Alice in InfoLand

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Wow: 110 different ways to graphically demonstrate information and concepts!
Although the examples given in the table are all business-based, it should be easy to adapt these into possibilities for revising many of those standard (and boring) “write a report on” assignments.

found via Lifehack.org

Sloan, the co-creator of EPIC, a must-see for all informed citizenry, appreciates libraries (and librarians):

“One of the really magical things about libraries, after all, is that they are all about service. They don’t want anything from you; they don’t want to sell you anything. Today, that is almost a radical proposition. Like serious journalism, librarianship is worth preserving and extending in the era of Google’s cold genius; in both cases there is something valuable at the core. “

A sad reality is that — too often — classroom teachers just don’t know how to effectively utilize the skills of a school librarian.  Here’s the text of a flyer I gave out to teachers every year:

The mission of our School Library program is to:

• develop information-literate students
• create lifelong learners
• help teachers teach

I CAN HELP YOU BY:

• working with you to develop authentic research activities for your classes.
• coordinating information and research skills strategies with classroom curriculum.
• recommending additional resources to extend your classroom materials.
• presenting booktalks about new/relevant books for your classes.
• preparing Project Pathfinders to guide your students to the best resources for your assignments.
  
• brainstorming project ideas, lesson strategies, and topics with you.
• providing guidance relating to the ethical use of information.
• notifying the public library of any class assignments.
  

 YOU CAN HELP ME BY:

• notifying me as soon as possible of any planned resource-based class projects or assignments.
• meeting with me to develop/plan effective resource-based activities.
• reserving class time in the library as far in advance as possible, and notifying me as soon as possible of any schedule changes.
• understanding both the extent and limitations of the School Library’s resources and schedule.
• remaining with your students and supervising their behavior while they are in the library.
• sending no more than two students at a time to the library on a pass, unless prior arrangements have been made.

and the tag line on every notice I sent out:

Having these guidelines clearly defined made connections/cooperation/collaboration by teacher and librarian so much easier for everyone concerned!
 

For my upcoming presentations and hands-on workshops on “how to use Bloglines to look brilliant to your faculty” I’ve put together a set of instructions… using the create a blog capabilities of Bloglines itself.

These are only introductory instructions; I cover more details and advanced strategies during the actual workshops.
The demo blog is at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/Aliceinfoshow2rss

Comments and suggestions gratefully accepted here, since the Bloglines blog doesn’t have any comments capability.

I’m still gathering examples of school library bloggers. Check out an extended list on the TeacherLibrarianWiki that Joyce Valenza has created for us to use as a collaborative courtyard.

tags: RSS, web 2.0, school library, teacher-librarian, CIL2006, ISE2006

In preparation for the workshop I’m doing at the
conference on Mar 24 on
Really Savvy reSourcery, aka How Bloglines Make Me Look Brilliant To My Faculty, I’ve been scanning the blogosphere for examples of school and/or library-related blogs to include in my presentation blogroll.

Since my personal Bloglines subscription already has over 150 feeds, I’m struggling to stay afloat in a swirl of information flotsam and jetsam.

Now I truly understand the 6th grader who — in the midst of a oceanography research project — discovered the word vortex: noun. A whirling current, usually spiraling in toward a center and tending to drag things with it.
“That’s what this feels like!” he exclaimed. “I’m caught in an information vortex with all these things to take notes from. Quick, Mrs. Y — grab me and pull me out to safety.”

Use the link in the Navigation Bar (to the right) to access some of my FLIP it!™ materials.

Included so far are:

• Overview and Graphic Organizer
• Background/Explanation of how FLIP it!™ works
• Information Skills Categories
• Information Literacy Standards Matrix
• Research Activity Guides
• Research Reflection form
• Additional Applications of the FLIP it!™ mnemonic
  

If there’s enough interest, I will consider setting up a discussion forum for FLIP it!™ users.

Any questions ? 

 

Gee, said me, last spring:
wouldn’t it be neat if there were an AASL blog to report on events at the AASL conference in October, so that all the school librarians who can’t get to the conference in person could find out what was happening there?  LITA and PLA have blogs that post reports from conferences and events, couldn’t we school librarians do that too??  
So I sent in a proposal for a blog to the AASL powers-that-be.  Nothing happened.   After much dithering, I got word that it was a possibility… but there were still hoops to be jumped through at the AASL/ALA offices…

And then it was September, less than a month before the conference, and still, and yet, and we’ll have to see if, and firewalls, and need permissions, and uh oh…
until Damon Abilock of Noodletools.com generously offered server space and (even more important) actual tech support for a semi-official AASL conference blog!!

Check it out:  http://www.noodletools.com/aasl   for up-close-and-personal reports FROM the AASL conference in Pittsburgh.  And my heartfelt gratitude to the volunteers who bravely offered to help get this new publishing venture off the ground! 

 

Thanks to the generosity of fellow bloggers, I can now glean information from various professional conferences without being physically ‘there’ at them!
I started following the PLA blog last January, and now also use RSS feeds for the SLA blog, the LITA blog, and even the unofficial wiki for this year’s ALA conference.
I may not always fully understand what they’re talking about, but it’s still a worthwhile learning experience!

I’m looking forward to learning about/from the NECC and NEA conferences this way, too.

If you’re willing/interested in helping me blog from the AASL conference in October, please let me know! I haven’t settled on a format (and host/server) yet, so any advice will be gratefully accepted. I really think this kind of reportage could be useful as another form of professional development for all school librarians!

Any/all suggestions and willing participants welcome!
Learning is always more fun when you’re doing it with friends.

I’ve been following the news about this misbegotten federal bill proposall that would prohibit states from receiving “any funds under any [Education Department] program or activity” unless it establishes a “parent review and empowerment council” at each local education agency. H.R. 2295 requires parent councils to meet at least every six months to “provide significant input … regarding the purchase or acquisition of any library or classroom-based reference, instructional, or other print material for use in any elementary school,” except textbooks. The councils would be comprised of 5–15 members, most of whom would be parents of students enrolled in that district’s school system.”

Christopher Harris, on his Infomancy blog  remind us that

“This bill presumes that the “highly qualified” teachers and librarians mandated under NCLB are, in fact, incompetent. It assumes, as with filtering software discussed before, that students are incapable of making decisions on their own. This creates an environment where information is driven underground. Information literacy cannot be learned in a controlled environment. Students learn to evaluate the crush of information sources they will face in the world only by encountering examples of good and bad.”

Thanks to Steven Cohen’s Library Stuff for the pointer to Harris’s excellent blog !

Michael Lorenzen’s Information Literacy Land of Confusion blog led me to the resources of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project, “Developed to instruct patrons in the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to understand information fluency. Focuses on teaching people how to locate, evaluate, and integrate digital information.”


Notice that qualifier: digital information. For most librarians, info is info, no matter what format is used to produce it.

Still, I do like their distinction between information LITERACY and information FLUENCY:

“Information Literacy can be defined as “the ability to locate, evaluate and use information.”
21st Century Information Fluency is a sub-set of Information Literacy that might best be described as a combination of aspects of Information Literacy and Technology Literacy that people need to locate, evaluate and use digital information resources efficiently and effectively. We call it “fluency” rather than “literacy” to emphasize that the abilities involved are more than basic abilities. But we know that there is a spectrum of abilities ranging from basic literacy to the more advanced levels we call fluency.”

FWIW, I also think it’s important to clarify the distinction between

• Info-Lit as a concept (embracing that wide spectrum of skills and abilities), and some of the
• Info-Inquiry/Processing Models that are frameworks for developing or scaffolding the skills required to demonstrate information fluency.

Annette Lamb has an excellent overview of the variety of models available.
Too many folks seem to think that Information Literacy and the Big6 (for example) are synonyms.  They’re not: each of the processing models are really just arbitrary sets of ‘steps’ used to teach/demonstrate the skills utilized by an information-fluent person. It’s important to understand — and acknowledge — the difference between the basic concepts and the various processes !

Robert Eiffert, the Librarian at Pacific Middle School in Vancouver WA has posted an impressive collection of links to teaching possibilities for info-lit instruction on his Librarian in the Middle blog.
Lots of good ideas there!

Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader, his book.
3. Every book, its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

was the definitive text of my library-school education.  Over the years those precepts have certainly been bent and stretched to meet the needs of the changing information environment, but the basic principles are still as valid as ever.  A fascinating article, Ranganathan Online, in the 4/1/05 issue of Library Journal, asks do digital libraries violate Ranganathan’s third law?

The authors’ charts and recommendations should be required reading for all library managers.  After all: if resource-provision is our goal, we must make access to those resources as easy (even transparent, to use a current term) as possible!

Salon | 21st: Are we ready for the library of the future?
(found while Googling for images of ‘computers AND books’) — an article written almost 10 years ago addresses an issue that continues to bedevil us:  “Far from becoming keepers of the keys to the Grand Database of Universal Knowledge, today’s librarians are increasingly finding themselves in an unexpected, overloaded role: They have become the general public’s last-resort providers of tech support.”

David Warlick’s ideas always give me new insights to ponder, and this is one of his best:

What our students understand (and that we, as teachers, seem blind to) is that the very nature of information has changed. It’s changed in what it looks like, what we look at to view it, where we find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. We live in a brand new, and dynamically rich information environment, and if we are going to reach our students in a way that is relevant to their world and their future (and ours), then we must teach them from this new information environment. But that’s not the most bottom line. At the heart of our classrooms must be literacy, not technology. If information has changed so much, which I believe is undeniable, then our definition of literacy must also change. We must expand our notions of what it means to be literate, but [by] answering four questions:
What does it mean to be a reader when information is increasingly and almost exclusively networked (coming from anywhere and anyone)?
What does it mean to be a processor of information when information does not come as a dozen numbers on a piece of paper, but as thousands of numbers and they’re digital?
What does it mean to be a communicator when there are so many messages out there that the only ones to be read will be those that compete for attention?
And what are the prevailing ethical implications and responsibilities when the world of information ties us together in ways that makes us more interdependent than we could have dreamed ten years ago?

THE GATES; AN EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE MEMORY:  http://www.gatesmemory.org/

“Using Flickr’s unique photo sharing platform, the Institute for the Future of the Book
will gather pictures of the Gates from anyone and everyone who wants to
contribute. The aim is to harness the creativity and insight of
thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine - one that is
designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive
document of the Gates and our experience of them. 7,500 gates in
Central Park made for infinite views and infinite ways to shoot a
picture. As one observer said, there were as many views of the Gates as
footsteps in the park. In that spirit, there is no pre-determined shape
for this project, other than that it will be online and constantly
evolving according to the contributions, suggestions and innovations of
participants.”


(I certainly hope that this collective memory will include the creative crackers version of the Gates; those images that will certainly stay in MY memory.)



As noted by Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book:
“this project is the beginning of a long-term exploration for us.
Through this work, we are asking: how do we use social software to
create works that are in the spirit of the web - i.e. free-form, ad
hoc, always evolving, and driven by people’s enthusiasm to share - but
are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value? It is that
tension – between frozen and fluid works – that we aim to explore. We
are excited to see the ideas people will bring to the table.”

What a fascinating idea — and what a great concept to use for creating new learning projects:  Instead of ye olde “do a report on (fill in the blank),”  students
could gather/explore images on a topic, and then draw inferences from
that group of images in order to focus their essential
questions!   Since today’s kids are so tuned in to visual
images,
this could be a very powerful hook for new learning activities (and for
teaching effective search strategies along the way). 
For starters, consider using the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery — a vast and wondrous collection of images digitized “from primary sources and printed rarities
including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters,
rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more”  or the Library of Congress’ Prints
& Photographs Online Catalog for
Social Studies projects. 

For another example of how this concept might be used, take a look at 10×10, Jonathan Harris’ fluid look
at the news.