Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

The cover story of the March issue of American Libraries (the magazine of the American Library Association) explored librarians who blog. Despite the fact that school librarians represent a major segment of the membership, the story did not list a single school library blogger.

Doug Johnson and Peter Milbury wrote eloquent letters to the editor and the response was an article for the May 2007 issue based on questions submitted by the LM_NET listserv.

Here are my responses to AL’s questions and the responses of some of my colleagues:

What differentiates blogging for library media specialists from writing for the generalist biblioblogs?

I don’t understand what generalist biblioblogs are. Are you specifically referring to blogs written by public, academic, law, medical, business librarians? Don’t school librarians’ blogs automatically fit this category? I do separate my professional blogging from the blogging I do with students and classes.

What are your professional objectives for blogging?

I blog to learn. I blog to lead.

As a blogger I am part of a dialog far bigger than any I could engage in locally. Some of the comments I get are in languages I cannot easily translate. Blogging allows me to cross professions and to cross ALA divisions. Through my blog, I connect with as many classroom teachers, academics, and ed tech folks as I do with librarians. When I blog, I grow ideas. I count on the comments of regular readers to enhance and to challenge the ideas I put out. My blog allows me to fully bake many of my half baked ideas. Through the synthesis of what I get from my blogroll–what I read about what others are doing–and the comments I receive, I am able to bring better practice back to the classroom.

How much time do you devote to blogging?

I blog for about one or two hours a week. It varies. When I have nothing to say, I say nothing. I stopped blogging twice this year–when we had a crisis at school and when I was writing my dissertation.

How does having a professional blog impact your work with students?

Most of my students do not read my blog. I am always flattered to find that some do and say, “interesting post last night, Mrs. V!” But they are not the audience for my professional blog. My own blog gave me the confidence to lead our teachers in blogging over the past two years. It represented our school’s first step into the 2.0 world. It’s part of my job as technology integrator and scout. School librarians experiment and then help to translate emerging tools to meet learning objectives. My blog was a prototype. Folks really don’t see the other blogs I help set up. Many of our classroom projects now take blog (or wiki) form—our students manage and reflect on their research through research blogs. Our literature circles discuss their readings through group blogs. The characters in Hamlet discuss each scene as they live it in our Hamlet community blogs. Our seniors discuss global issues, films, and provocative readings in their class blogs. The blogs led to a great number of wikis. Among the most effective were the wikis we used plan a “live from Salem podcasts” and the wiki that supports lacrosse team intelligence.

What are the pitfalls for a school librarian to be writing a blog?

I don’t know yet. Many of my colleagues tell me they cannot read my blog because most blog sites are blocked by their schools’ filters.

How does blogging affect your interaction with nonlibrarian colleagues?

I suspect my blog is read by as many classroom teachers–especially edtech folks–as it is by librarians. I am frequently invited to speak at Web and face-to-face conferences outside the library world as a result of my blog. I hope that my blog helps to represent the role of school librarians in the educational community. When I visit ISTE or the Alan November conference this summer, I will connect with so many nonlibrarian colleagues—our writings are linked through our blogs. And I feel as though I’ve collaborated with them for years. My blogging introduced me to the community that is developing Terry Freedman’s upcoming Coming of Age 2.0 online book–http://web2booklet.blogspot.com/ I’ll be contributing a piece on Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0. My blog led me to become a member of the EdTechTalk community. You can hear my guest speaker spot on EdTechTalk here: http://www.edtechtalk.com/EdTechTalk53

It led to several visiting podcasts, for instance a podcast on resource evaluation for the Illinois Math and Science Academy’s Information Fluency Project http://21cif.imsa.edu/.

What has been the response of your faculty and/or administration to your blog?

My administration has been very encouraging. They are proud of my professional achievements. Springfield supports its library program and it supports professional growth.

What is the greatest benefit to blogging about school libraries?

My school library blog helps to present school libraries and school librarians to the larger educational blogospere and the biblioblogosphere. It allows me to play in the other blogging sandboxes. For school librarians, blogging is an effective way to demonstrate the talents and our value. Many more of us should be blogging.

How do you see the evolution of blogging (i.e., the growth of online video) as intersecting with the job of school media professionals?

My learners create knowledge products in multiple media—it’s the essence of synthesis and communication—it’s the culmination of the research process. I want to celebrate their efforts and share their streaming media learning objects with the larger learning community. I use blogs to gather their productions. This makes perfect sense—using the Virtual Library as a knowledge management tool. I recently created the Springfield Video Blog to gather and organize our growing collection of student-produced media. The blog features videos on using Google more powerfully, how to search databases. It hosts our new grammar series as well as our library orientation video. It also hosts a growing archive of book trailers. We now feature my introduction podcast and two student podcasts. This stuff is going to grow—bigtime! Students are proud to share this work. We use other 2.0 tools as well. We are moving our pathfinders to wiki format. We post our schools’ events, archived images, and our art gallery via Flickr. We post all of these knowledge products on the Virtual Library.

Doug’s responses.

Alice’s responses.

Sara Kelly Johns’ responses

Chris Harris’ responses

Francis Jacobson Harris’ responses

Rob Darrow’s responses 

Two stories from eSchoolNews caught my eye this week.

1. The fourth annual Speak Up survey revealed student, teacher, and parent attitudes relating to educational technology. The study found that students want to increase integration of technology into such subjects as science and math. Students cite communication as their number one use of technology.

Here are some other results from the survey:

•97 percent of students think cell phones should be allowed at school for emergencies and connecting with parents, compared with 77 percent of parents and just 56 percent of teachers.

•Use of digital cameras, MP3 players, and laptop computers in grades 3-12 has increased significantly during the past two years of the study.

•53 percent of students in grades K-12 use video games on a weekly basis. Girls are just as likely to be playing as boys until high school. •75 percent of teachers believe the use of technology in schoolwork has resulted in increased student performance and achievement.

•One-fourth of students are eMailing their teachers.

•One-third of students are interested in taking an online class.

•When asked how well they think their school is preparing students for working in the 21st century, 48 percent of parents and 47 percent of teachers said well. More than 50 percent of parents said not well.

2.  And watch out college music downloaders. RIAA looks to change students’ tune. The Recording Industry of America is escalating its war on illegal music downloading, targeting 23 universities.

The group’s new approach, which began last month, calls for pre-litigation letters to be sent to a number of different universities each month, informing the schools that a copyright-infringement lawsuit against one of their students is forthcoming; students can settle with the group within 20 days to avoid being sued.

In a related personal story, Matthew surprised me a few weeks ago coming down from his room wearing a new t-shirt.  “You see, I listen, Mom.”

An unintentional parable.

Two honors students visited yesterday.  They asked to use the library microwave to make a bag of popcorn for their class.  We sent them to the little kitchen area in the back.

We heard no popping.  We smelled no butter.  Five minutes later the girls emerged.  “There’s no popcorn button,” they complained. 

We shared our own wisdom.  “Sometimes in life, there is no popcorn button.”