Teach42

I’ve never seen Joyce Valenza present, but many people have pointed her out to me this trip and said that she was worth seeing.

She lays down some ground rules at the beginning and one of them is that if you’re going to blog about her session, please ‘blog kindly’. So I’ll try to be gentle here.

Heh, I’ve never seen a group of people in a workshop all sing together. She’s saying that Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing” should be our new anthem. She played a clip and astonishingly enough, people actually sang along. Then again, these ARE educators. We’re a bold bunch.

Users are changing, technology is changing, so we need to change accordingly. “Our kids lives are seemless”. She wants to be a window on their desktop and open all the time. She wants to blend the virtual with the face to face.

Gen X’ers spend 6.5 hours per day using technology. She quotes some research from Griffiths and Brophy, and PEW. I’ve never heard of the former, gotta look that up and see what they have to say.

We need to make our systems smarter. Instead of labeling things the way we think they should be, we need to start using ‘tags’ that make sense to the people using them. We know our users, we need to tailor our learning landscapes to meet their needs.

What can we do that can’t be outsourced to Bangalore? What can we do that Google can’t? Personalized service, with knowledge of the learner, tailored to their needs.

Put tools no more than two clicks away from a learner. Independance and intervention are critical.

She’s sharing mciu.org/~spjvweb, the ‘front door’ of her library on the web. It looks like her daughter drew the front page, which is very cool. Warm and friendly, which is a much better motif for a library then technological and sterile.

Ok, I know I said I’d be gentle, but I do have to throw out one small critique. There’s alot of unnecessary animation in the Powerpoint that’s cute, but detracts from her presentation. Flowers growing, and specific phrases slowly zooming in, they should probably be eliminated. After she’s made a point of verbally focusing our attention on a phrase, and then afterwards when she tries to go to the next slide, she first has to wait for the slow zoom to finish. It’s kind of distracting. And she’s doing a fantastic job of emphasizing the things that need to be brought out already. She’s a dynamic presenter, so her Powerpoint doesn’t need to be. Ok, back to the session.

She’s just gone through some examples of how some of the organizational processes of the library could go virtual and be more effective than doing them personally. It’s cheap to put information out there, and an easy way to get feedback and suggestions in a safe anonymous way.

Her site has got a ton of resources for students and for teachers, for content, curriculum and professional development. She also has an Online Research guide. And all the tools are available to pull off her site for teachers to use.

She collaborates with the media class at her school and ‘hires’ them to create content for the media center. When somebody asked how she orients students to the virtual library, she said that she has her students create the virtual library tour. Best way to learn is to teach it, right?

Students create pathfinders as they do research to keep track of it all and to show the path they used to find their resources. I dig that. The example that she’s showing emphasizes that they aren’t just using the internet, but also offline resources and a wide variety at that. Blog as bibliography. Very dynamic and much more robust. Dig that.

Have you ever heard of book-trailers? I haven’t but I love the idea. People have created online trailors for books they’ve read and made them available for other students. How cool is that? I would love it if every book that I looked up on my library’s website or even Amazon.com had a trailer. I’m a big fan of that idea. Very practical, and it could easily be done for every book your students read.

How are you going to interact with your students? FAQ’s? IM? Email? Blog? Podcasts? Most of the time students need their answers when the library isn’t open. Being available really takes advantage of teachable moments and makes powerful impression upon the students. And she points out that most of the questions students ask take less than 30 seconds to respond to.

This is a great point. She doesn’t want to see every library site converted to blog format. While she’s thrilled to be posting library news and sharing new content regularly, most of the people who are visiting the website have a purpose and want to get to specific tools. She wants those to be the highlight, the center, the focus of the site. The most valuable pages on the site were documentation guides, search tools, and the online catalog / OPAC. So build the site around getting people to those quickly. Then weave the other stuff in around it.

From feedback she’s gotten, just having links to the offline sites and databases isn’t enough. The icons don’t give any information about what their purpose is. “I don’t care what the name of the database is, I want to know what it DOES.” That’s a really good point that often gets overlooked.

SHe’s showing some some sites that are reprinting books, high quality educational content, and sites to search and find them. Her point is that these sites are much more educational rich for students to be using than what they might happen to find on the front page of Google. GALE.

Ok, here’s an interesting idea for a browser feature that might have some potential. A student does a Google search. They find a site that doesn’t quite suit their needs, but they find a link that takes them to a site that takes them to a site that takes them to a page that actually has the information that they want. All they’re going to bookmark is that last page, and that’s what’s going to be sited. While that may cover them for their bibliography, it could be very userful for teachers to see the PATH that students took to get there. So imagine a button in a search engine that grabs a breadcrumb trail that a user took to get to the current page. NOT the history, because students often go in 20 directions at once, so a straight history won’t work. But some sort of a bookmarklet that will copy out the trail a user took to arrive at the current page. Something that shows the search words used, and then the path that they followed. I think that could be incredibly valuable information for teachers, for other students, and might be a strong addition to a bibliography. Not just what you used, but how you got there. Anybody think that could be userful?

Hehe, she just mentioned unitedstreaming and that every library must have a subscription to it. It feels damn good to work for a company that educators are passionate about and evanglize for voluntarily.

This is truly a whirlwind overview of everything a virtual library can be. There’s way too much information to summarize. However, thankfully everything that she’s showing is online. Heck, nearly every slide in the Powerpoint is basically link after link after link. So if this is resonating with you at all, you’ll have to visit her site and spend a few weeks exploring. The one thing you’ll miss out on is just how animated and passionate she is about what she’s sharing. There’s no question, she’s a true believer. I’m guessing it’s not too unusual to find her working late into the night helping other librarians get their start with this stuff just out of the goodness of her heart, because she loves doing it. Not only doing it, but sharing it. I can see why people reccomended that I see her present, her excitement is contagious.

Her del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/joycevalenza. I’m guessing that it’s going to be something worth subscribing to if she uses it.

She’s sharing a ton of open source stuff now, and mentioned one that I hadn’t heard of. In fact a few, PrimoPDF, and FreeMind (I hope the URL’s are correct, I’m offline right now) are going to have to be added to my Office 2.0 presentation. Free PDF creator and free version online Inspiration.

Her blog is joycevalenza.edublogs.org, website is mciu.org/~spjvweb and direct link to the Powerpoint mciu.org/~spjweb/landscape.ppt

technorati tags:blc, blc06, library

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