The Librain

Well it is while since I last posted - various pressures have prevented me. Anyway, thanks to those librarians who have been sending me links to have a look at and think about.

And there is so much to think about!

So, today’s top thing is:

What is the role of the Librarian in today’s school library and maybe tomorrow’s?

I read this post “So just what should librarians be teaching?” from Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog. It is interesting to see how he discusses the different roles of the school library:

1. Reading Skills
2. Information Literacy
3. Technology Skills

He tries to work out the different balances that could be made between these areas. The diagrams clearly show his ideas.

In the UK, most school library staff do not have teaching qualifications, although most of us do teach. We may also think in different ways to the teacher-librarians in the US, Australia, etc. However, I have, over the years, tried to think more and more as an educator. I do try to balance out these differing roles - with varying degrees of success.

Some challenges are brought about by my own expertise/lack of expertise or my own skills and preferences - for example: I feel confident when helping students to choose books and have created a reading programme for our students, but would be less confident in actually teaching reading. I am happy to listen to students read and love “waving and raving”, but would not begin to know how to teach phonics. Is the teaching of reading the role of the school librarian? I am not sure.

I am looking more and more at how we can use the data held on the school systems such as SIMs in conjunction with our own Library Management Systems. How can we use our students’ reading levels to help them better? Do our schools even test students regularly so that we can measure our contribution to their reading development?

Similarly - I am happy to work with teachers on teaching research skills - particularly planning the search, thinking around the subject, developing keywords, using search engines and so on. I would not be so confident in teaching students how to write up their research, although I would like to get more involved and I would try! What is the role of the school librarian in the later stages of research? I have been sent a link on this and will return to this issue at another time. Also, I know many wonderful librarians who take Information Literacy Skills far beyond basic research - how many of us are confident that we can teach such things as “Critical Thinking” or group problem-solving and where do we go to learn how?

When I took up my present post nearly nine years ago, my ICT skills were definitely more advanced than most teachers and students. I still try to keep up with new developments and find this a very rewarding and exciting area of the job. Now, I think that more teachers are confident with their skills and many students are also. (Although many clearly are not or are over-confident!). Much of the teaching that I do in this area is on an informal ad-hoc level, rather than part of a formal teaching situation. I am learning about new technologies and am using them for my own personal and professional purposes. But, I would like more opportunities to use them with students. Where so we find the oportunities to try out new ideas?

A lot of questions here - do any of you have answers?

How do I plan for the future?

I like to think that I have always had a strong vision for what I think a school library should look like. But we are reaching a period of such rapid change. I want to think this year about where I am heading as a school librarian and what I think our LRC will look like in five years time. Is this a tall order? It may be, but I think that it is necessary or I will lose my “golden compass”!

Many years ago, in my first school job - 1982! - I made a display called “Information Explosion”. I illustrated it with newspaper headlines cut out and radiating outwards. This seems so funny now when I think that I did not even have a computer in the library at the time!

So, what can we read to help us think ahead?

The papers over the last couple of days have been full of articles about the “Google Generation” and how academics are worried about students’ information-seeking behaviours.

This one in the Guardian Education section on the 15th January - Intellectual Literacy Hour - talks about a research report which is a must-read for any school librarian:

University College London (UCL) CIBER group.(2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. London: University College London. CIBER Briefing paper; 9. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

This is the press release on the JISC website:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/googlegen.aspx

I have started to read the report and the following really struck a chord with me ( a precis of page 12):

“Themes for how children and young people use the internet:

• the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying  problems

Haven’t all of us who have been working in school libraries for some years been talking about this for ages? Students know how to play games and make lovely PowerPoints - but actually write something in their own words?

• internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority

Speed is the key here, I think and a lack of understanding about authority. This is not much better for some of our staff colleagues - how many teachers recommend students to use Wikipedia, but do not teach them how to use it properly or the check with other sources?

• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective

How many school librarians get the opportunity to actually teach this? Many of us do, but maybe not often enough or not to an entire year group.

• faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them

This is despite all of the ICT teaching that they are apparently getting in schools. Is this not the “meat and drink” of a school librarian’s job?

… However, the ubiquitous use of highly branded search engines raises other issues:

• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers
• as a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or Google, becomes the primary brand that they associate with the internet

I recognise this easily - many students cite “Google” in bibliographies (if I can get them to make one).

• many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs

This is also somehting that I am thinking hard about. I spend ages making lists of evaluated web resources either on our VLE, the LRC’s website or in Del.icio.us. But then I turn around and see students back on Google!

Anyway - this post has been very long and I had better do some more reading from the report before I post any more thoughts…

I had a look at Joyce Valenza’s Top School Library Things to Think About in 2008 and I thought about what mine might be. Probably a lot more simple and ordinary. But this is an area that we all need to think about in the new year.

So my first thing is:

How do I enourage my school to have a balance between technology and reading?
It is the National Year of Reading 2008 in the UK and reading issues have been at the top of the political agenda for a few months. However, how often is the link made between our often poorly resourced and staffed school libraries, the crowded curriculum, the low status (in some schools) of the “librarian”, the excitement generated by ICT developments and reading problems amongst our youngsters? Giving a free book to every Year 7 student was great - but what follow-up is there? Creating a boys bookshelf with the Boys into Books scheme was great too - but what happens next?

Is it always up to us to push for reading for pleasure as opposed to “extractitis”?

What I would like is for teachers to be as enthusiastic and excited about reading as some are about ICT. Where is the research into and evaluation of the impact of ICT upon attainment to back up the huge spending and emphasis on ICT? Because there is research evidence to prove the importance of reading!

I am not knocking ICT - after all I am using it to write this! However, I am concerned that one day a generation of us will be looking at younger adults who cannot think beyond the computer screen. I watched a programme on TV over Christmas about the Cold War and was fascinated and more than a little scared to find out that Armageddon was only avoided because one Russian guy decided to think for himself rather than believe what the computer was telling him - the “nukes” heading towards the USSR were clouds!

I suppose what I am talking about is teaching critical thinking - others know more about this than I do. But, I was not taught like this - I read a lot and thought a lot.

Do our students think enough for themselves these days?

What do you think?

I have just spent an interesting couple of days on a course. The SLICT (Strategic Leadership of ICT) course is run by the National College for School Leadership and involved senior staff who lead on ICT in their schools (plus me). It felt a bit beyond my “comfort zone” at times, but was very interesting in terms of how we have allowed our skills to become invisible in many schools.

As my job title is rather obscure and does not reveal that I am a librarian, it was fun to see some of the participant’s faces when I told them my background. At first I was worried that I would be out of my depth with all of these senior staff, but then decided that I needed to promote our skills and roles in school. I may have expressed myself rather too forcefully at times, but I felt that I had to put our case.

So, I did make a few comments to the effect that as librarians we have, or could have, a major role in managing information beyond the traditional walls of our libraries. Some of the techies went on about metadata and filenames as if they had just invented the wheel. When I said that many schools already had information experts in post - they were surprised! Or they could have been irritated, of course.

But… many of the teachers there said that their librarians were not interested in developing the ICT side of their libraries. These senior managers saw their libraries as backwaters, places of silence, stuffy, book-based, not at all forward looking. Their librarians, in their eyes, were old-fashioned and stereotypical. Again, when I mentioned
that we are exploring Web 2.0 - they were surprised.

Anyway, we then went on school visits and, believe it or not, the school they sent me to had all-singing all-dancing ICT with a brilliant VLE - but NO LIBRARY!

So, what am I saying here? I feel that most people I meet are forward looking people. But how many school librarians out there are not doing the rest of us any favours. If this cross-section of senior leaders in schools had their first introduction to a mouthy, bolshie,
advocating, ICT-literate librarian when they met me - what can we all do to promote our role and services before ICT takes us in the wrong direction entirely - i.e. closure?