International School Bangkok’s Main Library Review team – 12 teachers, teacher-librarians and technology coordinators from all three divisions, met for a first half-day session today to begin to develop shared understandings about the work ahead. We began with a series of readings (previous post) in four broad categories, focusing on

• “Where we’re at” in Libraries today – selected articles from “School LIbraries Worldwide” with a focus on Ross Todd’s “Youth and their Virtual Networked Words: Implications for School LIbraries“
• Technology Trends – “The Horizon Report“, Joyce Valenza’s “A Few New Things” and Michael Smith’s “Web2.0 & School LIbraries”
• Social Netorking and the library, and
• Design considerations – articles from disparate ALA sources, including Doug Johnson’s “Some Design Considerations”

We also looked at an updated version of Judith Sykes’s 2002  “School Libraries of the Future” powerpoint (yours truly carefully excised the Y2K-era backgrounds, typewriter & helicopter sound effects and distracting random fly-in entries – and added current terminology and local images).

The result was a high-energy, intense half day of discussion, analysis and conjecture, with all parties professing to have gained something from the experience. For us teacher-librarians, it was a too-rare opportunity to expand the conversation about libraries to a wider stakeholder audience, and we were thrilled to have had the opportunity to broaden our colleagues’ horizons on the scope of work in which we’re engaged.

Now to follow this up with Next-Steps Action. We will be working toward completing an internal “audit” early next semester, capped by a consultation visit by an outside expert. Details in the planning stages now. Stay tuned…

…Life

My internet connection was flakey, my avatar could barely move, and I spent ten minutes getting my microphone turned on and adjusted, but in the end, it was a successful first foray in “virtual” networking. About a dozen intrepid “Second Lifers” met Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk) and Dianne McKenzie (HK) to chat about our current library situations, review and redesign thoughts, and the future in general.

There are really deep implications for the future of libraries, and of learning in general, here. As soon as I get my head around some of them, I’ll write a post about it. For now, I’m guessing that Doug will write something about the experience, and I’ll look to him for the words of wisdom.

But it IS the wave of the future – for those of us in the “wired” world, at least. It can only get better….

…day by day. It’s been my email “byline” for a couple of years now.

“It’s not what we say, it’s what we do – day by day.”

As we approach the almost vertical part of just about any of the many technology implementation or change curves (on a standard graph) regularly popping up these days, I’m plagued by the question, “What happens when the timeline crosses over the vertical line of the y-axis? What will we do, day-by-day, when we cross this threshold, or the one we see coming next week, or the Technological Singularity that Ray Kurzweil predicts will happen within our lifetimes. What will it mean for my work as a teacher, a librarian, a professional colleague and a lifelong learner?

Kurzweil’s “MassUse of Inventions Diagram from  “The Law of Accelerating Returns” shows the problem.

According to this one, we’re already ON the other side of this vertical curve! With the birth of the internet, the world became connected in ways which we are told will fundamentally change how we, as a species, develop, archive, access, share and “transform” information and ideas. In a way, the birth of the Internaet has been a dress-rehearsal for the Technological Singularity, that point at which Artificial Intelligence exceeds biologic, human intelligence. It has been almost a “mini-singularity”.

So have our lives changed in fundamental, core ways? Do I interact, on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis with my family, friends and professional colleagues, in a way that is fundamentally different than I did before 1995? Are my daily life routines (getting up at 4:50 am, working from 7:00 – 4:00, spending from 6:00 – 9:00 with family, and awaiting “weekends away” from work) different in core ways from what they were “before”? Has the business of meeting work commitments, fulfilling family obligations and achieving personal goals changed become fundamentally different from what it was?

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like it.  Throughout the last twenty years of educational pedagogy evolution, of global issues awareness-building, and of the exponential increase in the power of the technology at our fingertips, one thing seems to have remained constant. We love to talk about the need for change, and how these latest tools will help us succeed where past innovations have failed. Today we can can brag about the size of our personal online network, expound on the virtues of the new “mashup” tools on our desktop, or chortle about how how we are “reaching out” to a global citizenry using the social networking flavor of the week. When it comes right down to it,  though, is that all it is – just more talk about how things are going to change, now that we have a new widget to help us get a new “round tuitt”?

But then along comes an event like today’s United States presidential election. Although I’m generally cynical about politics and politicians in any areana, I saw a fundamental change today in the way the community to which I’m currently attached, reacted to the momentous events of the day. I saw students shriek in ecstasy at the CNN Win projection. I saw teachers with tears in their eyes at the concession speech. And I spent the 45 minutes on the way to an afternoon meeting listening to American colleagues marvel about how finally, after so many years of guilt-feelings about their country’s failure to measure up to the world’s expectations, they can finally once again wear their nationality with pride.

I am old enough to remember the euphoria that gripped the world in the Kennedy White House years, and after 45 years, I’ve finally seen that same optimism, eagerness, and, yes, euphoria, grip the participants (as we all are in this new “wired” world) – and to reflect that maybe the world IS different on this side of Internet’s “mini-singularity”. Maybe, just maybe, there is hope.

This election is a fitting backdrop for this posting. As I was drafting this earlier, watching Barak Obama deliver his acceptance speech to the American people, and to the world, I heard a subtext in everything he was saying (”change”, “yes, we can”, “we shall overcome”). And that subtext was;

“It’s not what we say, it’s what we do – day by day.”

Congratulations, America, on renewing my faith in democracy, my belief in the work we as educators do to prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s challenges, and my hopes for a brighter future beyond the shadow of the clouds hanging over us today.