Edging Ahead…

We’re currently in the throes of discarding our thoughtfully selected (over almost 20 years), meticulously cataloged and carefully managed collection of VHS titles that were, five years ago, one of the highlights of our library. Every visiting group (local universities and schools wanting a taste of what “western” school libraries look like) was ushered into our “Special Collections” area (4500 VHS tapes, 1500 music CD’s, 1000 in-house archival videos, a growing collection of DVDs…) 

There’s a story in itself, in view of Ross Todd’s exhortations that we stop obsessing over collections of “stuff”, but that’s not the issue here. The question is whether we should limit, or even deny use of our replacement collection of DVDs to our school community.

Why would we deny access to our collections? To provide full access to our collections - for our primary users (students and teachers).  But if we do so, are we denying full Library2.0 access to ideas (and opportunities to create new ideas from these)?

On the other hand, is the the whole issue academic? Are DVD’s passe in a Web2.0 world anyway? Is it time to simply abandon “realia” media collections  altogether? Should we just open the gates wide and deal with access issues IF they arise?

As an international school where our students have minimal access to the public libraries,  Borders-quality bookstores and commercial video outlets that populate most neighborhoods in the developed world, we’ve always felt a responsibility to offer our collections for “community” use.  This manifests itself in regular (often daily) use of our facilities by a small cadre of unemployed parental “spouses” who live in the gated community in which our school resides, regular circulation of adult-interest print (e.g. travel and geography titles, along with adult-interest fiction) materials - and, of course, what I’ve called the “Saturday morning Video Club”. These are the parents, who stock up on video titles every Friday. the sheer number of titles they borrow and the timing of these loans suggests that they are not used in an instructional setting, but rather, as an “educational” alternative to the limited cable-tv offerings in Bangkok.

So why is this a problem? A couple of years ago, I published the following in our PTA publication, “the Touchstone”.

Recently, a number of Main Library video titles have not been available on request by teachers during the school day. Following a review of our policies, I have decided that the policies are fine but enforcement has “relaxed” over the years, so have asked Main Library staff to strictly enforce the “Overnight Loan” policy for all video material loaned to anyone other than a classroom teacher.  The policy has been in place for several years, but regular users may sometimes keep titles for several days and may have asked to borrow  items during the school day rather than at the end of the day, once the chance of a classroom request has passed.

From March 1 onward, I have asked staff to provide videos on strict overnight loan to non-teachers for parental review or student extra work on the following basis;

1. Titles may be borrowed following the regular school day between 2:05 and 3:00 (following which we have only one staff member on duty and close down the Special Collections area (including videos)
2. All titles provided on Overnight Loan should be returned between 7:00 and 7:20 the NEXT school day.
3. As we have only a single staff member on duty on Saturdays, we cannot offer video service on Saturday 

We would also like to remind patrons that while ISB’s Main Library holds an impressive video collection, each title in the collection was purchased “with instructional intent”, meaning that it is not our primary purpose to provide weekend entertainment for our students. There are many video outlets available in Bangkok providing this service.

We value the wonderful collections that ISB has built to help every one of our students achieve to his or her potential. Please help us to ensure that these materials are available at all times for their intended use.

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The American Library Association provides the following guidelines for non-instructional use of school-purchased videos.

1. Loan/Rental of Videotapes
Libraries may loan/rent videos to patrons for their personal use. This is true even if the video is labeled “For Home Use Only.” According to (ALA) “a library or school that resells, rents, or lends a copy of a copyrighted videotape, which it owns, is not infringing on the copyright owner’s rights.” Some guidelines to follow when loaning/renting a video to a patron:

·         Libraries should not obscure (i.e., cover or deface) the copyright notice as it appears on the producer’s label.

·         Libraries should not knowingly loan a video for use in public performances. If a patron inquires about a planned performance of a videotape, he or she should be informed that only private uses of it are lawful.

·         Libraries can charge a nominal fee for use of videos…”The fact that a fee is charged is irrelevant; the right to distribute a copy includes the right to rent it — for a fee or deposit or otherwise.”

Check out the ALA “Fact-Sheet” site containing this at;

http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Library_Fact_Sheets&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=24635

The question at hand - Should we continue this policy, or are we justified, given the new access to commercial media, internet sources and social networking options, in locking up our DVD collection and making it available exclusively for teacher preview, instructional use and student review (in-house). 

“Everything Old is New Again”, goes the refrain in the Peter Allen  song of the same name from 1974, and the flurry of new teaching and learning standards surfacing during 2007 reminds me of that refrain. 1974 was the year I spent waiting tables, driving cab and trying to wrap my head around the dichotomy I saw between the promise of  Open-Area Education to achieve a new vision of vision of “child-centred” teaching compared to the reality I saw in my practice teaching (inner-city schools in Vancouver, B.C.). Technology was the poster-child back then. It was going to play a huge part in achieving that vision of every child achieving to his or her potential.  

Over the past 30 years we first added computers and every peripheral we could get our hands on to the lineup of “must-have” technologies in the classroom and the library (the ’80’s). We then populated the ever-increasing RAM and hard-drive space with a plethora of electronic databases and data sets (the early ’90’s) that promised “anything, anywhere, anytime” access to information. When that still didn’t seem to produce the quantum-leap in learning we’d anticipated, we jumped on the “Information Highway” big-time in the late ’90’s and into the early 21st century in order to provide our students with access to “real-world” data and information. 

 And it seemed to work. Life was good. Technology had saved the day. A slew of studies in the ’90’s and early 2000’s said so. The Ohio Study by Ross Todd and Carol Kuhlthau was just one of  these. But in spite of the positive results, The School Library Journal interview with Todd in 2004 ended with;

“We see so many kids coming into the school library with a project to do. At the end, did they learn anything? And what does that learning actually look like?”

Put another way, had all of this “stuff” (Ross Todd, 2008) translate into vastly new and better, “child-centered” Learning? It seems not.   Although on the one hand, the data from landmark studies like those of Todd, Keith Curry Lance and others have assured us that there’s a confirmed link between libraries and learning, it seemed that actually, the “Nation’s Report Card” was not showing significant and consistent gains in student performance or learning as we might have hoped, given the promise of Educational Technology over the previous 20 years. Even though several subject areas have shown improvement in 2005 0ver 1990’s scores, the Executive Summary for Reading published in November, 2007 showed that;

“In 2005, the average reading score for high school seniors was 286 on a 0–500 scale. This score was lower than in 1992, although it was not significantly different from the score in 2002. With the exception of the score for students performing at the 90th percentile, declines were seen across most of the performance distribution in 2005 as compared to 1992. More…

The percentage of students performing at or above Basic decreased from 80 percent in 1992 to 73 percent in 2005, and the percentage of students performing at or above the Proficient level decreased from 40 to 35 percent”

Scary? Well, keep in mind that “everything old is new again”. Unfortunately, the Bare Naked Ladies version of the song by the same name might be a more accurate depiciton of the way it’s turned out, at least in the school libraries I’ve worked in. But, to mix in another metaphor, maybe Lenny Kravitz really got it right back in 1991. It ain’t over ’till it’s over… There IS a difference this time around, and the difference is in the technology. It’s called Web2.0.

Web 2.0 has helped us embark on yet another cycle of renewal and rebirth in our dream to take every learner to the limits of his or her personal ability; to help him achieve “to his academic potential” in the parlance of the ISB Vision and Guiding Principles.  If we’re lucky, perhaps this time, the vision and the reality will mesh more neatly than it has in the past. Perhaps the technology has matured enough in “Web2.0″ to really help us make “everything old new again” - in the best Peter Allen Tradition. I’m hopeful…

To begin with, the new AASL “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner” AASL’s New Teaching Standards offer “a vision for teaching and learning to both guide and beckon our profession as education leaders.”

The Standards describe how learners use skills, resources, and tools to

• inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge;
• draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge;
• share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society;
• pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

While the AASL has been framing its new standards, ISTE, the International Society for Technlogy in Education, has been working to the same ends. In 2007, ISTE completed updated standards for students, and these identify;

“What students should know and be able to do to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world …”

• Creativity and Innovation

• Communication and Collaboration  The new standards identify several higher-order thinking skills and digital citizenship as critical for students to learn effectively for a lifetime and live productively in our emerging global society

• Research and Information Fluency

• Technology Operations and Concepts

• Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making

• Digital Citizenship

  

At the same time, the “Partnership for 21s Century Skills” launched Route 21, an online, one-stop shop for 21st century skills-related information, resources and tools. The group is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the key players in InfoTech  today.  Their core beliefs?

“We believe schools must move beyond a focus on basic competency in core subjects to promoting understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into core subjects: “ 

• Global Awareness
• Financial, Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy
• Civic Literacy, and
• Health Literacy

And finally, International School Bangkok’s Own own cut on 21st Century Learning  comes out of the work of Technology Resource Coordinators Justin Medved and Dennis Harter . They write:

Over the school year we … came up five essential questions that we felt addressed the core elements of a comprehensive technology and learning curriculum…        

• How do you know information is true?      
• How do you communicate effectively?      
• What does it mean to be a global citizen?      
• How do I learn best?      
• How can we be safe?

When I look at any of these systems of core values, I see, in each of them;

• Critical thinking in a 21st-century context (deep understanding, just-in-time learning, use of appropriate technology, evaluative abilities, communications skills)
• Global Awareness (the environment, and how our stewardship of the planet impacts on the future)
• Global Citizenship (human interactions and how they influence our individual and collective futures)
  • Encompasing issues of personal “safety” and “health”
• Metacognition (learners’ reflection on and engagement in their own learning)

The rather sobering thought that follows is that I’ve been seeing these core values in every “system” I’ve encountered since my Open Area days in the 1970’s. In other words, however you label them, people looking to the future of education have been zeroing in on the same fundamental skills, topics and themes for as long as we’ve been thinking about it…

Everything old is new again?…

 (planned for an upcoming post - How can we ensure that students who spend a semester, a year, a school division or a complete schooling career with us are adequately prepared for the challenges in those four overarching themes? What do we need to do to reinvent ourselves in school libraries so that we regain the relevance to a learner’s journey that we believe libraries should have? How can we make our libraries, our programs, and ourselves “new again”?

The answers may lie in the new collaborations that Ross Todd exhorted us to forge with the people who can help us best when it comes to using the power of technology to achieve our aims. At ISB we call them “Technology Faciliators” and we’re working hard to make sure that our next efforts really are the “best yet” in terms of achieving our dreams of taking learners to the places they need to go to be successful in the 21st century world they’re facing. -rjr)

I spent some time tinkering with a personal summary of the “Big Ideas” on Guided Inquiry in the school library that Ross presented in his preconference session at the ECIS Librarians’ Conference in Berlin on February 28th. Unfortunately, I had initially marshalled my thoughts in a table form, and when I tried to import them to this blog, all sorts of things went wrong.

Fortunately, before I invested too heavily in trying to resolve the technical problems I was encountering, my colleague and co-attendee, Kim Cofino http://mscofino.edublogs.org/ posted an absolutely crystalline analysis of the conference.

More to the point, Kim proposes a number of strategies that are absolutely seminal to the teaching and learning issues at hand. Kim absolutely nails the rationale for Edtech Facilitators and Library/Media professionals (in whatever guise we see ourselves) to work together in a new model of collaboration which will marry the innovativeness and enthusiasm of the former with the experience and traditional expertise of the latter.

This frees me up to move in new directions with this blog. In the spirit of  recent postings by Will Richardson URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First   and ISB colleague Dennis Harter Is school curriculum still meaningful? I’m going to indulge in a bit of professional self-examination to see if I can develop a bit of that “network cred” that Will talks about. The question might be, “If a blog post exists in a blogosphere vaccum, do the ideas really matter?”

Meanwhild, a last note on Ross Todd.  In addition to the Big Ideas noted in “A Side Trip…”, Ross went on to exhort School Libraries to:

• Offer effective alternatives to “cut ‘n pasting” strategies
• Move beyond the “scope & sequence”  info literacy to “information to knowledge” strategies
• Develop Additive vs Integrative knowledge construction
• Be(come) zones of intellectual conflict, intellectual discontent, intellectual activism.

To get to the nub of  the  work on Guided Enquiry by Dr. Carol C. Kuhlthau & Dr. Ross J. Todd go to; http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided_inquiry/introduction.html .

All material presented at the Guided Inquiry site is copyright protected under Creative Commons

…to Berlin, to attend the triannual ECIS Librarians’ Conference here. I’ve always wanted to catch an ECIS conference, having spent twenty years seeing many of the same faces at various conferences in Southeast Asia.

Dr. Ross Todd http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~rtodd/ is the keynote speaker here, on the topic of Inquiry Learning, and I’m thrilled to say that he’s lived up to all advanced billing. In the all-day preconference, Dr. Todd called us to account for historically abandoning students to their own devices at the key point in their research! For too long, he says, we’ve obsessed about providing “Collections of Stuff” which our students can access, retrieve and excerpt from, but have NOT helped them with the really important work of “creating their own understandings”. Libraries need to become involved in Transformational vs. Informational work.

If we DON’T move beyond the Scope and Sequence information literacy to a mindset of moving from “information to knowledge”, we do ourselves, and our profession, a great disservice. In the end, we put not only our own relevance at risk, but we denigrate the importance of libraries - and reading itself - and when reading is at risk, knowledge itself is at risk!

In the report I’m preparing to take back home with me next week, I’ve highlighted some of the “Rossisms” that I’m bringing back with me. In a nutshell, Ross has convinced me that if I’m going to stay the course, I need to;

• Get off the Information Bandwagon!
• STOP obsessing over “found” items (locating, accessing, finding, evaluating “stuff”)
• Start helping kids Transform Information and Create New Ideas instead of just “finding stuff”
• Have my library be(come) an Intellectual Center, rather than the “Collection” Center I’ve so carefully built over the past 10 years…

And finally, Ross reminded me, keeping in mind that not everyone is ready to jump on this runaway train at exactly the same point I have now rejoined it. Ross lets me off the hook a bit here, and I’ll have to remember this one.

• Don’t Water Rocks!!! (work with the kids, teachers and parents that are ready to join the Adventure)

Powerful exhortations indeed! Now just to get back home, catch up on the work I’ve missed in the past week, and Start the Process. ONWARD!!!