In one word: accessibility.
Certainly, the accessibility of information is something that libraries and librarians have been focusing on since…well, probably since the very first librarian established the very first library, but I'm not talking (or writing, as the case may be) about these traditional ideas of accessibility. That's SOOO Library 1.0. No, what I'm focusing my energy on in this blog post and what I think libraries and librarians should focus their energy on in the coming year and beyond is accessibility in the era of Library 2.0 and social networking.
As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, I think it's safe to say that most libraries and librarians have by this point embraced the concept of Library 2.0 (or, if not wholeheartedly "embraced," have at least realized that it can no longer be ignored) and social networking and have begun incorporating various Library 2.0/social networking features and functionalities into their library websites. Which is great (in theory, at least).
The problem is that, while feeling obligated to add all of these widgets and whatnot in order to make their website's users feel more welcome and like they are more able to interact with the library and with one another in an online environment, they haven't really made that online environment any more inviting or accessible to those users. If anything, all of the bells and whistles of blogs and wikis have in many instances made those online environments more confusing and closed-off to users than they were before.
What I'm saying is that, libraries and librarians have been distracted by plugging in all of the shiny plug-ins for long enough, and now need to return their focus to the users and to making all of these new Library 2.0 features and functionalities less of a novelty and more of a natural and ultimately accessible aspect of their websites and of their services in general.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee attempts to respond to the many critics who dismiss playing video games as a “waste of time” by discussing and demonstrating how video games actually communicate information and teach specific skills incredibly efficiently and effectively, how children and young adults actually learn a great deal by playing video games (and enjoy themselves at the same time!), and how schools and teachers could actually learn a great deal from video games as well – about engaging students and encouraging true learning.
Gee begins by summarizing the arguments of those who view video games as a “waste of time,” stating that in their view (and unfortunately, in the view of many current educators and administrators), important knowledge is “content”: facts and figures that can be “drilled and skilled” – learned and memorized by students, and then measured and assessed by standardized tests. This is effective education in their eyes, and they view any other form of work (especially playing video games) that does not involve such learning as “meaningless.”
The absurdity of such an approach is immediately evident to Gee, and he attempts to help the reader appreciate this absurdity by considering another type of “gaming”: the game of basketball. “Imagine a textbook that contained all the facts and rules about basketball read by students who never played or watched the game,” he writes. “How well do you think they would understand this textbook? How motivated to understand it do you think they would be?” Not. At. All.
Isn’t that absurd? Wouldn’t it be absurd to try to teach children the game of basketball by forcing them to memorize all of the facts and rules related to it rather than by actually playing it? “But we do this sort of thing all the time in school with areas like math and science,” Gee rightly observes. True learning only occurs when the game of basketball (or any type of subject or skill) is experienced directly by the learner, and that is the primary reason why Gee believes that video games are actually better at facilitating learning than the current flawed educational system in place in many of our schools and enforced by many of our teachers and administrators.
Rather than being the “waste of time” that most adults believe them to be, Gee concludes that video games “encourage [the player] to think of himself as an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.” In sharp contrast to much of what passes for education in this era of “No Child Left Behind” which forces students to simply “ritualize the solutions to problems,” the playing of video games encourages children and young adults “to be the sort of problem solver who leaves himself open to finding new ways to solve new problems in new situations.”
If you are at all interested in education and/or video games, or are at least willing to have your assumptions about education and/or video games challenged (and hopefully corrected), then I highly encourage you to read Gee’s book. Support your local library and check out What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy!
Gee begins by summarizing the arguments of those who view video games as a “waste of time,” stating that in their view (and unfortunately, in the view of many current educators and administrators), important knowledge is “content”: facts and figures that can be “drilled and skilled” – learned and memorized by students, and then measured and assessed by standardized tests. This is effective education in their eyes, and they view any other form of work (especially playing video games) that does not involve such learning as “meaningless.”
The absurdity of such an approach is immediately evident to Gee, and he attempts to help the reader appreciate this absurdity by considering another type of “gaming”: the game of basketball. “Imagine a textbook that contained all the facts and rules about basketball read by students who never played or watched the game,” he writes. “How well do you think they would understand this textbook? How motivated to understand it do you think they would be?” Not. At. All.
Isn’t that absurd? Wouldn’t it be absurd to try to teach children the game of basketball by forcing them to memorize all of the facts and rules related to it rather than by actually playing it? “But we do this sort of thing all the time in school with areas like math and science,” Gee rightly observes. True learning only occurs when the game of basketball (or any type of subject or skill) is experienced directly by the learner, and that is the primary reason why Gee believes that video games are actually better at facilitating learning than the current flawed educational system in place in many of our schools and enforced by many of our teachers and administrators.
Rather than being the “waste of time” that most adults believe them to be, Gee concludes that video games “encourage [the player] to think of himself as an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.” In sharp contrast to much of what passes for education in this era of “No Child Left Behind” which forces students to simply “ritualize the solutions to problems,” the playing of video games encourages children and young adults “to be the sort of problem solver who leaves himself open to finding new ways to solve new problems in new situations.”
If you are at all interested in education and/or video games, or are at least willing to have your assumptions about education and/or video games challenged (and hopefully corrected), then I highly encourage you to read Gee’s book. Support your local library and check out What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy!
Web 2.0 at Work
I didn’t really have too terribly many occasions to use Web 2.0 technologies during my student teaching, but whenever the opportunity arose, I most definitely took advantage of it, often incorporating excerpts from blogs or streaming videos into my instruction.
I also even encouraged students to consider creating their own digital audio or video content instead of just writing an essay and turning it in. In one very memorable instance, a student created a short video for an assignment and then uploaded it to YouTube, which made it very easy for me to view and to share with other teachers and students (with his permission, of course).
Also, while none of the teachers that I worked with used them, at various department meetings I would hear teachers at the lower grade levels discussing the use of blogs and wikis in their classes. One common use for these two particular Web 2.0 technologies was that students were asked to keep a daily journal or a reading journal in which they wrote about their reactions to the content covered in class that day or the material that they read for homework that night, which they would then post and allow the teacher and/or the other students in the class to comment on.
Another similar yet different use of blogs and wikis in the classroom involved students would being asked to write reviews of the books, short stories, plays and poems that they read for class and to then post them, allowing other students to comment on their reviews and note whether they agreed or disagreed with that student’s assessment.
While this sounded very interesting and appealing to me and to the other teachers, when I talked to my actual students about using blogs and wikis in the classroom, the reaction that I received was overwhelmingly negative. Even though they were “digital natives” and have in many cases grown up reading and even contributing to blogs and wikis, that didn’t make the idea of having to use them for class any more appealing than any other type of assignment.
I guess homework is still homework to them, no matter how technologically trendy the teachers try to make it.
I also even encouraged students to consider creating their own digital audio or video content instead of just writing an essay and turning it in. In one very memorable instance, a student created a short video for an assignment and then uploaded it to YouTube, which made it very easy for me to view and to share with other teachers and students (with his permission, of course).
Also, while none of the teachers that I worked with used them, at various department meetings I would hear teachers at the lower grade levels discussing the use of blogs and wikis in their classes. One common use for these two particular Web 2.0 technologies was that students were asked to keep a daily journal or a reading journal in which they wrote about their reactions to the content covered in class that day or the material that they read for homework that night, which they would then post and allow the teacher and/or the other students in the class to comment on.
Another similar yet different use of blogs and wikis in the classroom involved students would being asked to write reviews of the books, short stories, plays and poems that they read for class and to then post them, allowing other students to comment on their reviews and note whether they agreed or disagreed with that student’s assessment.
While this sounded very interesting and appealing to me and to the other teachers, when I talked to my actual students about using blogs and wikis in the classroom, the reaction that I received was overwhelmingly negative. Even though they were “digital natives” and have in many cases grown up reading and even contributing to blogs and wikis, that didn’t make the idea of having to use them for class any more appealing than any other type of assignment.
I guess homework is still homework to them, no matter how technologically trendy the teachers try to make it.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Choose Your Own Adventure (and/or Blog Post Topic)!
For this week's blog post, I am choosing to write about what I felt was the most interesting part of my research into Folksonomies: metadata. More specifically, how it has been used in libraries and how it has been used (and not used) on the Internet.
Apparently, metadata was included as part of the original proposal for the Internet, which was envisaged as “a collection of organized, linked ideas.” While a structured system such as this would have made accessing and navigating the early Internet infinitely more efficient and effective, metadata was initially absent from the Internet because it’s designers felt that “the flexibility and simplicity of the Web was more important to its early users than the maintenance of a strict structure.”
Metadata did eventually find its way onto the Internet, however, as it continued to grow in popularity during the end of the previous millennium and the beginning of the current one. Marcel Gordon attributes this eventual inclusion of metadata by the Internet to two particular Internet innovations: “First, search engines began to map the Web, introducing what is now the Web’s primary interface.” These search engines, recognizing that metadata could be used to organize the Web, “began to use identity metadata such as titles and keywords in assessing the relevance of a page to a given query.” Accordingly, metadata’s importance to the Internet increased exponentially.
The second innovation was that not long after the appearance of search engines, commercial interests also appeared on the Web. In response, to the increasing use of metadata by search engines, “commercial Web site operators supplied false metadata about their pages to ensure that they appeared more frequently in search results and attracted more users.” As a result, metadata was essentially removed from the Internet once again because it had become “untrustworthy and effectively useless, depriving the Web of this powerful information management tool.”
Today, of course, metadata has returned to the Internet once again with the development and popularity of Web 2.0, which allows users to not only browse the Internet but to actively contribute to it by contributing original online content…just like I’m doing right now!
To learn more about the history of metadata use on the Internet and in libraries, and about how metadata is being used today in this wonderful Web 2.0 world, be sure to read Marcel Gordon’s article “Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach.” As always, here’s the citation:
Gordon, M. (2006). Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach. The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law, 531-570.
Apparently, metadata was included as part of the original proposal for the Internet, which was envisaged as “a collection of organized, linked ideas.” While a structured system such as this would have made accessing and navigating the early Internet infinitely more efficient and effective, metadata was initially absent from the Internet because it’s designers felt that “the flexibility and simplicity of the Web was more important to its early users than the maintenance of a strict structure.”
Metadata did eventually find its way onto the Internet, however, as it continued to grow in popularity during the end of the previous millennium and the beginning of the current one. Marcel Gordon attributes this eventual inclusion of metadata by the Internet to two particular Internet innovations: “First, search engines began to map the Web, introducing what is now the Web’s primary interface.” These search engines, recognizing that metadata could be used to organize the Web, “began to use identity metadata such as titles and keywords in assessing the relevance of a page to a given query.” Accordingly, metadata’s importance to the Internet increased exponentially.
The second innovation was that not long after the appearance of search engines, commercial interests also appeared on the Web. In response, to the increasing use of metadata by search engines, “commercial Web site operators supplied false metadata about their pages to ensure that they appeared more frequently in search results and attracted more users.” As a result, metadata was essentially removed from the Internet once again because it had become “untrustworthy and effectively useless, depriving the Web of this powerful information management tool.”
Today, of course, metadata has returned to the Internet once again with the development and popularity of Web 2.0, which allows users to not only browse the Internet but to actively contribute to it by contributing original online content…just like I’m doing right now!
To learn more about the history of metadata use on the Internet and in libraries, and about how metadata is being used today in this wonderful Web 2.0 world, be sure to read Marcel Gordon’s article “Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach.” As always, here’s the citation:
Gordon, M. (2006). Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach. The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law, 531-570.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Wikis and Folksonomies
Speaking of citation information (as I did at the end of my previous post), here are the citations for the two articles that I found for this week's class about wikis and folksonomies:
Bell, S. (2008). Wikis for reference, enthusiasts, and government information. Online, 33(1), 20-23.
Cosentino, S. L. (2008). Folksonomies: Path to a better way? Public Libraries, 47(2), 42-47.
Bell, S. (2008). Wikis for reference, enthusiasts, and government information. Online, 33(1), 20-23.
Cosentino, S. L. (2008). Folksonomies: Path to a better way? Public Libraries, 47(2), 42-47.
An Effective Example of Library 2.0 Service
After reading "Building a Library Web Site on the Pillars of Web 2.0" by Karen A. Coombs, I think that the library at the University of Houston has truly understood and embraced Web 2.0 and is making great efforts to effectively incorporate elements of it into its website and services.
Upon determining that their previous website “needed a new structure for both managing and organizing it” and that “the site’s structure was rigid and inflexible and provided no space for staff or users to participate,” Coombs began researching many elements of Web 2.0 including blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social software, and from this research identified six “Pillars of Web 2.0” that the library would use as the foundation for rebuilding its web site.
These six pillars are:
1. Radical decentralization, which Coombs says helped librarians to establish ownership of their library website content due to its “wiki-like nature,” in which “any staff member can make changes to a page if they see a problem.”
2. Small pieces loosely joined. Referring to the library’s previous website as “a monolithic silo that stood separate from the rest of the library’s web-based systems,” Coombs and the other librarians decided to make their new website “a combination of different technologies” which gives the new site “as much flexibility as possible.”
3. Perpetual beta, an idea that “embraces change” and creates an environment where “constant improvements can be made”to their new website.
4. Remixable content, which Coombs defines as “content and/or data that is accessible to be repurposed in other applications,” giving the example of subject guide content being “incorporated into the corresponding department’s website or appropriate classes” in addition to being hosted by the library’s website.
5. User as contributor, which allows library website users to “create content and give feedback,” and
6. Rich user experience, which is what Coombs and the other librarians at the University of Houston hope their website users will have as a result of their incorporation of the previous five pillars of Web 2.0 into their website.
For more detailed information about each of these six pillars and how Coombs used them to improve her library's website, be sure to read her full article. Here is the citation:
Coombs, K. A. (2007). Building a library web site on the pillars of Web 2.0. Computers in Libraries, 27(1), 16-19.
Upon determining that their previous website “needed a new structure for both managing and organizing it” and that “the site’s structure was rigid and inflexible and provided no space for staff or users to participate,” Coombs began researching many elements of Web 2.0 including blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social software, and from this research identified six “Pillars of Web 2.0” that the library would use as the foundation for rebuilding its web site.
These six pillars are:
1. Radical decentralization, which Coombs says helped librarians to establish ownership of their library website content due to its “wiki-like nature,” in which “any staff member can make changes to a page if they see a problem.”
2. Small pieces loosely joined. Referring to the library’s previous website as “a monolithic silo that stood separate from the rest of the library’s web-based systems,” Coombs and the other librarians decided to make their new website “a combination of different technologies” which gives the new site “as much flexibility as possible.”
3. Perpetual beta, an idea that “embraces change” and creates an environment where “constant improvements can be made”to their new website.
4. Remixable content, which Coombs defines as “content and/or data that is accessible to be repurposed in other applications,” giving the example of subject guide content being “incorporated into the corresponding department’s website or appropriate classes” in addition to being hosted by the library’s website.
5. User as contributor, which allows library website users to “create content and give feedback,” and
6. Rich user experience, which is what Coombs and the other librarians at the University of Houston hope their website users will have as a result of their incorporation of the previous five pillars of Web 2.0 into their website.
For more detailed information about each of these six pillars and how Coombs used them to improve her library's website, be sure to read her full article. Here is the citation:
Coombs, K. A. (2007). Building a library web site on the pillars of Web 2.0. Computers in Libraries, 27(1), 16-19.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Towards School Library 2.0: An Introduction to Social Software Tools for Teacher Librarians
As a follow-up to my previous post, here is the specific citation information for the article that I referenced in that post, as well as citation information for the other article that I found for tonight's class session dealing with public libraries:
Atwater-Singer, M., & Sherrill, K. (2007). Social software, Web 2.0, Library 2.0, & you: A practical guide for using technology @ your library. Indiana Libraries, 26(3), 48-52.
Giustini, D., & Naslund, J. (2008). Towards school Library 2.0: An introduction to social software tools for teacher librarians. School Libraries Worldwide, 14(2), 55-67.
Atwater-Singer, M., & Sherrill, K. (2007). Social software, Web 2.0, Library 2.0, & you: A practical guide for using technology @ your library. Indiana Libraries, 26(3), 48-52.
Giustini, D., & Naslund, J. (2008). Towards school Library 2.0: An introduction to social software tools for teacher librarians. School Libraries Worldwide, 14(2), 55-67.
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