And this is a brief interview with Howard Rheingold, who coined the term “smart mob” in his book of the same title. In this interview Rheingold discusses the importance of libraries in their role of aiding learners to be smart in a 21st century sense — able to find the information they need and able to determine that the information they find is reliable.
So exactly what is a smart mob? Wikipedia says, “A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination.”
The illustration of the Borg above to me is the extreme illustration of this idea of collective intelligence, as in the TV series Star Trek: Next Generation the Borg was a group of people part-human, part-machine who knew one another’s thoughts and worked as a single unit. As a smart mob the Borg was incredibly efficient; social media was directly programmed into its consciousness!
In terms of our current reality as teacher librarians, Rheingold wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review blog in which he gave a self-described ‘rant’ about the importance of teaching about social media. “Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum – it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit.”
He further says, “Whether digital media will be beneficial or destructive in the long run doesn’t depend on the technologies, but on the literacy of those who use them.” Rheingold has found that today’s students, although they may be “digital natives,” do not necessarily have the literacy skills they need. He says, “learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today’s institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide.” He is developing a software program that integrates forums, blogs, wikis, and other social media, allowing the “smart mob” to direct its own learning.
Discovering the term “smart mob” helped me see the true power of the wiki. In their article, “AnInformation Skills Workout: Wikis and Collaborative Writing,” Lamb and Johnson say that “Wikis are a specific type of social technology involving cooperation, interdependence, and synergy.” Instead of providing the content, we as teachers can work with our students (and our colleagues too) to collaboratively create the content. We allow our students to become the smart mob. Lamb and Johnson point out that wikis are best for creative, original works, not just regurgitating what is already out there. As teachers we must ask students, “How will your project contribute in some unique way to the body of information already on the Internet?”
In his article in Gifted Child Today, Working With Wikis, Del Siegle addresses some common concerns with using wikis, and especially with Wikipedia. These include inaccurate, out-dated, or biased information, as well as missing information. He points out that generally with Wikipedia these problems are usually quickly corrected. I especially like this quote: ‘Few would doubt that “all of us know more than any one of us.” Whether all of us can jointly produce documents of equal or higher validity than those produced with traditional publishing practices is a social experiment in which our students are embedded. Educators can help their gifted students understand this debate and use it as discussion fodder as they help students develop and use wikis.’ Of course, I believe that this smart mob mind construct is not limited to gifted children.
While creating a wiki can seem quite a challenge, there is lots of help available. Shonda Brisco analyzes three different wiki applications in the article WHICH WIKI IS RIGHT FOR YOU?I tried out the three she suggested, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and WetPaint.
Despite the fact that using any of these wiki applications is supposed to be incredibly easy, while using Wikispaces I managed to delete one page three times before I finally switched applications. I found Wetpaint easier for me than PBWiki, so I built my wiki at http://onlinereading.wetpaint.com/. It is titled Reading the Internet: Skills for the Information Age. I had intended to create something entirely new but decided instead to rework a professional development session I had done in partnership with Margo Johnston, a fellow teacher-librarian (and incidentally, my mentor) for staff and parents into a wiki. It is in fact a work in progress, and I really like some of the Wetpaint features, including the To-Do List. You can make a note as to what needs to be done to a page next. I have some more changes to make for our discussion on reading and web 2.0 on Wednesday.
At the moment this wiki is me, not us, as I don’t have a smart mob working on it. Any volunteers out there?
This first problem I had this week when I began researching this topic was determining the difference between a “virtual” library and a “digital” library. Wikipedia offers a definition of digital library as “a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by computers.” It does not include a definition for virtual library (other than calling it an “older term”) The professional literature and popluar culture seem to be equally divided as I found references to both terms in the literature, as well as lots of results for both terms in Google searches.
After exchanging emails with Joanne, and doing some reflecting on the various sites I was seeing, I decided to go with this approach. I would ignore sites that are basically repositories of stored information, such as digitized material, (for example, the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library or Voice of the Shuttle), and concentrate on sites that offer a variety of resources and library services to their patrons.
The Traditional View
One of the first articles I read was virtual SCHOOL LIBRARIES–THE TIME IS NOW!, by Audrey Church. Written in 2005, the article identifies why school library web sites first became so important.Church says, “There is so much good information out there, and it is our job as library media specialists to point our students to it! There is so much bad information out there, and it is our job to teach students how to evaluate what they find. . . . If we are to help students become information-literate–critical assessors, evaluators, and users of information–we have to meet them on the Web and provide library service and instruction online, at the point of need.”
As I read this, I thought, “This is exactly why I built my first library web page 15 years ago. The problem is that I don’t know that my current site has progressed much beyond that view!”
What Am I Looking For?
At this point it was obvious to me that I need some specific characteristics to be looking for as I searched for high-quality sites, so I turned next to Joyce Valenza’s page, A WebQuest About School Library Websites. Her Introduction, to me, is the perfect description of what a virtual school library web page should be. Of course Valenza’s own site at Springfield Township High School Virtual Library exemplifies her description.
“Your library Web page is your second front door. It meets your students where they live, play, and work! It creates signage for students and staff. The effective library Web page pulls together, in one unified interface, all of a library’s resources–print and electronic. It offers guidance while it fosters independent learning. It models careful selection. It offers valuable public service and can redefine “community.” It can even lead users back to print. A good library Web page, whether in traditional HTML, or blog, or wiki format, offers implicit instruction and projects an important image of the librarian as an information professional.”
Whew! Sounds easy, right?
Valenza acknowledges that creating such sites is not easy, and the librarians should look around the web, find what is there, and build on the work of others. The characteristics she suggests we should judge sites on include
content,
usability/design, and
special features, which are features that other sites don’t have. I decided to look for sites using Web 2.0 features for this last category.
Becoming Virtual
In their 2008 article in Teacher Librarian, the virtual teacher-librarian: establishing and maintaining an effective web presence, Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson further refine the difference between a traditional library web site and a virtual one. “Much more than a static library web page, a web presence provides an ongoing, virtual connection with students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members.” They point out that a good web site will help the teacher librarian provide high quality resources both in and outside of school hours.
Lamb and Johnson provide a list of steps to follow to achieve this “web presence.” These steps provide another list of criteria for identifying quality sites. These include
digital versions of various activities such as library orientations, tutorials, and FAQ pages;
24/7 access to the library’s catalogue and online databases;
differentiated materials for students at different ability/grade levels;
activities to encourage student involvement in the site, such as blogs;
tools that help collaboration, such as wikis;
modeling innovative techniques, such as including your own videos; and
promoting the physical library by advertising its services or polling students.
Building Community
In her article, The Real and the Virtual: Intersecting Communities at the Library , Kelly Czarnecki emphasizes the importance of the library in building community. “Building community: What a powerful phrase and a tremendous responsibility for a library. It is an even more powerful feeling to step back and see the community grow as a result of what you’re doing with library services to create new groups of people and new ways to share and discover information.”
Since today’s teens love to create content online, we should be encouraging them to create content online in our libraries too. “The kinds of interaction that result from teens being able to participate (through allowing access) in virtual communities and create content while at the library is a rich topic for research.” Czarnecki suggests strategies such as
setting up a Flickr account for your library (showing photos of teens involved in library programs),
sponsoring after-hours gaming programs,
using blogs and wikis, and
appealing to music-loving teens by having iTunes available after hours.
Now I was ready to look at web sites. I decided to focus on these areas:
I started close to home, with an Edmonton high school page, created by stellar t-l, Rob Poole. There is wide range of content, including links to all databases, an online catalogue, FAQ’s, and much more. The site is attractive and professional looking, with dropdown menus providing easy navigation. A password-protected blog for the student book club is available. Other than some student photos, no student content is evident.
Although there is no online catalogue, Janet Jorgensen’s site has excellent content, offering extensive links to databases, E-books, some assignments, and web sites for every subject area taught at the school. The site is almost all text-based, with a clear, clean interface with no broken links. There is no Web 2.0 content. Book reviews have been posted by the Book Review Club.
This site uses a number of Web 2.0 applications used (blogs, Animoto videos, polls, collaboration wiki). The catalogue is online, but there are no other links to library resources such as databases, E-books, etc. It showcases media but almost all of the content has been created by staff, although the videos show students involved in special projects in the library. Navigation is confusing, as the left hand links don’t seem to be in any logical order. Students are encouraged to contribute book suggestions as blog comments, and there are several polls.
This elementary school site is a bare bones school library web site that looks rather unappealing. It has an online catalogue, and links to various web sites. A number of the links do not work. There is no student content, and no web 2.0 content.
With an online catalogue, databases, research tools, links to many research projects, and the Ask- A-Librarian feature, this site is a superb resource for its students. Students can use instant messaging to chat with the librarian. Some research projects are posted as wikis, and students are encouraged to create wikis and blogs, although I see no student content on the site itself other than some photos of students.
This page is a strong contrast to the other elementary library site I reviewed. Content includes the online catalogue, and databases. The navigation is clear but the Books and Reading page is not working at this time. Research Projects are arranged on a page called a wiki, but actually consists of links to various other pages arranged in a wide variety of formats, none of them wikis. The strongest feature of this site is the student content on the home page, which includes podcasts, wikis, and blogs created by the students. I label this one a MUST SEE for that reason.
My response to this site is WOW! There is lots of content here, including superb pathfinders and all kinds of research help, library FAQ, and the online catalogue. I found navigating the page a bit confusing, as there is so much on one page. This would benefit from a set of clear links at the bottom of thepage (what’s there is incomplete). This is still my vote for #1, however, because there is all kinds of student content as well as nifty web 2.0 applications, such as a PageFlakes page, various blogs, videos, and more.
I love my public library site! In addition to the catalogue, we have access to many quality databases. The site offers services to various groups, including children, teens, teachers, and people new to Canada. The library has the Ask-A-Librarian service, which you can access from 9:00-3:30 weekdays, or via email. Staff have created pathfinders on commonly-researched topics, and teachers can request that one be created for their classes. RSS feeds are available for various topics, one of which is book reviews by library patrons. Navigation of the site has recently been improved, and the interface is clean and logical. I see no web 2.0 features except for a slide show of upcoming events.
The Biggest Challenge – Being Human
What have I learned from doing this research? The best school library sites are those with the strongest human component. The wonderful web 2.0 features work because caring adults make them work, and involve students in their creation. But there is another factor that I think we need to examine.
In her article, they might be gurus, Joyce Valenza identifies what for me will be the next big challenge in developing a true virtual school library. She says, “How can we be there for learners’ just-in-time, just-for-me learning experiences? I know that my own online presence scales my guidance and instruction and makes both available to students on weekends and evenings and even when they are sitting 5 feet away. Can we offer independence while we offer as-needed intervention? Can we be available to students beyond our walls and beyond our hours? Our students live online; they need their libraries online. They need their teacher-librarians online.”
While I believe Joyce is right, given limited resources, staff, and time, I wonder how we can make that work.
As I researched this week’s discussion topic, How are you managing information overload, I found that reducing information overload is a hot topic. One estimate in a New York Times story is that this problem and its resulting loss of employee efficiency will cost US companies 650 billion in 2008 alone.
Mary Brandel’s August 25, 2008, Computerworldarticle is titled “Information OVERLOAD: Is it time to go on a data diet?” In it the author quotes a number of company executives who have specific suggestions for dealing with this problem. “Some use technology to combat the information overload, while others suggest putting yourself on an information diet and taking control over how much you allow yourself to be exposed to” (p.22).
My favorite quote from the article is from Steve Borsch, CEO of Marketing Directions Inc, who says, “The river of content is turning into a flood, and my instinct is to get to higher ground” (p. 22). I recognize that feeling of drowning in data, and I’m looking for a way to leave that feeling behind.
Last week I wrote about how useful Delicious and Diigo are, and decided that I would continue to explore Diigo. My question is this: How can I use the various options in Diigo to manage my information more efficiently? I am hoping that this technology will help me reduce the amount of information I’m dealing with while maintaining better control over what I find.
Step 1: I’m Treading Water
As I have uploaded bookmarks from two computers and my Backflip page to Diigo, I chose first to refine the organization of those links. My first step was to explore the My Lists feature. You can sort bookmarks by tags and then it’s easy to group bookmarks together in a list, which you can then use in various ways. Since my older bookmarks had no tags, I ignored these and worked with only the new bookmarks, the ones I saved after I began using Diigo.
There are many options with Lists. You can put sections in the list to subdivide it. You can rearrange the bookmarks in any order you wish. You can send and share the list with friends or groups on Diigo. You can set up a group of colleagues; for example, all the grade 9 language arts teachers, and instantly share lists with them.
Once you have created lists you can also go to WebSlides and instantly (in two clicks) create a slideshow of your bookmarks. These can be used as an HTML link, or embedded with a player as a widget into a blog post, so readers can flip through the sites you’ve bookmarked. If you have annotated the bookmarks, or highlighted pages, viewers can see that too if you so choose. Here’s a tutorial on creating WebSlides shows.
Imagine the application of this to the classroom. You can have students (with Diigo accounts) collect sites, annotate them, highlight important sections, and then share them with their peers. You as teacher can present students with a selection of sites that they can use for research. And of course, this works with teachers too.
You can also send bookmarks directly to your blog from Diigo. This I have not yet tried, but so far I must say that the My Lists options have already proved very useful to me. I am working with a colleague on a presentation in January, and we will be sharing bookmarks via Diigo.
Step 2: My Feet Just Touch the Bottom
Creating lists and THEN editing bookmarks may seem backward to you. My initial intent was simply to have an online list of bookmarks; I didn’t have too much interest in highlighting and annotating. Now I am going back through the links and making changes. I saw the advantages when I was collecting bookmarks for the last assignment. Usually I would save the page, and either print it and highlight, or use Word to highlight it. I often used sticky notes to emphasize certain parts of the page. Using Diigo means that I can highlight, comment, and sticky note it as I read it the FIRST time and my highlights, comments and the site are all instantly saved on Diigo. Saves a HUGE amount of time!
Here’s a link to the Diigo video tutorial on highlighting and page comments, and another one on sticky notes. These are very short Flash tutorials.
Step 3: Waist Deep and Moving Up
As I mentioned earlier, many of the bookmarks I imported into Diigo were without tags. When you are looking at the list of your bookmarks you can edit them to add tags, highlights, comments, and sticky notes. You can also label bookmarks as private, so that if you have personal and professional bookmarks together (and I don’t need more than one bookmarking site to master), you can display only the links you want.
And, one of the best features of Diigo is that the pages are cached, so they NEVER disappear. If you can’t access the page live anymore, you can access the cached version with all of your comments intact.
Step 4: At the Shallow End
There is much about Diigo I have not explored, most especially the social aspect. In terms of my original goals, I have achieved much better control over my information. I have reduced the amount of duplication of material saved in various places. While I have used the Tags feature to see what other searchers have found on a topic, and have found one or two good sites that way, I haven’t really even begun to explore this option sufficiently. But how wonderful to feel that I am in control!
This week spent learning about podcasting was a challenging, stimulating, and joyful week for me. Joyful, you ask? Absolutely. I read Stephen Wolk’s article The Positive Classroom: Joy in Schoolfrom the September 2008 issue of Educational Leadership. Wolk is talking about the dictionary definition of joy: ‘According to my Random House dictionary, joy means, “The emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something good or satisfying.”‘
Wolk discusses 11 kinds of joy; I’m borrowing some of them to share with you what I learned about the power of podcasting.
JOY 1: Find the Pleasure in Learning
Wolk talks about teaching as nurturing; we must help our students find their reasons to learn. I started out already knowing my reason to learn. I knew when I started to work on this topic that I wanted to create a podcast of Mona Gould`s poem, “This Was My Brother.”
Why this poem? It is one I always shared with my students when we worked on our Remembrance Day programs. It is Canadian, written by a Saskatchewan-born poet and broadcaster after she lost her brother in World War II. And finally, a more personal reason: I lost my brother last year and this poem reminds me of him; he was very proud of the time as a young person that he spent in the army reserves. This kept me motivated all week, even through the many challenges.
The creation of Remembrance Day programs motivated many of my students to learn. The most successful program we did was the year I had grade nine language arts students interview a relative about the personal cost to the family of war. Students recorded the interviews and we based the program around this content.
We created tableaux of actors in costume portraying one scene from the reminiscence as the appropriate audio played in the background. We also used some of the audio as soundtrack for the slide presentation we created from family photographs students brought to share. Every student in the class was involved either onstage or backstage as we honoured these memories. While the joy was sombre in nature, it was definitely there.
JOY 2: Give Students Choice
This project was joyful for me because I was able to choose what was meaningful. I was able to choose music as well as the poetry; I have always loved Ravel’s evocative “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” I was also able to choose a project that I was capable of doing. At one point I thought of reading a longer piece, but I decided once I started recording that I didn’t know enough about recording, editing, adding music, creating effects, and exporting to deal with a long reading and the resulting large file.
When working with my students I always gave them choices too. Those who were uncomfortable performing in front of an audience were able to choose other tasks. We had students editing tapes, organizing slides, running lights or sound, writing scripts, creating costumes, and more.
JOY 3: Let Students Create Things
In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson talks about the importance of audience for students. He says, “Podcasting is yet another way for them to be creating and contributing ideas for a larger conversation, and it’s a way of archiving that contribution for future audiences to use” (p. 113).
I did some searching on the web for schools that have used podcasting as a way of honouring Remembrance Day in Canada, and found only a couple of examples. Eel Ground School in Eel Ground, New Brunswick, a school with lots of interest in new media, has a podcasting club. Here is their podcast of a special ceremony on November 8, 2006, where the school honoured not only Canadian veterans but also soldiers visiting from Maine.
Vincent Massey Collegiate, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, also active in podcasting, has podcasts of their guest speakers for Remembrance Day (scroll down to find presentations by Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Bastable).
How I wish that I had had these tools to use earlier in my career. How wonderful it would be to have an archive of the incredible creativity, expertise, and sensitivity that my students showed in their contribution to the observance of Remembrance Day in our school.
JOY 4: Show Off Student Work
We invited family members to attend our Remembrance Day presentation, and of course they were always suitably impressed. How sad that we were unable to create a more lasting version of our work. If only we had had the resources we have now, this would have been a natural to videotape and then broadcast. The students could create individual podcasts of the interviews, web slide shows, and more.
I’m happy to show off my presentation. While technically imperfect, it captures for me the essence of where I am right now with this new skill. More importantly for me, it gave me something positive to do with the feeling of loss that I am still trying to integrate into my life.
Ah, yes – the joy of tinkering! Thank goodness for the booklet Learning in Hand – Podcasting for Teachers & Students Booklet that classmate Christine Robinson shared with us. The step-by-step directions walked me through the technical niceties of downloading and using Audacity, import music, and do some basic editing, as well as how to save and export the file. I still really haven’t mastered trimming down a long piece of music to the right length, and properly fading out music, and I certainly need to find some more detailed instructions.
Of course I referred to all of these directions AFTER using Windows Sound Recorder, and spending a l-o-n-g time recording my poem only to discover the format isn’t supported by Audacity! I had to record it yet again. And again. And another five or six times.
At this point Irealized that the inexpensive microphone I bought really isn’t good enough for the job, so I’ll have to buy something better when I have had a chance to research them.
More tinkering was need when I went to put the podcast on my blog. I realized again why I am using Edublogs to host my blog, as it was so easy to upload the file there. Due to the problems I’ve had with Edublogs being down, I am backing up my blog on Blogspot, and adding a podcast there was not easy at all. The hosting sites suggested in the booklet didn’t work for me but I finally found Podbean, an audioblogging site, and was able to upload my podcast, create a post, find the embedded player, and copy the HTML to my Blogger site. I’m sure there is an easier way, but at least that roundabout method worked!
This is a reminder that using technology with students will require much tinkering time. I think perhaps there should be another type of joy listed here:
The Joy of Structure and Scaffolding
In her PowerPoint presentation, Podcasting in School Libraries, Kristin Fontichiaro, author of Podcasting at School and Active Learning Through Drama, Podcasting, and Puppetry, not only gives a superb list of reasons for using podcasting (learning styles, curricular fit, needs of 21st century students, sharing learning with the outside world), she also provides a number of ideas for providing students with the support they need to create successful podcasts, as well as the safety tips they need to keep them safe.
As with all project-based learning, students need to start with manageable podcasting projects that are supported with just-in-time instruction from the teacher.
Joy in school?
It’s up to the teacher to help the students – and herself – experience this. I agree with Wolk. He says, “So teachers must strive in whatever ways they can to own their teaching so that each morning they can enter their classrooms knowing there will be golden opportunities for them-as well as for their students-to experience the joy in school.”
And Joy for Me
This week I challenged myself. I learned, I created, I podcasted. What’s next? I’m looking forward to volunteering to read for my very favourite web site, Librivox, which provides free audio recordings of books in the public domain. And I’m going to take great joy in buying a really good microphone!
Why start with a car commercial, you ask? Ever had one of those “Ah hah!” moments of revelation when the layers of your brain finally slid into place, and you found yourself wondering how you could have been so stupid? Would you believe I had one of those moments while I watched this Ford Focus commercial on TV?
It is sad but true – or really neat depending on your perspective – but I finally “got” tagging when I saw this commercial. To me this is the ultimate demonstration of the pull technology that is the Web 2.0 culture: the car buyer pulls all of the options he wasn’t out of the tag cloud surrounding him.
This integration of the concept of tagging gave me the mental set I needed to try out social bookmarking this week. And I love it!
First Stop: Del.icio.us
I began by looking for video tutorials about social bookmarking. First of all I watched the Common Craft video, Social Bookmarking in Plain English, which uses del.icio.us as its example site. Lee Lefever’s simple three steps, signing up to a service, tagging sites, and “being social” by looking at other people’s bookmarks, gave me the confidence to explore further. After all, I had already used Backflip as a way of storing bookmarks on the Internet. Now I just needed to add the tagging component. I decided to start using del.icio.us.
After I added my personal bookmarks I decided to experiment with the social aspect. I searched for tags having to do with crochet, and by adding and deleting tags was able to collect bookmarks dealing with crocheted afghan patterns. Remembering my RSS lessons from last week, I decided to add a feed for this collection to Bloglines.
Next Stop: Diigo
I knew that I also wanted to explore Diigo, so I searched YouTube and TeacherTube and found Emily Barney’s video, “Social Bookmarking: Making the Web Work for You.” This gives a wonderfully clear explanation of how social bookmarking works, and then goes on to explain how to use Diigo.
If I were working on showing teachers how to do social bookmarking, I would use all three of these videos as part of the training (but of course not all at once).
Pit Stops on the Journey
This past week I
Set up accounts for Diigo, del.icio.us, and Furl
Installed the toolbar for Furl but had to uninstall it as my computer kept hanging and crashing. I decided to just experiment with the other two applications
Imported bookmarks from both my computers to both those accounts
Exported the bookmarks from both accounts and imported these into the other
Set up Diigo account so that new bookmarks are also automatically added to del.icio.us
Added email contacts to Diigo
Searched for other del.icio.us users’ bookmarks on crochet afghan patterns by using tags
Found Will Richardson on Diigo and looked at some of his bookmarks
Found Joyce Valenza on Diigo and subscribed to a feed from the Teacher Librarian group she belongs to
Investigated educator accounts on Diigo – I can’t join as I don’t have a school email address at the moment
Created WebSlides of some of the sites on social bookmarking I collected (see right sidebar).
Deciding Which Route to Take
Each of the sites I investigated has its pros and cons.
Del.icio.us:
I found del.icio.us easier to use, as it has a simpler, cleaner interface and it seems more intuitive to me, and easier to navigate.
I love the fact that it is as free of ads.
The Help pages are easier to navigate than Diigo.
Diigo
All the ads in Diigo definitely slow down search results and navigating pages.
Diigo has more features; the highlighting and commenting features are really valuable.
I can easily add contacts from my email address book in which I can’t do on del.icio.us – very useful when you want to email colleagues your bookmarks.
This is the fully-featured site I’d want to teach students how to use, especially since you can create an educator account.
Some Bumps in the Road
1. Information Literacy – Critical Evaluation
In his “Social Bookmarking” chapter in the book, Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The NEW Worldwide Web, Terry Freedman identifies one critical concern. He says,“There are downsides, [to using social bookmarking] of course. The main one is the flip side of the coin, that is to say, if looking for information is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, what social bookmarking does is to increase the size of the haystack! That is not an argument for not using it, but it is an argument for making sure that students are taught good information-searching skills, including the ability to evaluate the plausibility and accuracy of the information they find.”
2. Issues with Tags
Freedman also points out an inherent problem with tagging: ‘A good example is “e-learning”: it would be a good idea to use “elearning” too!”‘
Tagging requires the use of only use single words, so you have to join words in phrases, such as socialbookmarking or social_bookmarking. In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson states that “tags that are more than one word usually use an underline to separate the words” (p. 96).
Unfortunately that is not necessarily the case. There is no standardization except what individual users, groups, or communities decide on. One would need to work on this with students or teachers in order to standardize tags. When I was searching for crochet patterns in del.icio.us, for example, I discovered that I could use the tag “patterns” and get results containing the tag “pattern,” but not vice versa.
Spelling counts too. I found plenty of bookmarks with the word “socail” as one of the tags.
3. Issues with Filtered Sites and Downloading of Toolbars
Many school districts restrict the downloading of toolbars and buttons; in my high school students were unable to download anything on to the computers, including bookmarking sites. As part of an initiative for using these resources, teachers would have to work with their administration and technicians to overcome these issues.
4. Privacy Issues
As with all public web sites, the possibility exists that students will encounter some inappropriate content. The Diigo Educator Account provides some safeguards to students. Only teachers and classmates can communicate with students. Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors. Students can only communicate with their friends and teachers, and their profiles aren’t included in the People Search feature.
Reasons To make the Journey
Miguel Guhlin’s article “Diigo the Web for Education – From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo” gives an eloquent explanation of why social bookmarking tools are so important for our students. Guhlin says,”New web tools allow you to do MORE than just gather great resources; they allow you to explain why they are great, put virtual post-its on them, and then share that care package of great resource links with your comments with your audience of choice.”
Guhlin goes on to quote Dr. Judi Harris:
1. We all begin on the Web by “telegathering” (surfing) and “telehunting” (searching. This we can do pretty well. What we don’t do very well yet is to take educationally sound steps beyond telegathering and telehunting).
2. We need to help our students and ourselves “teleharvest” (sift through, cogitate, comprehend, etc.) the information that we find, and “telepackage” the knowledge that results from active interaction (application, synthesis, evaluation, etc.) with the information.
3. Then, we need to “teleplant” (telepublish, telecollaborate, etc.) these telepackages by sharing them with others…who use them as information in their…
4. …telegathering & telehunting, and the process cycles back around again.
Are you helping your students make the shift from surfing and searching as telegatherers to becoming teleplanters?[Emphasis is mine]
The End (Not) of My Journey
The mind boggles. I could tear down my whole library web page, the Web 1.0 page, the Read Web page, and start again. Shortly the grade 10 students in my former school will be starting their Shakespeare research project. I am itching to work with a class. Students can use Diigo to collect, highlight, annotate, and tag resources on their topics, which include the Shakespeare controversy, the Elizabethan theatre, the Great Chain of Being, William Shakespeare the man, Elizabeth I, the plague, the Spanish Armada, and more. Instead of the page for this project I created, students can contribute what they have found while their teacher and I provide guidance and support. We can teach evaluation and critical thinking skills, building this in as a stage in the project.
And our students become teleplanters.
Did I mention I LOVED working on social bookmarking this week?
Which Web 2.0 tool could I learn use that would help organize more effectively my work and my life?
When I considered this week’s topic, getting (and staying) organized in an electronic, Web 2.0 environment, I thought about how much I like to be well organized.
I love organizational tools. I love coloured file folders, customizable dividers, and stacking clear plastic boxes. I love Microsoft Outlook because the calendar reminders function keeps me on time for all my meetings and the rules and folders for mail keep my correspondence arranged by topic and the colour coding for incoming mail meant the fuchsia messages from my principal got instant attention. I loved using Backflip, because I could access my bookmarks from any computer (now I’ve switched to del.icio.us). I love my MSN homepage because on one page I’ve got email, important links, daily weather, news headlines, the comic strip For Better or Worse, and more.
But I know I can be much better organized using some of the Web 2.0 tools out there. My inquiry question for this week is this. Which Web 2.0 tool could I learn use that would help organize more effectively my work and my life?
As I began to research this, I knew that it would be tough to pick just one tool. I needed something with applications in several areas, and that would be useful not just as a teacher’s tool but as a personal tool. I thought about the amount of time I spend searching the Internet, and thought that perhaps I could find something that would make this more efficient and less time consuming. That would impact my personal AND professional life.
I skimmed through our text book again looking for ideas and was struck by the title of Chapter 5: “RSS: The New Killer Apps for Educators.” I had looked at this earlier, while setting up my Bloglines account at the beginning of the course. But now I saw all the different ways you can use RSS to get all kinds of content organized and brought to you. Richardson says, “RSS is a technology that will change your life if you let it” (p. 72). The most useful application for me personally that he suggested was the RSS feed for website searches using Googlealerts.com (p.80).
I decided to investigate using RSS applications as my Web 2.0 tool of choice.
Joanne’s Trailfire on RSS and Blog Aggregates provided some more excellent examples of the effective use of RSS applications. In the article NCTE Inbox Blog: RSS: Bringing What’s New to You I was struck by this succinct explanation. “But what exactly does RSS do? In the simplest possible explanation, RSS gathers the new information from specific sites that interest you and brings this new information directly to you.” Then the author, Traci Gardner, provides some suggestions as to what RSS can do for you in addition to just keeping up with new blog postings.
Here are a couple of Gardner’s ideas:
1. Want to keep up with new results for a Google News search? Perform the search, then click on the RSS link (lower left of the page) to subscribe. When new results appear, you’ll see them in your aggregator.
2. At Amazon.com you can subscribe to RSS Feeds for Bestsellers, Hot New Releases, and Movers & Shakers.
In Terry Freedman’s book, Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The New World Wide Web, I found more good ideas about RSS in John Evans’ chapter “What Are RSS Feeds and Why Haven’t I Heard About It?(RSS Feeds from an Educator’s Perspective).” Evans mentions the time-saving aspect of having selected content come to you, and he gives some educational applications too. For example, in social studies teachers and students can subscribe to feeds from around the world on a specific topic or event to compare content, bias, coverage, etc. He suggests using RSS Compendium – RSS Feeds, which sorts feeds into categories such as Education, Film/Video, Government, etc.
I also read Quentin D’Souza’s Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators A Guide to RSS and More Version 2.0. He gives dozens of ideas for integrating RSS feeds into all kinds of projects and applications, including email, blogging, photo sharing, and video sharing. Need to be reminded about something? Go to ReminderFeed – Your RSS Reminder Service. Want to search while you are off line? Set up a search on MSN, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for it. Want to share a calendar with your family? Go to RSS Calendar, and you’ll get updates automatically in your aggregator! I have set up a calendar to share with my family to help us in planning our family reunion for next year.
It is clear to me that using RSS feeds more extensively will simplify my time online considerably. I’ve already seen how easy it is to keep up with new blog postings on Bloglines. I plan to set aside some time each day to learn how to use RSS more effectively, especially in doing Internet searches.
As a teacher librarian, how would I go about sharing this with my high school teachers? I would select a social studies topic dealing with a current issue, such as global warming, set up some feeds from around the world, and meet with one social studies teacher to share what I’ve collected. I would teach her how to set up a Bloglines account and appropriate feeds. Together we would plan a project where students would look at and use content from around the world using RSS aggregators. One we’ve done this with one class, we would collect feedback from the students, and modify the project.
This has been the toughest week of the course so far for me. I have spent way too many hours reading books and blogs and exploring video-sharing sites. In fact I’ve worked so many hours that today my husband said to me, “Sweetheart, how would you have time to do this course if you were still teaching?”
I felt so overwhelmed that I dug out my copy of Focus on Inquiry and looked at the description of the Processing phase of the inquiry process:
“Inquirers usually experience a sense of relief and elation when they have established a focus for their inquiry. Even so, choosing pertinent information from resources is often a difficult task; there may be too little information or too much information, or the information may be too superficial or too in-depth for the inquirers. Often the information that is found is confusing and contradictory, so students may feel overwhelmed” (Alberta Learning, 2004, p. 12).
Yes, that was me. Overwhelmed. While I understood from my reading that video sharing sites work for many teachers, my initial exploration of YouTube did not excite me. According to the YouTube statistics from Michael Wesch’s blog, Digital Ethnography, as of March 17th 2008, there were 78.3 Million videos on YouTube, and 150,000 videos are uploaded each day (Wesch, 2008b).
When I searched for videos that could be used to support curricula I found the site confusing, the search inefficient, and the videos generally of poor quality. In addition several searches yielded results with tags that were to say the least, inappropriate for a school context – even high school. There was also blatant and rampant copyright infringement.
I looked for videos dealing with John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, as that is a project that I am presently reworking for an English teacher friend. What I found were many clips from commercial movies, and a variety of poorly done student re-creations of various parts of the story. Then I expanded my search to John Steinbeck and found The Dustbowl and the Great Depression.
This is the kind of project that I can see my students doing as they explore the life of migrant workers. It does likely infringe on copyrights, but we could avoid that by obtaining appropriate permissions and/or using non-copyrighted material.
In her blog posting, Have You Tried YouTube? Brenda Dyck talks about these constant trade-offs. She says, “Much to our chagrin, the very Web sites and online tools that provide incredible learning opportunities also provide the ever-present possibility for students to access and misuse inappropriate information and images. The enduring challenge for educators is how to access one without the other” (2007a).
Dyck goes on to discuss the fact that YouTube is blocked – and for many good reasons – in many schools. I know it is in mine, due not only to the inappropriate content, but also because of the fact that downloading video is a bandwidth issue. Dyck argues, ‘What better place than school to teach about and practice evaluating the value and ethical use of sites like YouTube? But just talking about it isn’t sufficient; students need the chance to develop their ability to evaluate Web content to determine “what is and isn’t appropriate, what is and isn’t academic, what is and isn’t true.” Anything less would lack authenticity'(2007a).
But of course it’s not just about the resources students can use, which is the part I have been struggling with.
So I know I am slow, and what I am saying is painfully obvious to all of you, my young colleagues, but I finally get it – it’s the Read/WRITE Web. Maybe it should be the Read/Write/Converse Web. Michael Wesch’s presentation “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” made this so clear to me: video sharing is just as much about the sharing – and the conversation it creates — as it is the video. Think of the Numa Numa song, moving from person to person around the world (Wesch, 2008a).
In their report titled Pew Internet: Teens and social media, “The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004″ [underlining is mine] (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill,, & Smith, 2007, p.2).
Of course we want our students to have access to quality curriculum-related videos as part of their instruction, but we also need to facilitate our students’ creation of video. Students need to be involved with the process of creating product, as well as simply viewing it. And that finally helps me to see more clearly just how YouTube might fit, at least in my high school. Our Communication Technology students create a variety of products, ranging from portfolios of their photographs to computer animation projects to short music videos to a full television news broadcast (we have a professional quality TV studio) complete with news, sports, weather, and commercials.
These products were shared only with teachers and classmates, and at Open House. Last year I suggested to the teacher that she have a noon hour showing of the best of the work. We booked our large central atrium and had a week of sharing that included displays of photographs and portfolios in the library as well as video showings for ever-increasing audiences of fascinated students, some of whom didn’t even know of the Comm Tech program’s existence.
If those students had their work shared on TeacherTube, what a resource that could grow to be. They can compare their work with that from thousands of other students around the world, and can learn from successes and the mistakes of their peers. Their teacher can hone her instructional techniques with dozens of exemplars, both from her own and from other teachers’ students. And as Will Richardson says, these videos can be aimed at “real people outside the classroom” (2008, p.121).
In Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0, Susan Ariew gives a great example of this. She discusses how her library used a student volunteer who was an avid YouTube user/creator to help library staff create videos for library instruction. The first video, Databases, was posted only on YouTube as it infringed on copyright and was not technically perfect. But the staff was hooked. They invested time and planning and money on higher-quality equipment, and their second video, “The Chronicles of Libraria,” was posted by the library and received national attention. The student volunteer spoke at a library conference, showing his presentation Youtube, Librarians, and Me. Now planning for further videos is an important aspect of library programming, so much so that the library sponsors a video contest to solicit more instructional videos created by students (2008, pp. 125-132).
I’ve been asked to do a presentation on Web 2.0 at my previous school, fortunately not until this course is over! I’m already planning the video-sharing section. I’m looking forward to reading your blogs to help me stumble a little less on my way.
Ariew, S. (2008). Joining the YouTube conversation to teach information literacy. In P. Godwin & J. Parker, Information literacy meets Library 2.0 (pp. 125-132). London: Facet.
Clark, J. A. (2007). YouTube university: Using XML, web services, and online video services to serve university and library video content. In L. B. Cohen (Ed.), Library 2.0 initiatives in academic libraries (pp. 156-167). Chicago: Association for College & Research Libraries.
JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments – biological experiments and protocols on video. (2008). Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.jove.com/
Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd. ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
RuneHQVideos (Director). (2007). The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression [Motion picture]. YouTube. Retrieved September 24, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gplaqa2yRgg
Science videos search engine [Indexes videos from other sites]. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2008, from http://sciencehack.com/
Studio 4 Networks, Inc. (2008). Studio 4 Learning. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://studio4learning.tv/
TeacherTube – Teach the world: Teacher videos, lesson plan videos, student video lessons online. (2008). Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.teachertube.com/
Wesch, M. (Writer/Director). (2008). YouTube – An anthropological introduction to YouTube [Motion picture]. United States: YouTube. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&feature=user
When thinking about the topic “Creating a visual presence in your own ‘little’ places on the web,” one area of concern I thought about was creating an online identity. The question I want to consider is this: How much of myself do I want to put ‘out there’ on the web? As a way of limiting the topic, I’m restricting my response to blogging.
When I began building the blog for this course, I started out thinking that I should strictly limit any personal information or even personality in my blog. I built a Voki avatar to use instead of using a photo of myself. I avoided using my name in the URL. My original posts were short and, I thought, to the point; in other words, really boring. Then I began to read blogs, and about blogs.
First I read Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom Use. Richardson suggests that teachers create their own blogs and make them public.
Be a public blogger. Put your name on your work, but make sure you understand the ramifications of doing so. . . . Public writing demands discretion, especially in an educational setting. And remember too that what you write stays with you. Each post contributes to your online portfolio that may turn up in future Google searches (p. 45).
Hmm, yes – discretion. This reinforces that I should be careful what I put out there. The comment about “public writing” stayed with me. I came across that idea again in a blog entry by Doug Johnson titled How – the importance of conduct. Johnson blogs about Thomas Friedman’s review of Dov Seidman`s book How.
And Seidman’s book, Friedman writes, is about how one’s reputation in life is going “to get set in stone so much earlier.” It’s “a digital fingerprint that never gets erased” and that second chances will be harder to come by when your resume may play second fiddle to a Google search about you. That the only way to succeed is to get your how‘s right – how you live your life and how you conduct your business. And do it early in life.
Obviously I know that I have to be discreet about what I write in each page and post, but this article made me look carefully at what else I had put on my blog.
I love quotes, and was excited when I discovered that I could add a quote widget. However, I got rid of the first one I used, a widget called Quotes4All because a couple of the quotes were a little more suggestive than I was comfortable with. While I found them funny, I wouldn`t have shared them in a professional context at school, so I decided not to share them on my blog.
The quick and dirty version:
We create a Profile (My Account) on a site, we make friends and add applications and groups and events to define Identity. We interact over time, offering content and comments and ratings which gains us a Reputation. That Reputation is then turned into a Trust factor – we decide how trustworthy a social network member is by the way they fill out their profile, by the connections they make, and by the content they submit, all of which is over time, which is why Social Media is a long term engagement.
She has posted this diagram on Flickr. Note she mentions choice of widgets under Identity!
As I continued my exploration for information about to identify myself in the blogosphere, I searched for blogs to add to my Bloglines account. I saw not only how the “experts” were crafting their entries, but how their personalities and some personal information were revealed. Will Richardson mentions his son, Tucker. Joyce Valenza`s very funny post My condo for a paper clip: or the effect of Kindle freeze on one particular vacationer shares some insights about her family and her foibles. Doug Johnson`s Blue Skunk Blog is frequently funny and personally revealing, as when he describes his ill-fated Alaska adventure.
I also found two excellent postings by Stephen Downes about how to create effective blogs. Both discuss the importance of establishing a clear identity. In Seven Habits of Highly Connected People, the seventh habit is Be Yourself.
The idea behind “being yourself” is not that you have some sort of offline life (though you may). Rather, it’s a recognition that your online life encompasses the many different facets of your life, and that it is important that these facets are all represented and work together.
In another post, How To Be Heard, Downes discusses many strategies for getting your blog read and taken seriously. In the section, Your Blog Is Your Identity, he suggests several ideas, including using your name in your URL, adding your blog address wherever you put your name, putting your blog address on your business cards and as part of your email signature, and makes this final point:
And don’t forget: put your name on your blog. Blog posts that cannot be attributed are much less likely to be cited by anyone (and if they’re not cited, they’re not read).
I`m not ashamed to admit that I really knew nothing about establishing online identity in my blog. How have I changed it as a result of my reading and reflection?
I`ve used my name in the URL.
I`ve added some humour (hopefully).
I used my own photo instead of an avatar.
I added personal information (my love for Scotland), and used some photos I took there.
I`ve worked on developing a distinct and personal voice in my blog entries.
I know I have a lot to learn about personal online identity on the web, but at least now I know that I didn`t know!
I can’t sleep. I’m feeling a little rushed — trying not to get trampled in the rush of blog rolls, RSS feeds, Facebook updates, and so on and so on. I read Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog today, and his post “Your source for humor?” resonated with me. Instead of tossing and turning, I’ve decided to take stock. Johnson talks about the fact that humour is a great motivator, attention-getter, and stress reliever. I couldn’t agree more — hence the photo of the sheep stampede above.
Having a laugh gave me a chance to catch my breath and think more about how some of Richardson’s suggested used for blogs in the classroom could apply to my library. I am very proud of the library web site I created for M.E. LaZerte High School. It is a combination of web links and pathfinders and online learning structures for a wide range of curricula. But it could be so much better.
I do love the assignment we created for Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men. Students were asked to collect materials on the Great Depression, and they visited the New Deal Network to view photographs and read accounts of people who lived during the Depression. They then created a collage based on the material they found. How powerful it would be to have students blog this material. I can imagine the rich discourse that would result as groups looked at the material other groups had found, and were able to reflect and comment on it.
I am hoping that, even though I am retired, I can go back to school and work with my good friend Kathryn Cook on reworking this assignment.
