I am back. And ALA was dizzying. I must apologize to Alice and Laura. I developed this post for the AASL Blog, but could not seem to post it. So maybe we could link later?
For those of you interested in seeing our little gang posing around the Convention Center, check out the Flickr account.
I was grateful to get my research presentation out of the way on Saturday afternoon. I asked the audience to help me interpret the data and folks in the room, like David Loertscher, asked some hard questions about what it all means. I love those questions that force me to look with a new lens! And I am quite excited about the next steps. Research can be thrilling, you know!
Some highlights of my conference:
Flat World Classrooms (Saturday) Some very random ideas from David Warlick–
I couldn’t agree with David more. If you want to be in on any discussion of change, you have to read Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat. It is talked about everywhere and it has forced me to think about what it is I do that is important and what it is I do that won’t be outsourced to Bangalore or UPS headquarters.
Warlick points to some of Friedman’s big ideas that are relevant to an also flat classroom:
We are living in “a world that is increasingly global, where industry is crossing political boarders, and not only purchasing the natural resources of other countries, but also contracting for the intellectual talent that is located any place where there is an Internet connection.” You can read many of the flat examples David provided in his wiki:
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki-warlick/index.php?title=Flat_World_Classrooms
David also recommended Richard Florida’s titles: The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. He argues that historically, the Internet has moved from conversation (remember text-based email systems? How I loved my Pine!) to library (remember when we didn’t talk back to websites?), and back to conversation (how we are interacting and collaborating and will interact and collaborate through our blogs and wikis and what is next to come).
The workforce of the future will have the need for more creative arts jobs. We will need people who can express ideas compellingly. Learners should ask, “How do I get my message through the storm?” It’s not about the technology; it’s about the information, the story! We need to teach kids how to be creative producers of information.
The internet now allows business to meet the needs of the “long tail” by fulfilling the needs of emerging niche markets.
Every citizen should have access to networked information Although we are seeing more home broadband access among most groups of later adopters—one major exception is people in rural areas
Among the many links David recommends is the amazing Technorati http://www.technorati.com/ which tracks the blogosphere, Hitchhikr http://www.hitchhikr.com/ where you can hitch a ride to conferences you are, and are not attending physically, Buzztracker http://www.buzztracker.org/ where you can learn more about mashups, Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/ for self publishing, and YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ where folks are energetically sharing their videos.
David believes we need to retool education for the flat classroom. Though he is pessimistic, this North Carolinian also believes “we might could do this.” I think so too and I am ready for the next workshop on just how.
On Sunday at Treasure Mountain a group of researchers and practitioners discussed Tomlinson and McTighe’s new Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding By Design. The question on the table: How would you modify the book’s axioms to make them relevant in an information-rich and technology-rich environment (the LMC)? Would you add any new axioms that would merge the three-part Venn diagram: UBD, DI, and LMC program?
Fearless leader David Loertscher provided the two units of instruction that have transformed old “bird units” to higher-level ones. We discussed the units with their creators, David’s students in California via telephone.
David urged us to learned to speak UMI and Di and to continue to ask the most essential of questions How do we move the library media program into the center of learning?
Sunday at Crystal Ball 2, the eminent panel of KQ editors spoke thoughtfully of change, but it was Danny Callison’s voice that continues to resonate with me. Danny believes that “we don’t know nearly as much as we should about school library media professionals and programs, nor instructional interventions for student learning and best practices. We’re tending to learning only what seems to make us feel better and we are not learning enough about how we should improve and what other stakeholders value.. . We need to test for the Future rather than to preserve the Past and Present.
Danny discussed and compared current research and spoke of the need for new research. From his handout: “You don’t need 99% to be impressive. You do need to be believable. Establish credibility with recognizing challenges with success. . .We learn from critical review if it is valid.”
Monday–YALSA’s President’s Program and Membership Meeting: How Adult Is Young Adult
This discussion of those many young adult titles that are both literary and sophisticated featured a wonderfully thoughtful panel and I wish I could have captured far more in my notes.
Michael Cart spoke of the history of YA lit. He spoke about crossover titles. The importance of leading teens to books that maybe labeled adult and equally importantly, leading adults to books that may be labeled YA. Publishers arenow doing some simultaneous publishing. But according to other panelists, there are several reasons for so little crossover. Among them–writers who write for adults get larger advances.
Whether a book is YA may depend on how close the narrator is to the teen experience. Catcher in the Rye, considered by many the first YA book, is actually written in the Peter Pan tradition. Huck Finn is actually the first book (by a genius) who could write in the consciousness of an adolescent with the soul of a 50-year-old.
Author Adrian Chambers left us with the message: Life follows art. Those cave paintings in France are truly examinations of people considering “how we can do it better? What’s the best plan for us to kill buffalo?”
Books are like that too. They explore and offer ways to consider how to be a teen. There are many ways, of course, just as there are many ways to be a seventy-two year-old man, as Phillip Roth and Chambers himself are both exploring.
After noting that Catcher in the Rye pretends to portray teen consciousness but actually presents the consciousness of a bitter, middle-aged man, author Greg Galloway looked at what makes a book literary and sophisticated. “The Windex approach” is at odds with “the stained glass approach.”
Dan Brown uses “the Windex approach” when he describes his DaVinci Code protagonist as “tall and broad” or as “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed.” Raymond Chandler and Vladimir Nabokov (and many others) really know how to create “stained glass” descriptions.
Galloway shared delicious descriptions of Chandler’s women– “Inside was a blonde. A blonde! A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” And Humbert’s descriptions of Lolita. “My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
I hope to have more to share in future posts. Right now there is laundry.
