I’m feeling a little self-conscious about the how much I know I have become “one-note Davey” when it comes to talking about what we’re focusing on instructionally in the information literacy, media literacy, research instruction space. To be completely honest it is literally almost all we’ve done instructionally since we started our ’21-’22 school year in the second week of August.

Apologies in advance if you’ve read previous things I’ve shared about Michael Caulfield’s SIFT methodology for checking online sources. If you have, you might want to skip down a few paragraphs.

What is SIFT? – Michael Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, developed a magically simple four-step process for quickly evaluating and contextualizing online sources. The SIFT method, takes techniques and strategies commonly used by professional fact checkers and puts them together in a format simple enough that my 9th graders to learn and successfully apply in a 45-60 minute stand-alone lesson!

Never Waste a Good Crisis – Misinformation/Disinformation has always been with us, but events and the discourse of the last few years seems to have made teachers i work with acutely aware of the need to explicitly teach students skills, strategies, and dispositions needed to discern reputable sources from their less reputable cousins. Living in a new golden age of misinformation isn’t exactly something any of us would wish for but the reality on the ground is that, this is where we are so as librarians it would be a tragedy to waste a crisis foisted upon us.

During the first week of school, I sent versions of the following email to every teacher in our science department.

For the time being SIFT has, temporarily, become the entirety of our high school research curriculum. We have now introduced SIFT to almost every 9th grader through their science classes, and we’ve also had a chance to introduce SIFT to 6 or 7 jr/sr science classes as well (we piloted SIFT for the first time at the end of last year so our older students never got it). If you are just beginning your school year, DON’T WAIT!!!! Approach your science teachers before they get too deep into their content! The storm of misinformation around vaccines and masking has made science teachers very willing partners on infolit instruction! We’ve also found that working with these classes on SIFT has helped us to start collaborative conversations with teachers on other projects and skills they’d like to work together on!

Science teacher: “I really wish our kids could learn APA for science. Why do we have to use MLA?”

Me: “Uh… We don’t only have to use MLA! Nobody ever asked. LET’S DO IT!”

Science teacher: “And when we do that, can you help us with how to use databases?”

What Does all this SIFTing Instruction Look Like? – I use 4 introductory videos that Michael Caulfield created for CIVIX, a non-partisan group based in Canada, and posted to the Ctrl-F channel on Youtube. They’re embedded in a Libguides page and we watch the first two (very short) videos. We give students a sample sources to SIFT and simply have students try the strategies and techniques that have been introduced. When student(s) come to a conclusion we debrief and share the methods and strategies the students tried that helped them find success.

When it seems like the class is comfortable with the tools and strategies, we watch the second two videos and continue with practice samples.

Keep if Fast. Keep it Simple! – The sample sources that we have kids SIFT are meant to be easy to investigate, but I’ve tried to pick examples of sources that let us raise issues and strategies that I want kids to remember.

This sample using the publication Undark is a good starting point that says, “See, you can do this. It’s easy and it’s fast, but it works so it’s worth the investment of 90 seconds BEFORE you read the article!”

This sample using Goop allows us to talk about expertise. “So Gwyneth Paltrow is an Academy Award winning actor, if you were looking for information about becoming a successful actor would she probably be a well qualified source? Does expertise apply across different fields or domains? What do you think of this?”

Interestingly, I’ve had three different students talk about Dr. Fauci being an expert in diseases and vaccines, but maybe not baseball… Hahaha!!!

Being Transparent and a Little Humble Doesn’t Hurt – In the midst of teaching this lesson news broke about the owner of the Snopes site admitting to committing plagiarism. As Michael Caulfield recommends Snopes as a source for reliable, fact-checking, I decided to bring the issue up head on and have honest conversations with students about citation, attribution, and trust. I tell them honestly that I still use and trust Snopes because I have a long history with the site and I’ve checked enough of their stories over time that continue to believe in the integrity of their work as a whole, yet it is frustrating that i now feel the need to have this conversation with students when talking about using Snopes–and that if they don’t feel comfortable with the recommendation that, that is very legitimate and they should use other sites instead.

When students look at the Wikipedia article on the New York Post, they tend to conclude that it is a less than credible tabloid and therefore the story itself must be misinformation. I find that this is a good opportunity to show students the Google News tab where they quickly see that multiple news outlets that they know have reported the same story. This allows us to talk about how the SIFT process often actually doesn’t give us a black and white answer and THAT’S OK because what we are actually seeking as we SIFT is how to place this source IN CONTEXT. Understanding and using what a source has to offer in an appropriate context is also why we typically don’t want to rely too heavily on any single source.

SIFT is a Start, Not an End — Our juniors and seniors pick up on SIFT very quickly. We do some of the same exercises and cover the same ground as with our 9th graders, but with the juniors and seniors we use it as an opportunity to point out how better online journalism or open web sources typically link to the scholarly work that supports claims being made. “Trace those sources as close to their original context as you can get and typically try to cite the source that is the furthest up the chain.”

Reception from Kids — Feedback from students has been amazingly positive. Where there used to be a lot of frustrated eye rolling and heavy sighing from the last row (and sometimes the middle and first rows, too. LOL!!!). I’ve had students tell me, “I can use this!” As I see it, we can teach perfect techniques and strategies for source evaluation, citation, and annotation, but if kids just won’t use them unless they’re coerced to do so for points, we’re not really teaching source evaluation for a real world and for kids’ real lives.

When they leave us as graduates, I want my kids to have the information literacy knowledge, skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for them to thrive in a world of networked information.

• How do I weigh the risks and benefits of a vaccine?
• What are the costs and benefits of this policy on greenhouse gas emissions?
• Is this policy change likely to do what its proponents say it will do and whose hypothesis is more likely to be correct based on their experience and/or expertise?
• Which candidate running in the next election is most likely to represent the positions that I value?

In the highly complex world of networked information that we now finder ourselves navigating, two of the most valuable “commodities” individuals have to invest are our attention and our trust. Until recently, I feel like I haven’t been able to find a way to very effectively help students understand how to discern where and how to invest their attention and their trust. With our work on SIFT I am starting to feel like the pieces are coming together. We certainly have a way to go, but SIFT feels, to me, like we’ve taken a solid first step in the right direction! I hope you’ll give it some consideration in the work that you’re doing!

Happy new school year, everyone!

Happy summer, everyone!

I hope that this post finds you spending some of your summer off doing good work like our colleagues Christina and Tasha, traipsing about in the glens and gorges of Ithaca or sighting eagles in Washington. I too, spent three weeks treating my serious case of “tropical island rock fever induced wanderlust” with three weeks on the East Coast by visiting friends and family in New York, Rhode Island, Boston, and Maine that we haven’t been able to see in two years. On the way home from the East Coast, we stopped off and spent a week catching up with friends and former library colleagues in Los Angeles where we lived for 14 years. I know that there are many of you out there excitedly working on initiatives and projects that you want to implement next year, but very honestly, I just haven’t had it in me to think about my library at all for the last four weeks.

Things I have been thinking about instead of my library…

I’ve been back home here in Honolulu for almost a week now and yesterday I finally mustered the energy to go in and check on the library and pay some bills. It’s really interesting. I initially struggled with burnout pretty significantly during the spring of 2020 when we were in the initial COVID-19 lockdown and we were working completely from home. In October of 2020 we began a lengthy reopening process that saw us bring our PK, 1st, and 2nd graders on campus, then slowly bringing a grade at a time back to school. During this transitional time, middle school and high school faculty were allowed to teach remotely from home or to come to campus and teach remotely from their classrooms or offices. I choose to go to campus and work and teach from my empty library. This experience brought me to the realization that I am a person who is significantly influenced by my physical surroundings. When I was working completely from home my brain thought about the library 24-hours a day. My brain would not stop thinking about work–to the point that it was affecting my sleep. When I was able to return to my library space, the physical separation of my work space and my home space seemed to cue my brain to think about different things in each space. “Oh… We’re here in the library. It’s time to think about that news literacy module that we’re writing” vs. “Oh… I seem to be home now and there’s my bed so I guess I can stop thinking about work stuff and just worry about which of these characters might be Lady Whistledown…”

The experience of the last year and a half has made me realize that I need to pay much closer attention if I want to work with intention so that’s what I’m going to try to do starting right now in the space below. Please know that this is a first draft document…

Things I want to do with intention…

• Reset our Library Culture–I think we had a pretty good pre-pandemic library culture going in our physical library space. We typically were bulging at the seams with kids in the space before and after school, and we had a good number of kids in our space every period of every day. That being said, sometimes I think that we tipped further toward “student lounge” than I sometimes desired. While I was perfectly fine with the balance of work to socializing ratio we had going most of the time, I’d like to work to reset the culture in the space so that we’re pretty loose before and after school, but work on being a little tighter on the “this is a space for relatively quiet work, reflection, and contemplation” during the middle of the day. The fact that our space as been virtually closed to drop in access by students for a year and half is actually a pretty rare opportunity to reset our school communities’ perceptions and expectations for the library as a place. I don’t want to squander that!

• Build on “The Library is an Instructional Department” Mindset–Let’s be real, the pandemic has been hard and painful, but a silver lining in this experience has been that many more of our faculty colleagues have begun to see that the “Mid-Pacific Library” is ACTUALLY just as much an instructional program as it is a physical space. This is a mindset shift that I’ve worked to instill since I got to Mid-Pacific 7 years ago, but having an opportunity to able to work with teachers and their classes both synchronously and asynchronously WITHOUT A PHYSICAL LIBRARY SPACE seems to finally have helped a significant number of faculty let go of their pre-pandemic notions of what the “library” is; what the “library” has to offer; and what librarians know and can do! I’m hoping that we can continue to foster the new collaborations that emerged over the last year and a half and that these new “willing partners” will bring some of their friends along for the ride as well!

• Lead the Way on “Non-Discipline Specific Concepts and Competencies”–Over the last year and a half, teachers’ reality ALL OVER THE WORLD, has been that they just have not been able to teach all the content, skills, and competencies that they thought they were teaching in a pre-pandemic world. Going virtual, virtually overnight and then having to teach cohorts of kids that were socially distanced with some learning from home, etc. really forced teachers to ask themselves WHAT REALLY MATTERS in what I’m teaching. I’ve started asking our academic curriculum chairs’ group and other teachers we’ve collaborated with, “So, when your students are 35 and perhaps working in a field that might not be directly related to your subject what concepts, competencies/skills do you want them to remember from this course/project?” What I’m finding is that the resulting discussions have frequently produced opportunities for us to collaborate on instruction in the information literacy, media literacy, and news literacy spaces that seemingly weren’t as available to us in the past. I’m hoping to keep this question on the front burner with our academic curriculum chairs’ group in the coming year.

I’m sure there’s a lot more, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I’d love to hear what you hope to do with intention in the upcoming year. Please his reply and share what you’re thinking in the comments below!

Have a safe, restorative, AND WONDERFUL rest of the summer, all!

Aloha!

PS–Something I suppose I’m not super intentional about is that someday I’d like to have six pack abs, but… Alas… Carbs are SO DELICIOUS!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I’ve been a Libguides user for YEARS and I must say…

I ❤️ Libguides

I also know that I’m not alone. WAY BACK in 2014, CD McLean posted Libguides: My Most Favorite Tool.

I think the folks over at their parent company, Springshare, call them, “Lib [like liberty] guides,” but I don’t care and with my kids I’ve always referred to them “L-eye-b guides” since they’re guides to the library. I’ve heard other librarians argue that we should call them “research guides” since the platform branding really isn’t the concept we’re shooting for in our information skills instruction and that makes TOTAL SENSE, but I don’t care so I still call them “L-eye-b guides.”

Really, though, you know it’s been a long year. Let’s just all smile and agree to say it my way… Thanks for your cooperation! LOL!

If you’re not a Libguides user, no worries, it’s not all that complicated. At its most basic the Libguides platform is really just a really good and rather elegant web authoring and hosting platform. I think the reason that I’ve been so taken with Libguides over the years, though, is that it’s web authoring software that behaves like it was designed by librarians for librarians–the tools are tailored for librarians to very quickly and IMHO pretty intuitively organize content and resources the way that librarians want to organize content and resources.

A week or two ago librarian extraordinaire, Matt Ball, asked how people organized their database offerings to help students select the most appropriate database for their information need. The thread that transpired led to an interesting discussion that surfaced some really fascinating factors that librarians consider when creating the digital portal to their library’s resources and services. Things that people appeared to weigh as they organized resources for their students seemed to include:

• What is your student population like?
• At what grades or age groups is your site aimed?
• Are all of your students Academic Search Complete or JSTOR power researchers or do you need to meet a broader range of research needs?
• Are you a laptop school? iPad school? Other?
• Is your curriculum structured and consistent where you know that middle ages primary source project is going to be launching in February so you can plan or are your students’ projects completely different from year-to-year?

Clearly, there were many more, but you get the idea. What I found fascinating was that librarians in the discussion indicated that they were having a lot of success with the A to Z database list feature in Libguides. As a librarian, I find this feature so freaking elegant! I LOVE it! But, alas, after I set it up, my kids found it bewildering and just wouldn’t use it.

We ended up using a more graphic approach to organizing our databases. Kids generally just wouldn’t read the scope notes and other text so I just got rid of all of it. It looks like here at Mid-Pacific we will be returning to all face-to-face instruction next fall so we’ll probably stick with our current database organization, but our icon only format only works if you have in-class face time with kids so they’ve been introduced to searching in Gale in Context: High School–otherwise known as that “pretty purple icon that’s probably a pretty good place to start almost any search” ahead of time.

I supposed this is all just a very long winded way of explaining, that as much as I love Libguides, I’m not really sure that I’m using enough of their elegantly powerful tools to justify my annual subscription costs. My program is decently funded, but I don’t have the luxury of a bottomless budget bucket and I’m finding that emerging digital resources like Sora for our eBooks and digital streaming databases that I’m think are becoming a new necessity are really forcing me to find efficiencies in my spending so I can stretching my budget as far as it can possibly go. Over the past two or three years I’ve thought long and hard about whether I can do what we’re doing on Libguides with Google Sites, Weebly, or other service. Each year, I’ve chosen to stay with my Libguides, but I’m finding it harder and harder.

Factors I’ve weighed in deciding to stay with Libguides or head off in a new direction:

I work with an younger librarian who is an amazing, talented, excellent, and hugely creative partner in the library, but I’m also a huge control freak. Our Libguides templates give us each flexibility to build research guides for classes with our own style, but keeps the look and feel on our site as a whole, consistent enough that no matter where you are on our site, you know you’re at the Mid-Pacific Library. .

We originally created “admin guides” that housed all of our main resources. When we were building project-specific research guides, we placed “linked boxes” on the new research guide. That new offspring box continued to be live linked to its parent on our admin page. When a database icon or URL got updated, replacing the new icon on the admin guide parent box automatically updates the icon on all of the offspring boxes everywhere else on our site. It’s elegant and saved us time which was hugely helpful when you’re a 2 librarian department in a PK-12 school with 1500+ students.

That being said, as time went on I found that as a 1:1 iPad school, our students seem to prefer a single long page that they scroll with most of the information in fewer boxes (Libguides boxes rearranged themselves and move around a page in a way that can be confusing when on a mobile device). That, combined with our move toward more icon and graphics dependent design lead to me doing far more “copying” of database buttons than use of linked boxes. I’m guessing there are better work flows to achieve what I do, but the result is that my work flow has negated the elegant linked box, parent box/offspring box capability of Libguides. When I last had to do a global update of some URLs, I was able to make do with a find/replace search from the admin page, but even now, I’m not super sure that I caught ALL of the necessary URLs that needed updating.

If I really had to, I know I could put together a simplified and probably a little more static web presence for my library. I’m just barely comfortable enough with HTML that I can make minor tweaks and get a page to do what I want it to do. That said, I think it would take more time and there would be some trade offs that wouldn’t kill me, but that I just really would prefer to not have to deal with if possible.

In the end, I think that I’ve continued to ante up the pretty significant subscription renewal because I am comfortable with the platform and I can get resources put together quickly with minimal thinking/learning as far as the authoring platform is concerned. I, honestly, don’t think that that is a wrong or a poor decision. It just, however, troubles me because those extra few hundred dollars mean fewer print books that get added to our K-2 collection or our MS/HS collection. Maybe I just need to get over the guilt and say, “It costs more, but I’m worth it! It’s OK to spend money on myself once in a while!” #LOL but also #Sigh

So that’s it… I’m still in love with Libguides, but I have wandering eye just to be sure it continues to be the right tool for my particular school’s needs.

How to you build your library’s web presence? If you’ve got a cost effective way to make stuff look good that you find works well, I’d REALLY love to hear (and see, so please share links to your library pages) about how you’re handling things! I love my Libguides, but I’ve got wandering eyes! 😉

PS–I’d love to see links to any and all Libguides alternatives, but if you’re a Libguides user, I’d love to see how you organize your resources too! Please hit reply and share a link to your site below!

Under different circumstances, I would be opening my first post of 2021 by offering a platitude wishing everyone a Happy New Year accompanied by a humorous-to-me gif, but given the events that unfolded in Washington, D.C. today, that just isn’t what I’m feeling at the moment. In fact, I’m not sure what to feel in this moment beyond feeling rather heartbroken for the where we find ourselves.

When it comes to my work, I tend to be someone who is averse to risk. I don’t perform well in “brainstorming sessions” because I so dislike/fear sharing thoughts and ideas that aren’t well formed that I spend all my energy managing my anxiety rather than participating in the process. The thing is that when it comes to things like the US Capitol Building being stormed by a mob of protestors seemingly based largely on misinformation and disinformation, the teachers, administrators, and students with whom we work are going to expect librarians to say SOMETHING. What I’m struggling with this afternoon is what this means for my work tomorrow and in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Be warned… This is kind of a mess… It is, what it is…

On Breaking News…

I’m thinking that this might be a good time to talk with teachers and students about how to contextualize “breaking news.” This came to mind. It’s old, but holds up very well…

On Quality Journalism…

I need to stop being so afraid to explicitly tell kids, “I generally give more weight to mainstream media sources. Here is why I do that…” This entire module on quality journalism is good, but I sometimes have just used sections 1-6 as a way to contextualize source evaluation lessons. I will be talking about this a LOT more.

On “Motivated Reasoning”…

On Types of Misinformation…

We need to talk about the different types of misinformation that kids are likely to encounter.

On Emotional Health…

Talking about the news of the day is depressing or anxiety inducing for some–It is for me… I tend to be a “defensive-pessimist.” Basically, my kind of flippant personal motto since I was kid has always kind of been, “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.” That is, when I took tests in my HS chemistry class I always left the room hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. I recently came across this piece on The Stockdale Paradox that actually helped me understand why it seemed to work for me. Maybe it will speak to one of you…

A Final Thought for Now…

Our school President, shared a lengthy message with our faculty today and I read it in a moment when i was struggling to deal with what I was seeing. This excerpt from his longer message spoke to me and maybe it’ll speak to you.

I think I found my theme for the coming year, “Character will prevail…”

Hoping you are all safe and doing as well as might be expected. Wishing you all the very best, friends.

I hope my final AISL post of 2020 finds you either already enjoying some well deserved time away from your libraries or that you will be heading off to start your winter break very shortly.

Butter Cookies, Beignets, and Gingerbread Man Time…

Here at Mid-Pacific we begin our school year in the first week of August so, for us, this week marks the end of our first semester. I know that the end of a term is typically extremely busy for many libraries, but in our heavily project-based learning curriculum, demand for library services tends to come early in the semester when projects launch and then about a month before the end of a term when the bulk of work is in progress. Interestingly, the very end of a term tends to be the time when we catch up on cataloging, weeding, cleaning up catalog records, and other “good librarian’s do this” stuff that I HATE doing. I’ve deemed this period butter cookie, beignet, and gingerbread man time because I hate these tasks so much that the only way I can make myself do them is by telling myself, “Catalog 5 things, then you can go to the work room and have a butter cookie, one of the chocolate beignets, or one of the gingerbread men.” It means that I usually have to swap over to the fat pants in my closet about two weeks in, but it also means that I don’t get fired so… #TradeOffs #Pragmatism

A Gift from Santa Your Email Inbox (and No, Not the SPAM Kind from Random Library Vendors that Want to Meet Your Printer Toner Needs) …

Sometimes, though, as you’re wiping the stray powdered sugar from that delicious chocolate beignet off your face, your email notification chimes and you get a random gift that’s so unexpected that all you can do is rub your eyes (you know, metaphorically, because it’s a pandemic and you should never touch your eyeballs) and read it over and over…

I got this email from a 10th grade STEM teacher in our multidisciplinary Mid-Pacific eXploratory [MPX] program:

Hi Dave, saw this.  We have been following the vaccine in class.  How do we turn this into a lesson? https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/tech/covid-19-vaccine-misinformation-social-media/index.html

So, I’ve been thinking about what to do with this…

When Trying to Grow Information Literate Humans, Can Less be More?

I recently came across this article on Why the ‘Paradox Mindset’ is the Key to Success on how “embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.” I’ve been thinking about that piece a lot lately. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel like I’m working super hard getting all sweaty everyday, and teaching bundles of skills, yet never seeming to get to the point where I feel like we’re sending students out into the world with the degree of information literacy that they need in order to thrive in a networked, polarized world. I’m ready to try something different. I’m wondering if 5 minutes of library instruction can be more productive than 85 minutes. I know that’s crazy talk, but hear me out.

When I think back to my days as an elementary classroom teacher focusing on developing students’ reading literacy, nobody ever expected that reading literacy would come in 6 discrete reading lessons a year. Literacy just doesn’t develop that way. I don’t know why, but it occurs to me that I seem to be trying grow information literate young adults in 6 library lessons a year. When I really think about it, it looks a lot like a fool’s errand.

This is grossly oversimplifying, but literacies, I suppose, develop when students are able to put skills, concepts, and strategies together and apply them to complex, faceted contexts that they haven’t seen before. With reading literacy, when I say skills and concepts I’m thinking things like:

• Letter-sound relationships
• Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends
• In English we read from left to right and from top to bottom
• Etc.

And when I say strategies, I’m thinking about things like:

• What should I do when I come to word I don’t know?
• Based on the title and the illustration, can I predict what this book is about?
• Does the information that I think I’m getting as I read this story match my prediction or is it causing cognitive dissonance?
• Etc.

When it Comes to Information Literacy or News Literacy Instruction, We Need to Keep it Simple, but Keeping it Simple is Super Not Simple… 👀

If we ever hope to help students truly become #NewsLiterate or #InformationLiterate, I think we’re going to have to make our news literacy and information literacy instruction look and feel more like reading instruction looks in our elementary classrooms. We need to find ways to teach specific discrete skills and specific strategies in multiple ways over sustained periods of time with lots of opportunities for students to practice application in different contexts. I know that’s a horribly constructed sentence, but I hope you get what I mean.

Half-Baked Thoughts: What If…?

I think that’s what we need to do, but I’m in uncharted territory so I’m feeling stuck and all I have to offer here is my half-baked thoughts on a half-baked plan for some news literacy instruction that we hope to begin working on sometime in January.

What if, instead an 80-minute library lesson, we taught news literacy skills and concepts in the form of short 5-10 minute lessons and activities over a sustained period of time? The pandemic hasn’t been any fun, but if we’re going to have to take the negatives, we may as well embrace the silver linings in the black clouds. We’ve gotten pretty good a making short instructional screencasts and teachers here have become really comfortable having librarians Zooming into their hybrid (most of our students, PK-12, are on campus for face-to-face instruction, but almost every class or section has a few students who are learning virtually) for short “just in time” instruction. We are finding that having the technology in place and working with teachers who are now comfortable with virtual/hybrid instruction is giving us a lot more freedom and flexibility to deliver library instruction in different ways. As in:

“Hey Dave, my kids don’t know anything about in-text citation or works cited!”

“Yeah… No, the frosh haven’t had any instruction on it yet, but do you want me to Zoom into your class RIGHT NOW? I can if you want…”

Sometimes our service is a screencast; sometimes it is a short Zoom session with a class; sometimes it is meeting in a breakout room with a segment of a class; and sometimes is is face-to-face in a teacher’s room.

Here’s What I’m Thinking, But I Need Help Figuring Out How to Make It Work – CSI: InfoLit Edition…

Rather than schedule an 80 minute library lesson on news literacy or source evaluation, I want to try 3-10 minutes of instruction or activities with our 10th grade MPX STEM sections, everyday for 2 weeks. Some days, we’ll teach or demonstrate a skill or concept and on other days we’ll try some guided practice applying the fact checking or source evaluation skills and strategies that we’ve introduced. At the end of two weeks, I’d like students to have to come up with a deliverable of some kind that demonstrates their ability to apply the skills, concepts, and strategies presented.

At some point earlier this year, I had a conversation with AISL librarian Nancy Florio who mentioned that she had her research seminar students record narrated screencasts of their database search efforts to demonstrate what they’d learned in her class. I thought the idea was genius so we’re thinking that at the end of the instructional module, perhaps we can give students sample sources and have them create narrated instructional screencast that demonstrate how they would fact check, verify, and/or place the source in a broader context before sharing it on social media or using it for a research project which we’ll then share out to their parents as a virtual presentation of learning.

The Format…

On instructional days, show or review an information literacy video that we already have on hand or record new screencasts presenting the skill or concept.

Something kind of like this:

During the next class meeting, present students with a source for them to fact check and evaluate, then briefly debrief the techniques members of the class used to achieve success.

Hoping to Hear from You!

I know it’s not a lot, but that’s where I am right now. That’s all we’ve got. I’ve love to hear about any thoughts, suggestions, concerns, better ideas…

I’m not completed wedded to these ideas, but I’m hoping that getting students to think about source evaluation concepts, skills, and strategies over a more sustained period of time might help to build an information mindsets that leans toward skepticism and determining context, but that avoid turning students into cynics–skepticism is good, cynicism not so much…

I’ve come to believe that when students feel overwhelmed by source evaluation they either:

• Become cynical and believe that there’s no way to discern “truth” in any form so they just use the first thing they find that le’s them fill their perceived information need get that assignment off of their todo lists.

-or-

• They literally don’t know HOW to investigate a source’s accuracy; origin of a claim; or discern whether a source’s creator has political or financial conflicts of interest that may influence the context for the information presented.

I’m hoping this might be a way to combat those scenarios with a little more success.

That’s All I’ve Got, Friends…

Wishing you all a restful, safe, socially-distanced, healthy, well deserved time away from your libraries. I’m so grateful for everyone in AISL. In spite of the year that has been 2020, you all help me to remember that the world is #MostlyGood and will continue to be so because we choose to make it so. Thank you for being my community!

[Edited: 12/19/2020] Checkology and NewsLitCamps!

Thank you to AISL Librarian, Lia, for her reminder about resources available through Checkology and the News Literacy Project! While we’re at it, please consider attended one of the News Literacy Project’s NewsLItCamps for educators! A number of AISL librarians attended the December 10th event. I thought it was an amazing experience! There is a NewsLitCamp scheduled for January 23rd. Details and registration information is available here: Jan. 26: CNN (Virtual: Open to educators nationwide). The event is free!

Happy Fall, All!

I hope this post finds you all hitting your “It’s not the beginning of the school year anymore so here we go, people!!!” stride.

Figuring out what to post every other month is really challenging. I always hope to share something new but you know, as a “librarian of a certain age,” to be honest, I’ve reached the point where I think I might be posting about things that I’ve already posted. So, if that’s true… Sorry!!! It’s hard to keep coming up with new stuff. Besides, new episodes of The Boys (parental guidance suggested) and The Great British Baking Show (fun for the whole family) have started dropping every Friday so I kinda, sorta also have other demands on my time these days… 🤣

Anyway, back in February of 2018, Courtney Walker wrote a really fantastic post on Hyper Docs for Hyper Connection in which she shared how she was collaborating with a colleague to use hyperdocs for her research instruction. I’d played with hyperdocs a bit in the past, but we had instructional methods in place that seemed to be working for us so I kind of just tagged the idea in my #ThingsToStealAtSomePointInTheFuture and moved on.

After planning all spring and summer for an in-person opening of the 2020-2021 school year, a significant spike in Covid cases in our State forced us to open the year completely virtual. Experience from our move to emergency virutal learning in the spring of 2020 made it clear to all that 85 minute blocks of virtual synchronous instruction were just not viable or sustainable ways to deliver instruction so TA-DA!!! The time seemed right to revisit and steal the hyperdoc concept!

Emergency Virtual Instruction vs. Starting a New School Year Virtually…

I don’t know about the rest of you out there in LibraryLand, but I’m finding the way that emergency virtual librarianship manifested itself last March to be COMPLETELY different than starting a new school year virtually. Our teachers were no longer dealing with a completely unknown form of instruction and most of our faculty seemed comfortable enough with the technology that they seemed to feel comfortable going back to more project-based/inquiry-based instruction in line with our school’s philosophy of learning. Beyond that, an amazing number of teachers who had never worked with us in the past began requesting help with sources and instruction. It’s been a little like school librarian buffet of opportunity for us!

The Pragmatics of InfoLit Instruction…

Opportunities that come with requests for help are wonderful, but there is the reality that we are a PK-12 school with 1500 students and two MLIS librarians. Given those parameters, our mission as a library program is to assure that information literacy and research skills are being taught and taught well–not to teach all of the research and information literacy instruction ourselves. Hyperdocs are emerging as one tool we are using as we work to be an instructional presence in students’ research and information literacy endeavors while reducing our instructional load on procedural and “work flow” kinds of issues. Done right, much of the instructional support content can be recycled and reused on multiple projects. The goal is to make as much “library work” asynchronous-able as possible so that when we have actual face-to-face time with students we are doing instruction that is hardest to commoditize with canned tutorials–I’m thinking things like:

• How to broaden or narrow a research topic
• How to refine your keyword search terms to find what you need
• How to paraphrase
• Where else to search when you can’t find what you need in Gale High School and Academic Search Complete
• Etc.

Addressing Just in Time vs. Just in Case Instruction: All Library Instruction that Can Be Commoditized Should be Commoditized…

What I truly love about employing hyperdocs in our instruction is that it gives us a way to offer instruction to kids just in time–just before they need to do something while also freeing us to skip laborious and torturous instruction with kids who don’t need it. I am someone who HATES having my time wasted. PLEASE don’t make me sit though another meeting about stuff I know. I get it, sometimes we need to be sure that everybody understands the school’s sexual harassment policy or other necessary basic things. That is repetition that is needed and in those cases we each do our best to learn SOMETHING from the experience. As a librarian, I sometimes feel that everything I teach rises to this level of importance, but let’s face it, if the 14 year old sitting in front of me knows how to set up a new project in NoodleTools or locate a preformatted citation for an article in a database she really shouldn’t have to sit through Mr. Wee’s lessons on those things AGAIN–you know, even though he’s super entertaining, hilarious, and easy on the eyes… #Hahaha!!! #Eyeroll

Our First Test Drive with Students…

Our first hyperdoc outing of the 2020-2021 school year was with 8th graders in a science class. Because our spring semester of the 2019-2020 school year was so topsy-turvey and we were launching the school year virtually for the first time ever, our 8th grade science teachers decided to ease students into their first “research” project. The stakes and content were purposely and wisely kept low. Many, many moving pieces–over the summer, our school transitioned from Google Meets to Zoom; a system upgrade meant that students all received new active directory usernames and passwords; and we moved to an 8-day rotating class schedule. Teachers’ desired outcomes included:

• Introducing students to a new middle school digital work flow
• Introducing/Reviewing database research skills
• Making sure everybody could login to Google Drive and school databases from home
• Reviewing note taking skills
• Learning students’ personalities, abilities, strengths, challenges, work habits, etc.

Taking the hyperdoc out for a test drive with actual middle school students was a really interesting learning experience. A significant amount of the instructional focus with this project wasn’t specifically “library research” instruction as much as digital work flow instruction that students typically use in just about every library research project through high school. We did end up spending a good amount of time creating the tutorials that we embedded into the students’ hyperdoc, but I saw it as a very good investment of time because we were able to reuse the tutorials for multiple projects at numerous grade levels. Because the tutorials were embedded directly into the hyperdoc adjacent to each task, we were able to quickly walk students through each part of the hyperdoc; let them work on the tasks independently; and while the majority of kids worked independently we were freed to move into Zoom breakout rooms and trouble-shoot with individual students who needed extra help.

Iterating and Fixing Stuff Based on Things We Learned Along the Way…

Immediately after finishing our instructional arc with our 8th graders, we got to meet up with our 7th graders. They were working on a similar introductory project with, largely, the same desired outcomes.

We built our first hyperdocs in Google Docs using tables. We are a 1:1 iPad school and in our first outing we discovered some issues and frustrating limitations with the Google Doc app for iPad. If you begin taking notes with a numbered list, for example, if you move to a new table in the document the numbers cannot be restarted. #DearGooglePleaseFixThis

To work around this issue, we built our second hyperdoc for our 7th graders in Google Slides which worked far better than Google Docs for our purposes. Each slide serves as it’s own independent page; the slide navigator in Slides allows one to navigate to different sections of a hyperdoc very quickly and intuitively; and since students are more comfortable working with Slides than with tables in Docs, adding new slides for additional sources didn’t require any explanation.

Coloring slide backgrounds to group tasks together proved to be very helpful with 7th graders. “Right now, we’re looking at the green slide–step #2.”

A Last Google Drive Tip to Keep in Your Pocket Just in Case…

After you’ve built your project hyperdoc and you want to share your hyperdoc with students, there are few ways to tweak your Google URL to change its behavior when it’s clicked.

Epilogue…

So far, so good. As soon as we concluded with our 7th graders, our 8th graders returned with a 2nd science project with more science and research content. We pushed a new hypderdoc out to students and we were able to get to our actual research instruction work far more quickly the second time around.

We work with some teachers building BEAUTIFUL hyperdocs. Some of those teachers build their own and incorporate our tutorials. Our hyperdocs tend to be more utilitarian, but they’re getting the job done.

If you’re using hyperdocs in your instruction, please reply below with a link to a sample. I’d love to see what you’re doing and how you’re doing it!

Have a great week, everyone!

When last we came together in this space, I was happily going about making plans to reopen my library for face-to-face service to limited numbers of students.

The world out there…

We watched with horror and empathy for our neighbors in the Pacific Northwest the Northeast as the virus raged through communities and overwhelmed their medical systems. In Hawaii we had daily counts of new COVID-19 cases of 5, 10, and on bad days a dozen new cases per day. Like much of the rest of the country, we locked down to flatten our curve. Travel to Hawaii was, basically, shut down. Rather than the roughly 33,000-35,000 passengers to the islands that arrive by air on a spring/summer day in a typical year, Hawaii was seeing in the very low hundreds of air passenger arrivals per day–most of them were thought to be residents returning home or essential workers moving to the islands.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

We set about planning for reopening by distancing all of our furniture so that masked students could be 3 foot distanced if facing the same direction or 6 foot distanced if they were facing each other. Computers were removed from our desktop area. Tables were rearranged in our Library Classroom, and plexiglass dividers were ordered for our library tables and circ desk.

After accomplishing our directive and goals, we proudly sat back and I started to rest and recharge for the start of the 20-21 school year!

The world out there…

About the time, that I started getting ready to enjoy my summer staycation (because, you know, I’m not a fool that’s going to fly to virus plagued NYC when I live on an isolated archipelago with almost no COVID and my condo has a pool…). At about this time, schools in many locales began seriously looking at 6 foot social distancing all around and REQUIRED, rather than just RECOMMENDED, masks in classrooms. I was extremely grateful that my school administration had, by then, VERY EXPLICITLY established that any return to campus would include a requirement that any child or adult on campus would be REQUIRED to wear a PPE at all times.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

With emerging guidance from the Hawaii Department of Health my administration took the lead in asking our reopening committee to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure all spaces on campus for 6 foot social distancing all around.

The library staff developed policies for class visits, plans for materials purchasing, plans for circulation, plans for tracking students entering the library. Our IT and ET staff helped us remove more computers, we removed more tables from our classroom space, got rid of all of the library’s “comfy” furniture, and we began rethinking ways that we might tweak delivery of services to students from K-12.

At the same time, other groups on campus worked on plans to keep students monitored at all times during the day to help them maintain safe social distancing and even more furniture (including teachers’ desks) were removed from classrooms to allow every single square inch of space to be used for social distancing in classrooms. A new schedule that might lend itself to an easier transition to virtual learning in a worst case scenario that saw us return to fully virtual instruction was developed and rolled out, and our AC units were upgraded with UV cleaning systems and higher quality filters.

The world out there…

People, for whatever reason, were growing weary of life under lockdown. As our community started to reopen from lockdown and people began to return to parks, stores, restaurants, and streets (still under a required mask mandate) little by little people just seemed to grow weary of the social distancing and masking that had kept our COVID rates so enviously low. Reports of things like huge beach parties in protected shoreline areas. A huge rock jumping contest attended my many kids without social distancing or masks. Predictably our rate of new COVID cases began to skyrocket.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

We put the finishing touches on our direction arrows. Put down our socially distanced “stand here” dots to facilitate queuing in various areas of the library, and were pretty much ready for school to start. Just over a week out from the first day of instruction, all of the public schools and just about all of the independent schools on Oahu announced that almost everyone would be starting the school year virtually so, once again, EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED.

Meanwhile, [NOT] back at the library…

I’m writing this as we prepare to switch from Google Meet to Zoom as our online instruction platform; my co-librarian, Nicole, and I are putting together our new Library and Technology 6 class that we will be teaching for the first time; and I’m preparing to be a virtual librarian for at least the next few weeks.

Physical cues matter… (At least to me, they do…)

As I’ve worked IN my library for the last few days, one of the things I’ve come to realize is how important the physical separation of my library life and my home life is to my personal mental health, my wellbeing, and my productivity–I get SO MUCH MORE done when I am working at school. While we were on lockdown and virtual librarian-ing from home in the spring, I truly struggled to stop librarian-ing each evening so I ended up thinking about work for, what seemed like, 20 hours a day. I’ve come to realize that when I’m working in the library the physical space tells me that it is time for me to work. When I get home, the change of my physical space signals my subconscious self that it is time to stop working and be a spouse/son/uncle/friend. As we enter a new phase of virtual education, I’ve decided that I will probably try do quite a bit of my virtual work from the library if we are virtual, but not under broader shelter-in-place orders. It is just something that seems that it will work better for me.

I’ve also made the decision to take all work accounts off my personal electronic devices. When I am working, I will be on a school device and when I am using digital platforms to visit with my friends and family, I will do that on personal devices. I seem to be a person that has a brain that needs physical cues in order to switch gears.

Sometimes we can solve, but sometimes we just cope and that’s ok…

It’s really exhausting and stressful to have everything you know how to do suddenly feel null. In a PD session earlier this week, an educational psychologist that Zoomed in to work with our faculty on our own mental wellbeing asked us to differentiate between problems and dilemmas. His point, as I understood it, was that problems have solutions so we should work on finding ways to solve problems. Dilemmas, though, are part of the fabric of life. They are things, like pandemics, that we as individuals have little ability to solve based on our individual decisions or actions, so we should focus instead on how to cope with the dilemma. With dilemmas we work to mitigate the negatives, but we simply cannot look at a future need to revisit and change how we’ve tried to cope because our reality is that there are no solutions for us to suddenly find.

Finding solutions to invisibility…

One of our biggest problems when we went to emergency virtual teaching last spring was that we, as librarians, felt like we became suddenly invisible (and believe me, my colleague and I are very different by personality, but we aren’t typically people that are easily missed within our school community). One way Nicole and I are trying to make ourselves more visible to our students and teachers in our virtual environment is that we’ll be rolling out short 5 minute or less videos for teachers to show to their classes. We’re planning to try targeting teachers in different subjects depending on the topic, theme, or skill being emphasized in each video. It, honestly, feels really weird to have your face in the corner of your screencasts, but we decided that it was important for students to see our faces in order to be a visual presence as well as a voice. We hope that students will feel like they “know” us a little better over time and that will serve us well when we finally get to work with students in a 3-dimensional space.

The production values are admittedly low. I don’t want us spending too much time making things perfect and pretty so I’m trying to get over my slow talking, weird phrasing, and awkward pauses. I just want to have a way to get info lit concepts out to our kids that’s relevant, authentic to our personalities, and a little informal, without too much fussing…

On the horizon…

I talk a good game, but honestly, I’m struggling with the idea of going back to virtual learning. Here’s the thing, though, this afternoon, I realized that we actually won’t be “going back” to what we did in an instant back in March when we had to implement “emergency virtual learning.” Last spring, teachers and students just didn’t have the “bandwidth” to switch everything online AND think about incorporating library and research work into that mix.

As we move toward opening school year 2020-2021… virtually … we’ve already been approached for research lessons and support than was our pre-COVID-19 norm at the start of a year. So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves.

Hahaha!!! That last sentence, “So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves.” sounds EXACTLY like something that would be posted on the Typical EduCelebrity Twitter feed ( @educelebrity ) which is sooooo worth following!!! But sometimes what makes parody funny is that it is based in truth.

So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves!

Take care everyone! And Happy New School Year!!!

Happy summer, all!

This is the time of year when I’d typically be off looking for a new restaurant in New York or searching for super cheap airline flights from New York to some exciting sounding country that I’ve never had a chance visit with the hope that I could chuck some clothes into my beat up carryon rolley bag and go on an international adventure for a week or two.

This is 2020 so, yeah, EVERYTHING’S CHANGED this year.

Any travel out of the state of Hawaii means a mandatory 14-day quarantine upon your return so this summer finds me staying put (Hello, #RockFever) doing some virtual summer school librarianship and working with committees of people developing plans for the reopening of school in August.

I am so incredibly grateful to work with a school administration that always gives our library program a seat at the table when there are decisions that need to be made that may impact our physical space, budget, or instructional programming. The thing about being included in decision-making when you are trying to make plans to respond to a pandemic is that, it takes A LOT OF MEETINGS! The reality, though, is that PLANS NEED TO BE MADE. They can be made with my input or they can be made for me. Given the choice, I am enough of a control freak that I’d rather take part in a lot of meetings and be able to help shape my program’s destiny as much as might be possible.

What follows is an in-process-kinda-ugly-doing-the-best-we-can-based-on-what-we-know-so-it-might-look-all-different-in-August snapshot of what our planning looks like for reopening our library in August #CrossesFingersAndToes

Stuff Needs to be Ordered…

My library is on an island 2500 miles away from the West Coast of the United States. We don’t have the luxury of flipping through a Demco catalog, ordering stuff, and having a truck roll up to the Facilities Management loading dock 5-7 business days later. I am incredibly grateful to have committees of really competent folk working on the vast majority of the logistical planning and procurement of supplies needed for reopening.

• Masks and face shields – Our school will be providing 2 masks and a face shield to every student and faculty member.
• Pexiglass shielding for our Circulation Desk – Our awesome facilities manager took care of measuring and ordering shielding that will be installed for us.
• Pexiglass dividers for library tables – We have round tables that are 4-feet wide. We will be trying 4-way dividers that will allow students to be shielded from each other, but still able to see each other.

Some Behavioral, Policy, and Instructional Changes…

• Entrance and exit – Given our library’s physical layout, one of the more noticeable changes that we are probably going to make is that we have traditionally had a single door for where EVERYONE entered and exited the library. Given the way that entrance is configured, we will be having people enter the library through our traditional front doors, but exit through what has always been a “Fire Exit Only” door in order to minimize shoulder-to-shoulder congestion.
• Calculating facility capacity – A facilities committee is working to calculate our library’s “Corona capacity” for our space. When we have a number, we will work on signage and we are currently trying to figure out a the best logistical way to keep count of the number of students that enter the library during any single period. I’ve looked into electronic counters. Bi-directional counters are either incredibly expensive or highly inaccurate so we’re still figuring this one out.
• Limiting co-mingling – It saddens me greatly, but like many of your school libraries, before and after school our library is a central meeting hub for significant numbers of students. One of the great joys of school librarianship for me is to get to know kids as they informally gather to commiserate on how hard the statistics homework was, to recap the great play their softball teammate executed, deliver the bigly romantic promposal, or to be consoled when your girlfriend just broke up with you… That’s not gonna be making a comeback in our library in the fall–at least initially. The current plan as I understand it seems to be that students will be assigned to “home base” spaces around campus to minimize gathering before school, after school, during lunch, and during free periods.
• Temporarily changing our collection development priorities – We’ve decided to launch Overdrive Sora in the fall. Along with that change, we have decided that eBooks will make up the vast majority of our acquisitions for the next school year.
• Bu-bye collaboration rooms – I’m thinking that it’ll be pretty unlikely that we will be able to allow students to use our group study rooms. We might be able to allow use as single occupant study rooms, but I’m guessing that getting students to maintain social distance or mask and shield use in our study rooms is just not terribly realistic.
• Public library cards – We are in the unique position of being, I believe, the only state in the US with a single statewide library system. Our administration is supporting our efforts to better integrate Hawaii State Public Library System resources into our instructional work flows by requiring that all of our families acquire library cards for their students. This policy will give us some needed flexibility should, heaven forbid, we have to unexpectedly close campus and go back to an all virtual instructional model. We will, of course, continue to subscribe to our portfolio of databases but one thing that became clear from the world’s sudden move to emergency virtual instruction is that school libraries should be teaching the value of LIBRARIES–not just OUR SCHOOL’S library. Going forward, we will be teaching our students how to search the public library’s book and ebook collections and, when appropriate, promoting the occasional use of a public library database when it might be appropriate for a student’s specific research need.

To be Determined…

• Minimizing High Touch Sharing – What do we do about the library desktop computers and our laptop cart? We’re a 1:1 iPad school. Sometimes classes need laptops/desktops to work on. We still haven’t figure this one out.

This is all very “up in the air” and “to be determined” and though I like flying to get when I’m traveling somewhere, neither are states that I typically love being in when it comes my work. I’d love to hear about the state of your reopening plans. Please hit comment below and share what you’re doing!

Be safe, but have wonderful summers, all!

I hope this post finds each of you doing as well as might be expected under the circumstances.

I live in Honolulu, Hawaii on the island of O’ahu. The City and County of Honolulu which is coterminous with the island of O’ahu has been under a stay-at-home, work-from-home order since March 22nd. The entire State of Hawaii went under a statewide stay-at-home, work-from-home order a few days later. When we began stay-at-home, my school was in the middle of our two-week spring break. Our faculty received two days of remote learning on remote learning, and we began remote learning with students on April 1st.

What follows is some random ruminating on this weird thing called work-from-home librarianship in no particular order which is probably very appropriate since there have been many days when listicles from Buzzfeed Animals like “15 Dog Posts From This Week That Quite Honestly Deserve Media Coverage” have been just about the only non-work reading I’m managing to do. So here goes, my personal listicle on work-from-home librarianship…

1 I Don’t Live in a Mansion So Here’s My Sofa – In articles about how to work from home, experienced work-from-home people tell us that working from home is work so I shouldn’t be working from my sofa. Well, I live in a condo with a significant other. I don’t have space for an office. I get that doing Google Meets with colleagues and students from my bed is probably not the best professional look around, but my sofa is as good as you’re gonna get so, “Ta-da. Here’s my sofa…” #GetOverIt #DoingTheBestICan

My spouse is retired and I don’t have children. How in the world are people with working spouses and remote educating their children even finding a corner in which to work?!?!?

In my search for a more office-like environ from which to do my librarian-ing, I tried working from the dining room table. We’ve had our dining room table and chairs for about eight years and I’ve always been perfectly happy with them. Only when I found myself attempting to type on a laptop sitting at what seemed to be shoulder height did I notice that our table is too high for our chairs. Now, every night when we sit down for dinner I think, “This chair is too low…” #StupidWorkFromHomeRevelations

2 A Lot More Dishes and Trash, A Lot Less Laundry – Yeah… #SelfExplanatoryThings

3 Bandwidth Is Limited – My home internet is excellent, but that’s not the bandwidth I’m talking about. I think the bandwidth in my brain is my current limiting factor. In a social chat that I had with some fellow librarians a number of folk who are very heavy readers indicated that they weren’t doing much reading. I have a stack of really exciting looking books sitting on a shelf that I haven’t touched in three weeks. The conversation and my realization about my reading harkened back to a Hidden Brain podcast where Shankar Vedantam explored “… when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing.” I’m worried about my 94-year old mom who is locked down in a nursing home. I’m worried about friends and loved ones who have been furloughed or laid off. I’m worried about friends that have had to close businesses. I’m worried about thousands of people in my community that have to line up at food banks to feed their families…

I am working from home, but my sleep patterns are weird so I get up at 2:00 am look at the ceiling, then oversleep and am late opening my library office hours Google Meet space at 7:30 am. I miss meetings (and I NEVER miss meetings IRL) even though I’m working on my laptop and everything is in my Google calendar that is literally open all day on the laptop I use for my virtual meetings. I want to do better, but for some reason, I can’t… #MyBrainIsAWOL #MaslowBeforeBlooms

4 Does Silence = Success or Failure? It’s A Mind Game Roller Coaster – As 2nd grade classroom teacher in the Hawaii Writing Project way back in the day, I remember being taught, “If you’re reading everything your kids are writing, your kids aren’t writing enough.” Over the last six years, our library has strategically and very purposefully moved to a “teach the teachers” service model. Our philosophy has been “If all of the information literacy instruction is being taught by librarians, our kids are not getting enough information literacy instruction.” Sometimes when you live by a philosophy, it can feel like you’re dying by one, too. As we’ve transitioned to remote learning, all of our teachers’ bandwidth has been taken up learning how to set up Google Meets, mute students’ mics, keep students engaged when they’re not in the same rooms, and just trying to make sure their kids are doing ok… Let’s face it, people haven’t exactly been lining up in droves to collaborate on new research projects with us of late. If I’m being really honest, part of me is very much feeling like the last six years of effort have been a waste.

The other day, I was doing “walk throughs” of virtual classes. When we walk through, we go into the class Google Meet with our cameras off and our mic muted. The classroom teacher was in the middle of outlining her project expectations and showing students how she expected OPVL annotated citations in NoodleTools for all of their cited works. If nobody asks me for help, am I a success or a failure? I dunno. Some teachers aren’t asking for help because they can do most of it really well themselves. #ImASuccess!!! Some teachers aren’t asking for help because they don’t know they need help and that good research strategies from when they did their graduate work in 1997 might be insufficient in the media ecosystem of today. #IveFlippingFailed!!! Some other teachers, still, actually want help but just don’t have the bandwidth in this particular moment to reach out to us with everything else that’s happening in their lives. #RememberEmpathy

This remote learning thing is one heck of a #MindGame #RollerCoaster

5 Email: The Digital Version of Getting Paper Cuts on Your Eyeballs – So much email. By my calculations it takes 27 emails to resolve an issue that in 3-D school world might be a 2 minute and 14 second interchange with a colleague in the breezeway between periods 3 and 4. And I know that people have the best intentions, but I kind of also feel like PLEASE, EVERYBODY STOP REPLYING ALL!” Sorry if I’m being too #JudgyMcJudgeface But so much email…

6 Philosophies That You Think Should Be Adopted by Others are Really Annoying When You Try to Live Them Yourself – I’m a big Twitter reader. Back, like, a million, bazillion, quazillion years ago in pandemic years, on March 31st, I came across this amazing Tweet thread from Angus Johnston who tweets as @studentactivism that made the point that:

… every direct-from-high-school student matriculating in 2020 and 2021 is going to have lost a semester because of this virus. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

… what’s happening right now is altering the life trajectory of every adolescent who is living through it, in ways that we’re only just beginning to grope toward understanding.

If you’re a teacher right now, your first responsibility is to your students. Not to your discipline, not your syllabus, and certainly not to some fantasy vision of a fall 2020 return to normalcy that you’re carrying around in your head.

From a reply from a locked account, lightly paraphrased: “People are freaking out about kids falling behind, Falling behind *who*?

Let me just say, that it is much easier for me to think that teachers should (of course) be understanding of students’ lives, needs, and life contexts during this crazy pandemic than it is for me to extend that same very same kind of understanding to my amazing, wonderful, but for now overwhelmed, faculty. #SelfSideEye

My information literacy instructional goals are important. They are! But I need to remind myself every frustrating remote learning minute of every frustrating remote learning day they aren’t as important as the human teachers that are giving everything they have to make it through today and making sure their kids are ok. It’s a library, not an ER so we’ll be okay if we pause our forward progress temporarily. #MaslowBeforeBlooms

7 I Miss My Library – I think I’ve come to realize that I don’t really miss my “library” so much as I miss the human beings who make my library space “my library”–even the ones who have irritated me and made me feel like crazy librarian man since they were in the 8th grade. Honestly, the ones that made my eyes roll back in my head the furthest are some of the ones that I miss most. 😃#RelationshipsMatter

8 I Wish I’d Said Goodbye When I Could’ve – As time passes, our reality is that it looks unlikely that campuses will reopen before the fall. This librarian-ing from home gig has made me regret not taking the time to offer more proper goodbyes to our seniors before we left for spring break. I know that I can reach out to them virtually and I will, but I’m mourning the fact that I won’t get to send them off from the actual physical space where we’ve spent so many days and hours together. I’ll miss the chance to say, “Hey, thank you for always taking the empty bags from the hot Cheetos you hid in your backpack and ate with chopsticks every afternoon when you thought I wasn’t looking and tossed them in the trash can outside rather than smashing them down between the seat cushions…” I want them to know that I saw them and that I enjoyed having them around even on days when it may not have seemed so. I hope they already knew that, but it’d have been nice to be able to do that more intentionally. #Sad

9 Have Faith and Keep Doing Good Work – I have a tendency to be a Davey-downer-glass-half-empty kind of guy by nature. In work-from-home librarianship, a Davey-downer-glass-half-empty attitude isn’t very helpful (and honestly, it’s kind of never very helpful). Anyway, when working from home, one needs to remember more than ever that through all the saddening isolation and frustration, if we keep doing good work, the effort makes a difference. The difference it makes might not be what we hope, but a difference for the better is a difference worth making. Sometimes that difference is bringing a little bit of familiarity and a little bit of joy to a 5-year old kindergartener at a kind of frightening time. As I was composing this rather grumpy list, I got an email from a co-worker who is also a parent of a kindergartener thanking my partner librarian, Nicole, for the wonderful read aloud time that Nicole has been doing with her daughter’s class.

In a world of work-from-home librarianship, that is work worth doing!

That’s all for now. Please continue to do the good work that I know you’re all doing. Please also consider dropping into one of the wonderful AISL Zoom meet-ups and share your successes, your wonderful ideas, and perhaps something with which you’re struggling, with a sympathetic audience. Based on my experience, there’s a pretty good chance that there will be a librarian there who may well have a solution to offer.

Take care, everyone!!! Sending each of you a **hug** From more than 6 feet away, of course! 😃❤️😃

Goodness, there are so many amazing things people are sharing about out the world of AISL libraries. Reflections on ways to improve library spaces that I’d love to call mine! Ways to make citation lessons engaging! Pieces on lunch book clubs; think pieces on publishing, loan policies, and the nature of research; 3D printing collaborations based on literature; and more! Wow!

So, I thought long and hard about what i could share this month and well, we took an ugly sad wall and… We made a clock!

Hahaha!!!

The clock mechanism was ordered online. We glued the outside edges of the books’ pages together with a mixture of1-part white glue to 1-part water so the books wouldn’t swing open while they were mounted on the wall. The books are secured to the wall with 3M hook and loop Command Strips made for mounting photo frames to walls and they seem to work fine.

I suspect that about 80% of our students and perhaps more than one or two of our youngest faculty may possibly be a tad flummoxed by the analog hands, but it’s all good! LOL!!!

In the end, every time I walk through the front doors of the library and see our clock, It makes me feel…

We have a day of professional learning focusing on self-care so as you’re reading this I might be in a book club session with faculty and staff colleagues discussing our reading of No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Molly West Duffy, learning about healthy microwave cooking, or doing yoga with heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day, all!