’t (and what sounded good at the time but now… not so much).  The results will probably surprise me, possibly surprise you.  But they won’t be “paid for”, I promise.

Books, Reading, etc.

• Not quite about books, but reading academic work – this Academic Phrasebook is a great thing to share with students and teachers.  And then ask, are [they] ready for college?

Tech Stuff

• David’s flow chart for research idea needs to be shared with my teachers before we start seriously thinking about Research Season planning.
• In my never-ending quest to find a great system to share links and projects with my staff, I’ll be exploring Dropmark (inspiration) and  Asana (inspiration).  Stay tuned.  Some of you may also think about the Everything Notebook.

Miscellany

• As we start to think about building a new space and how to work with the space we have, it’s always timely to remember the Five Laws of Librarianship and working with our faculty and administration to understand what our mission is.

Minor Musings

In December I bought myself a new laptop, and this summer I finally cleared out my old files and programs. Yes, I procrastinate. A lot. Anyway, prior to using Feedbin, I used RSS Owl (which is great, but lives on a machine not in the cloud). Some of these links have been stored there for, well… here they are anyway. Along with some new ones just because.

Books, Reading, etc.

• Summer’s over Time to start planning next summer’s travel. Perhaps the Lake District? Or any of the trips you can find on BookTrails?

School Life

• The Design Thinking train may be starting to leave the station (not everything needs to be DT-oriented) but if you’re curious, here’s a way to learn more.
• Nancy ponders the idea that If Teaching is Relational, How Does That Inform Online Teaching? And, along the lines of personal relationships, as we move into the school year, re-reading Katie’s thoughts about the Emma Personal Librarian Program makes sense.
• More on plagiarism (aka “something that got left out of my last post“): Why plagiarism is not necessarily deceitful or deserving of censure. And some comments on teaching copyright to students (they go hand-in-hand, right?)

Tech Stuff

• So cool: text “Send me [keyword, color or emoji]” to 572-51 and the SFMOMA will send you back a piece of art (I did this early one morning).
• I’m always in favor of bringing art to everyone, and apparently the Met’s Open Access experiment is working!
• If only I could use my own pens, I’d grab a Rhodia Bamboo Smart Folio.

Miscellany

• As AY18 begins, this reflection / confession from Joyce in 2016 is on my mind.
• Doug has thoughts on social media and the intersection between personal, professional and political. Your thoughts?

Who knew?

On Monday, we had Rosetta Lee come to do an all-day training (she’ll be back throughout the year) and she opened with a lot of identity work.  Which groups did we feel we fit into?  Which were social constructs and which were more concrete?  One piece of wisdom she shared was that she believes that there is a brief, 30 minute period when you’re 34 when you’re neither too old nor too young.  Clearly I missed my Goldilocks moment!

It got me thinking about an emoji teaching moment recently.  For years, friends and I would type {{{HUGS}}} in Twitter when appropriate.  And then emoji came and we still typed {{{HUGS}}} because 🤗 is clearly – oh, so very clearly – Jazz Hands.

You know:

 

Apparently, not so much.  According to Emojipedia, 🤗 is “Hugging Face”.

Who knew?

Now the question is, am I too old to change?  Or do I just not care and, as with so many old fogies, keep making this totes adorbs mistake?

 

Minor Musings

Summer is a great time to binge watch while digitally organizing/reorganizing/decluttering, isn’t it? So here’s what I’ve bookmarked and saved over the past few months.

Books, Reading, etc.

• B&N’s Teen Readers blog has a great list of their favorite summer reads and NYPL has a list of great YA reads (runs to make sure we have them on our shelves). Meanwhile, Ernie thinks about the white canon our students are asked to read in school.
• From NYPL: a great reading challenge. While I can’t comment on my current reading for the Alex Awards, I can say I’m meeting this challenge! You?
• We’ve been weeding the collection and getting great print and digital replacements. Here are more thoughts on the process from another weeder.

School Life

• Thinking this summer about The Power of Nonneutral Librarianship and my library’s role in our school’s life.
• Asking students to interact with Wikipedia may lead to greater understanding of how it works. Here’s one assignment I’d love to try.
• What skills do students need in the 21st century? IMVHO, they’ve always needed most of these skills, it’s just the tools and pedagogy that changed.

Tech Stuff

• I’ve been a huge RSS user for years and, since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve been using Feedbin (try it!). Here’s how to find/create an RSS feed for any site.
• The more I think about privacy, the more I know that you have to unsubscribe carefully. Here’s one way to protect yourself. And perhaps think about online shopping and privacy.
• The 23Things movement hasn’t slowed. Might be something to update and try again. Use Twitter? Try TwitLamp to see your timeline.

Miscellany

• I’ve been doing a mixture of a bullet journal/general notebook for the past few years, starting a new book every July 1. This post on To Do Lists is making me think about how I’m doing this, both digitally and in print.
• Apropos of the above, the idea of blocking off an entire Friday afternoon to plan makes me miss my days back in the corporate world.

The Very Overdue #AISLNO17 Post (part 3)

My goal: to blog all the PD I’ve done this year before the academic year ends. In eight five four days. Get ready!

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Day Two: E-Books

The best presentation advice: start on time, end early, feed participants.

This is an area we explored gently over the past few years (both at Milton and Porter’s) and haven’t gotten much buy-in for, so I was interested to see what other schools were/are doing.  There’s so much to think about, and as one person said, we need to suck it up: things are evolving (as they did from film to VHS to DVD to streaming).  Here’s my question/problem: my students, based on a survey I did at Porter’s that got a 33% response, prefer print for fiction.  Why?  Because it’s an escape from the screen, providing a more immersive/less interrupted experience.  So… there’s that.  I might do a survey of Milton’s students and faculty, particularly as Overdrive is pushing a consortium for the local independent schools.  The Massachusetts ebook program is difficult, particularly since it only allows for one book/reader!

We agreed that there are So.Many.Platforms. ABC-CLIO, Amazon (might need to circulate Kindles), Destiny Discover (which only works with Destiny, so that’s out), EBSCO, GVRL, OUP and Salem Press for NF; Overdrive, Axis360 are for Fic.  The big question is how do you support all of them, including train people in their use because it’s not “one size fits all” for platforms!  Promoting them is also an issue, because discovery isn’t as obvious as it is for print (you can’t easily browse a shelf) you need to add MARC records to the catalog.  Another way to promote is to put links everywhere, in all Resource Guides, on pamphlets, etc. You could also let students know that Snapchat reads QR codes and include those codes in book displays or on the inside cover of a reference book.

Day Two: Personal Librarian Program (CD McLean and Katie Archambault)

Another “we need to try this at MPOW” idea, which may or may not work given our size population.  But still… They got the idea after reading The Personal Librarian (there’s also this one), which further enhances the idea of library as “third space” (see a theme?  Doug and Claudette both talked about this!).  It’s important to get Admissions, Communications and the Dean of Students on board before starting, particularly since you can start talking about the program on revisit days.

Other ideas?  Create a “what is a personal librarian?” video and “get to know your librarian” videos… Tasty Tuesdays (send a surprise gift of treats to a random class)… send emails to all incoming students, detailing how the program works and connecting it to the work they’ll be doing.  CD sends a letter, a follow-up letter, is a presence during orientation retreats and promotes library tours by “their” librarian.  Make sure the program is seen as two-fold, promoting reading and research.  Asking teachers if you can embed is great – digital embedding means you can drop resources into the class page (be it WhippleHill, GClassroom, Schoology, Moodle, or whatever your school uses), pushing databases, print books and critical websites.  Encourage 1:1 consultations with both faculty and students, adding a link to your sig. file for setting up an appointment.  What about YouTube videos personalizing the experience?  New Book lunches?  Having students sign up for Reading Recommendation and then do video/email outreach.  Constantly promote services and resources.

We were reminded that it’s important to do an annual debrief, to collect statistics and to keep up with alumni.  Equally important is that we don’t have to do it all: the same program doesn’t need to exist for 9, 10, 11 and 12th grade!  You can push heavily into 9th, less in 10th and 11th, and they’ll still remember to come in in 12th.

Another way to be personal?  Get college matriculation information and create a presentation highlighting the college libraries to students (eg, “If you’re going to Bates, you’ll find….”).  Do outreach to those librarians so your students are known.  (kudos to Elizabeth Nelson for this!)

Day Two: Booktalking

This is so easy to do with LS/MS students, but US?  Sigh.  So here are some great ideas we’re going to try in AY18 to try to get our overworked, overscheduled, overstressed students to read more fiction:

• Ask-a-Question
• PW’s First Sentence List
• Use these Book Reports
• TeachingBooks.net
• Checking Pinterest for trailers and displays
• Getting teens to create posts
• Using Typorama, Adobe Spark, Thinglink and Canva
• Creating “booktalks to go” for students to take with them

Whew!  One conference down… two (NEAISL and ACRLNE) to go…

 

Minor Musings

Winter hit.  More accurately, a winter cold hit.  And wouldn’t let go.  But luckily things are back to normal and I’m able to enjoy our Spring Break (two+ weeks in March, unlike public schools nearby that get a week in February and a week in April).  There’s the AISL conference in NOLA later this week and a Faculty Forum when we return – stay tuned for things learned from the amazing people at AISL as well as the library department’s Fake News presentation for my colleagues.  Until then…

Books, Reading, etc.

• Serving on book award committees and keeping an eye on various best selling lists, I’ve always wondered.  Now I know what makes a best seller.
• Food for thought: Angie’s Towards A Less Normative Future in Library Services to Children & Teens
• If you like Litographs, you’ll love these star charts!
• The artwork of these manuscripts is stunning.  Thanks BL for sharing.
• What happens when you read a book?

School Life

• What about creating something similar for your school or community using local archives and oral histories?
• Creative Commons now has an image search!
• Love the “sounds of learning” in your library?  This is food for thought (and a plea for quiet spaces).
• A new way to look at 21st century pedagogy.
• For the visual learners among us: a guide to statistics.
• It’s research season for many of us.  The OUP has some thoughts about using quotations. And LJ lists great “ready reference” websites and apps we should all use.

Tech Stuff

• If you’re a fan of Chrome and use Amazon, check out this extension, which shows whether the book you’re about to pay money for is available for free in your local library!
• Colorized photos from the 1800s?  Definitely changes how you see people and events. (ht: David)
• Note to Self’s Privacy Paradox challenge (and tip sheet). And according to this quiz, I’m a minimalist in terms of social media.  Do you need to unplug?
• FeedFlip from MIT – get out of your Twitter bubble.
• Librarian tested & approved apps. Flippity looks like fun, too.

Miscellany

• In honor of our mid-March storm, an interactive guide to Boston’s museums (for those don’t leave home “field” trips).  Or maybe take this Southern Literary Trip, do a virtual museum tour, go around the world in 80 models, take a tour of where penicillin was discovered or plan to visit some secret libraries.  Best: Honey, I Shrunk Myself (into a prayer bead).
• This course looks interesting.
• These miniatures make me happy.

Not paperless – paperMORE

I’ve been hearing about the “paperless” office (and, by extension, paperless school) for nearly 40 years. Doug even talks about it in his recent The Next Big Thing(s) post.

To which I say, HA!

Here’s the reality: we’re using more paper.  Vast quantities of more.

Example?  Teachers are encouraged to create a syllabus and post it online (in addition to adding assignments to the LMS, but that presents problems for those trying to plan forward as those only go assignment by assignment without providing an overview).  So, they post it as a .doc or .pdf, or include it in a class online folder.  So far, so good.  But… many students want to see it in paper, or to add teacher comments about assignments.  So they print it out.  Then they lose that copy.  Solution?  Print another copy.  Etc..

Example? Teachers find an article, essay, short story or something similar and (as with the syllabus) post it online so students can read it for class discussion.  Guess what?  Yep.  Multiple printings.

We have a print management system at Milton.  And it works… sort of.  The problem comes when the student doesn’t see the document in their print queue immediately, assumes it never got there (there’s a delay, sometimes of about five minutes) and sends it again.  Rather than deleting the duplicate, they Print All.  Or it takes forever to actually download and print, so they leave and print elsewhere (we had a 100+ page document print that way).

At my last school, students would send a document to print and when it didn’t, send again.  All too frequently, the printer had run out of paper.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in school, we got one copy.  One.  And we took care not to lose it because there was no way to get another one (copiers were scarce, so often it meant hand copying the original).  I suspect that if you looked at school paper budgets over time – even the past decade, as more schools have gone to laptop or tablets for everyone – you’ll see an increase.

The reality is that students don’t want to read on their screen (for longer pieces) or it’s cumbersome to access the document/information.  Teachers, encouraged by their schools, post more and more because, hey, it’s online and they’re not printing.  But that just moves the cost of paper and tone and time onto families and students.

I’m not recommending a return to those Dark Ages.  But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that we’ll ever be paperless in the way Doug means – paperLESS would be nice,  PaperSAME perhaps achievable.

Minor Musings

Wow.  It’s been a year since I did one of these!  I’ve been squirreling away links and things to share, and using Schoology at work to share them with my team.  Now, here’s some sharing with you…

Books, Reading, etc.

• This is the time of year when I make a list and check it twice: what great books from the previous year slipped under my radar?  Here’s YA Interrobang’s list. And this of “what to read in each of life’s decades“.  And one on Native voices.  Did I miss any of 2015’s great translations? (yes, probably) For Rory Gilmore fans, a list of her past 9 years reads.
• Why the library shouldn’t be all things to all people.
• Important reading for all, especially English teachers: The Reading Rules We Would Never Follow As Adult Readers.  Amen.

School Life

• With “fake news” and “post-truth” being topics of conversation/angst, here’s a great list of ideas and resources. And then there’s this article and Hoaxy. And this graphic:

View post on imgur.com

• Many schools (including mine) spend a lot of time talking about privilege.  That phrasing bothers me, and when I read this in IHE about using “advantage” rather than “privilege” I wondered how we can convince others to change their phrasing.
• What a great idea for a local history project for students (also, helps the community) – linking graves to historical society information.
• Not all information wants to be free.  Something we’re thinking about regarding student work (newspaper, etc.) and our archives.

Tech Stuff

• Some interesting ways to reenvision the to do list.
• If you use your phone for notes (and who doesn’t?) consider Bear.
• Did using computers lower China’s PISA score?  What are the implications for the US?
• It’s the new year.  Perhaps add one of these tech blogs to your feed?
• What do you know about the TOS for your apps and related content?  Probably not enough.
• A great graphic of the ISTE Standards.  Is there one for ACRL and AASL?

Etcetera

• Thought-provoking post about deciding if traveling for PD has a good ROI.  Networking isn’t covered, but should have been.
• This is the second school I’ve worked at that touts the presence of Harkness tables, yet no one has been trained in the method.  I suspect that many schools are in the same position.  So here is one way “to Harkness” (hint: it’s not about the table!!)
• Why streaming music (I may be one of the few who refuses to) is going to harm music creation.