Capturing a living library

The Living Library is a new school program at the State Library of Victoria that makes use of Springpad, one of my favourite online tools. I’ve written about Springpad before as a fabulous personal library manager. It combines the searchability of Evernote with the visual interface of Pinterest, meaning it is perfect for a school program that challenges students to create a shared photographic record of their visit.

Armed with iPad minis, students first of all set off around all areas of the library and take photographs of people, places, text, pictures, and details. Students are encouraged to think about how their photographs can tell the story of how the library is being used, and already we’ve seen fantastic originality from the students who’ve taken part.  No editing or refining of pictures is done at this point- the brief is merely to capture as much of the experience as possible.

Then students return to a central point where they begin to think about the pictures that they’ve taken that best sum up their experience of the library. The pictures they select are all uploaded into the same notebook in a shared Springpad account (Springpad provides users with unlimited storage, but items must be smaller than 5mb). The photographs can also be given a title that hopefully adds to the story of the picture. We’ve been so impressed by the creativity of the students and some of the very clever titles they’ve made up.

The notebook is shared back with teachers after their visit, providing their class with a photographic record of their day. Hopefully it’s a useful resource for when students return to school. It could be used for recount writing, a digital storytelling presentation or a piece of creative writing inspired by the library.

So far Springpad has worked perfectly, despite the fact that often 30 students will be uploading photographs to the same account at the same time. If you’re thinking about making use of mobile technology to document a school excursion then Springpad is well worth considering, particularly as you can also add audio recordings to an item.  Best of all, Springpad notebooks are easy to share or embed on your blog, just as we’ve done below. So scroll down to have a look at some of our favourite pictures from the program so far.

A groundswell of playfulness

Hamish Curry, Education Manager at the State Library of Victoria reflects on gaming and playfulness after recently taking part in conferences in Auckland and Melbourne.

Games and playful thinking have been popping up a lot for me recently, more so than usual.

There seems to be a shift in the discussion from the games people play to how games both reflect and add to the culture of our workplaces and public spaces. School libraries can potentially be a hub for this kind of discussion enabling the exploration of games and apps that contribute to our understanding of digital literacy, deep reading and game elements.

In digging deeper I headed along to the inaugural Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) from July 19-21. Here more than 40,000 gamers descended on the Melbourne Show grounds to indulge in games from all kinds of mediums: card games, board games, video games, and talks about games. The scale was overwhelming. It was a powerful physical reminder of just how ubiquitous and diverse games are, as well as how rich the networks and local game development scene are too. I spoke on a panel about The Playful Library exploring the ways in which library spaces can be designed and co-programmed to support games culture. If libraries are keen to engage with the community, then games become a powerful way to bring playfulness and partnerships into their spaces.

Speaking of spaces, I was New Zealand bound the following day to participate in the Auckland City Council’s Hui ‘New Rules of Engagement: Future Directions for Children’s and Youth Services at Auckland Libraries’. This two-day event explored the ‘serious business of being playful’ and brought about 180 staff together to discuss how library spaces can be revitalised, redesigned and reprogrammed to better support families and youth services. There was a strong sense of community driven perspectives coming through the sessions, which also included a workshop on building bridges with newspaper whilst being shot at with Nerf guns! Clearly the play potential of libraries was a key focus, and the energy of the room suggested that the tenacity and eagerness of staff was certainly there.

The themes of risk, innovation, and opportunity kept surfacing. Something that also surfaced during this Hui was an article I’d written for the Schools Catalogue Information Service on Games and learning. In it I explore the ways in which games complement and contrast with education, and how control is always shifting.

Being playful reminds us all that control is at once a state of mind and an opportunity to do things differently.

Image credit: Steam punk nerf guns at Auckland Libraries Hui – librarians vs children!

What’s Technology For, Anyway?

In this guest post, Kristin Fontichiaro, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Information highlights key ideas from her upcoming presentation at SLAV’s, Transliteracy, multiliteracy, makerspaces: how can I participate? on Friday, 16th August.

The other day, I heard a story. A parent of young children heard that the oldest children in the school – ages 9 and 10 – were going to be having an end-of-year technology celebration to which everyone in the building was invited.  Eager to hear what her kids would be experiencing in a few years, she dropped by. The students filed in front of the assembly and, without a word, held up an A4  printout of a presentation slide.

That was it.

The whole school had been pulled out of class to gaze at small pieces of paper dozens of feet away.

Ahem.

Now, I have no doubt that the educators behind that project had great intentions and worked hard. (Anyone who has ever tried to get an entire primary school class to print out a project without mixing up whose is whose knows what a feat it is that each kid actually ended up with anything.)

But how did a tool meant to serve as an illuminated backdrop for public speaking end up as a small paper rectangle held up by a silent child? How did a faculty make a decision that seeing these faraway papers merited pulling every other child out of class? What was this project supposed to accomplish?

It’s hard to know. Maybe the technology curriculum focuses on the acquisition of specific skills and behaviours (“the learner will print from software,” “the learner will format a presentation slide”). Maybe the educators were pressed for time. Maybe something else.

I would argue that the crux of the issue is this: there were not clear, aspirational expectations for how technology could transform, extend, and deepen student learning. I would bet that this faculty did not have a clear understanding of what it meant to teach and learn with technology and how to use technology as a game-changer. I have a hunch that the administration pushed for its staff to use technology without talking about how and why to use it.

I quote an extreme example, but (I fear) it probably resonated within the realm of possibility for you. In this madcap Web 2.0 world, where there are endless “creative” tools, just waiting for you to type in a few words and pick a template, how do we move the conversation from “teachers need to use technology, period,” to, “technology needs to transform the teaching and learning and take students further than they could go without technology.”

Next Friday, we’ll gather to talk about this phenomenon. We’ll look at a possible vocabulary and framework for planning and discussing student work, and we’ll draw inspiration from Alan Liu’s Transliteracies Project as we collaborate to articulate what it means to do robust “reading” and “writing” in multimedia. At the end of the day, we’ll dip quickly into two alternative ways to use technology with kids: digital badging to track learning in formal and informal spaces and the makerspace movement. Come roll up your sleeves and dig in with us!

Image credit : cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Brad Flickinger

eBooks and Online Content Trade Expo

Access and management of digital resources became a good deal clearer for the large group of school library professionals attending the School Library Association of Victoria eBooks and Online Content Trade Expo at Melbourne Girls Grammar on Saturday 27 July.

The aim of the Expo was to demystify the concept of ebooks and online digital content.  It was a fast moving day of presentations from providers of free and subscription-based content for schools through digital content management systems, some of which we already subscribe to but could use more fully, others that opened up ideas for future development.  Presenters included:

  • Soltlink – Overdrive
  • Oxford University Press
  • Read Plus/Links Plus
  • Access-It Software
  • Follett eBooks
  • Jacaranda
  • OCLC Worldshare
  • Wheelers Books
  • EBSCO
  • Bolinda Digital

Links to resources from the Expo are available at SLAVConnects.  Exploring the options available in this rapidly developing field can be bewildering, however, this list provides a starting place for exploring online services even if you were not able to attend on the day.

Mining the treasures of Trove

It’s sometimes easy to forget how lucky we are to have so many digitised items freely available online. Institutions from around the world are making their collections open to people who could never have previously accessed these items. When this is combined with user uploaded content that is being added to sites like Flickr, the amount of digital content can almost become overwhelming.

Given this, it’s no surprise that educators see the importance of developing strong search skills in students. We’ve often written about choosing the right search term, filtering results and honing in on what we want. That’s great, but there are also some interesting ways to discover new items, or even items that we didn’t know existed. Here we’re going to take a quick look at three tools that tap into the incredible range of collections in the National Library of Australia’s Trove site. If you’re not familiar with Trove, prepare to spend the rest of your day there! It’s a unified search of items from many libraries across Australia, including books, newspapers, manuscripts, pictures and more.

Trove has a pretty familiar (yet very powerful) search feature. Make sure you go there and have a play. But for now, let’s look at three other tools that harness the amazingly open nature of the site. All of these tools are still quite experimental, so you may see some bugs or glitches, but they are well worth an explore.

The first of these is Trove Mosaic, built by Mitchell Whitelaw. This site lets you enter a search term and then displays a mosaic of images, which can be sorted by collections, titles or decade. Clicking on an item will take you to the record on the respective library’s website. It’s a brilliant way to explore the amazing digitised pictures available from across Australia.

Trove Mosaic displays images in a lovely sortable mosaic. Here we’ve sorted our search for ‘rabbits’ by decade.

The second tool for exploration of Trove is QueryPic  This tool  searches for terms within Trove’s digitised historical newspapers collection, and displays a graph showing the number of results for that term per year. You can add multiple terms and searches to a graph. In this way you can see the patterns of usage of a particular term over time. Clicking on a particular year in the graph will show you the related articles, and this then leads you directly to each digitised article.

QueryPic works on a similar principle to Google’s Ngram viewer, which searches and displays the usage of phrases in digitised books over time. Of course, it is important to remember that not every newspaper from the time has been digitised, but it’s definitely an interesting tool for analysing the frequency of phrases, like in our example below where use of the term ‘bushrangers’ peaks in the mid 19th century,  whilst use of the term ‘theft’ steadily rises.

Our search for theft (in red) and bushrangers (in blue) shows some interesting trends

The final site is a brand new tool built by the One Week, One Tool team. This team of coders are aiming to build a new tool each week, and one of their first projects is a seredipity site called Serenidip-o-matic. Paste in some text (such as a bibliography, essay, blurb) and then see what is returned based on keywords from your passage. The site searches sources like Flickr, Europeana & the Digital Public Library of America. It now also includes Trove (thanks to the work of Tim Sherratt at NLA). As you’d expect from a serendipity machine, results aren’t always completely relevant, but they are certainly interesting.

All of these sites show the possibilities presented by digital collections when they are built with open architecture. Trove’s open API means that tools can harvest the collection and present items in very different ways. We’re lucky to not only have such amazing collections, but also people who want to work with them to build these wonderful tools.

Influence and Enchantment

As part of a new series on advocacy in school libraries, regular Bright Ideas contributor Catherine Hainstock shares her reflections on how school librarians can assert their place at the heart of the school.

The School Library Association of Queensland in partnership with the Queensland University of Technology has recently published research on the important contribution that school libraries and teacher librarians make to literacy development. This excellent report reinforces the findings of decades of research on the positive influence a well-resourced library with a qualified teacher librarian has on student achievement.

I read this report in tandem with Guy Kawasaki’s book, “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions”. His book is about promotion and customer service and even though a school library is not a business, I believe it’s a useful model to explore. At the end of the day, as a teacher librarian I feel I am here to help others. The better our service, the better the result. I am also interested in how we promote what we do because no matter how much research is released, how well supported a school library is, how well it is resourced, or how qualified the teacher librarians are, there is no immunity from decisions to down-size or side-line a library service.

We must make our contribution to school life and student outcomes evident and our influence felt by everyone who comes into the library. Kawasaki’s book helped me understand that my ultimate goal is not about improving customer service, it’s about enchanting people with our service.

[Enchantment] is more than manipulating people to help you get your way. Enchantment transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility. It reshapes civility into affinity. It changes skeptics and cynics into believers.

— Guy Kawasaki

Kawasaki’s book goes right back to basics (and that’s not a bad thing). He reveals the foundation of enchantment as ‘Likeability’. You can’t enchant people if they don’t like you or your service. (I still haven’t forgot the tyrannical librarian in the public library when I was a child!) Those lady-dragons in pearls may be extinct now, but we want students and teachers not just using our services, but raving about them. Here’s a short list of points from the book that I found relevant to school Library/Information Services (and check out this infographic for more):

  • smile (and be polite)
  • accept others (and sometimes give them a break)
  • get close (get out of the library and make contact)
  • project your passions/find shared passions
  • create win-win situations
  • adopt a Yes attitude

Kawasaki also points out that likeability only goes so far – people need to be able to trust you and your service. In a chapter on the importance of trustworthiness there’s some excellent food for thought about:

  • focussing on  goodwill
  • living up to and fulfilling promises
  • giving people the benefit of the doubt
  • the importance of expertise and competence  (like keeping abreast of basic ICT skills for us)
  • showing up (physically and virtually interacting with our clientele)

Reading these two publications at the same time brought into focus the influence we have (or can have) as teacher librarians and how important it is that we recognise and actively cultivate opportunities no matter how big or small.

We used to say the library was the heart of the school; a place for students to learn, inquire, read and enjoy. But with all the technological changes occurring in education, school libraries are no longer contained within four walls. Perhaps the focus can finally shift from the physical space to the real heart of the library – teacher librarians and the services they provide. Over the next few posts, I hope to explore the idea of teacher librarians at the heart of the school. I’d like to reflect on what that can mean for us and how we can continue to grow our influence.

Other posts in this series:

Image Credit: (ca. 1910),  Interior of The Queen’s Hall, showing a member of staff sitting at the Enquiries window, State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.