Web 2.0 is here!   It’s exciting!  There are so many cool tools to use with students!  Collaborative!  Engaging! Higher Level!   Ooops sorry this site has been blocked for:

Forums, Message Boards
Social Networking
Images
Streaming
Freeware and Software download
WCC - Blocked 
Weatherbug

Well anyway the list goes on for reasons to block.  What about reasons to unblock? 

I am not so niave as to believe that there should be no filter.  Economically it isn’t feasible as a big chunk of e-rate funding is dependent upon there being some type of filtering.  What has really frustrated me is the lack of acknowlegement that there needs to be a way to determine the value of these sites.

When someone submits a request to unblock a site, it first goes to a classified employee who is charged with sending out sites for review to the Content Committee.  Unfortunately depending upon the reason the site is filtered by Websense, it may never get to the committee for review.  The requester must then ask for a recategorization which is submitted to Websense. 

This seems so cumbersome!  Certainly I do not advocate opening up inappropriate sites.  But I do see lots of value if sites that are blocked - some on the off-chance that there might be something inappropriate.  Should we completely shield our students?  OR should we help to teach them the ways of the real world and how to navigate through the glut of information?  Perhaps if we taught them valuable information and media literacy skills, we wouldn’t have such a large population of people falling for email scams, phishing schemes and hoaxes!

In the meantime, while we are teaching them how to be a citizen of the 21st century, we can use some of these outstanding tools to engage them, to help them analyze and synthesize their learning and to collaborate and create!

We have approached the problem with the responsible supervisors and we have been given permission to create a white list of acceptable Web 2.0 sites.  Let’s choose wisely for our students, and help provide them with the tools they need for their modern, technological education!

I am finally beginning to recover from jetlag and start to synthesize things I saw at last week’s AASL conference.  I attended some really outstanding sessions, in particular the one by Joyce Valenza was packed full of ideas and tools and generally inspiring.  I saw vendors out there with great new cutting-edge technologies, especially database providers and Library Management companies like ProQuest, Thompson Gale, Follett, Library of Congress and Library Video Co.  But I also came away with a somewhat troubling feeling.  I went to a couple of sessions after which I felt discouraged.  First, I am a product of 1970s library school.  That profession for which I trained no longer exists.  We went through a great change in the late 80s and early 90s with the advent of telecommunications and the pathways it opened.  There was also the new responsibility of teaching our students how to navigate through all that information to find meaningful, useful information and teach them what to do with it.  We are currently undergoing an even bigger shift with the advent of interactive collaborative environments.  There are so many new and engaging tools out there and we truly need to expand the scope of information literacy, to what Joyce describes as Information Fluency.  We no longer can be satisfied to just read what’s out there, we need to be contributing and participating in this global community.  So I came away very excited from sessions which encouraged this new model.  But there are still a lot of proponents of the cut and paste mentality.  Why are there educators out there still giving kids worksheets to fill out?  But it is still there and a couple of the sessions I went to encompassed lessons with just that methodology.  It was all I could do to politely listen and not bolt for the door!  Even in the line to get on a plane when leaving Reno, I had a conversation with a librarian who made the comment that she did not want to hear anymore about the word w-i-k-i.  I am living proof that you can teach old dogs new tricks!  This is my 30th year and I find myself more excited about the profession than when I first started.  I want my colleagues and my students to share my wonder, my passion, and my love of all these new toys!  Am I nuts?  I hope not!

As I finished reading the book Everything is Miscellaneous, one quote absolutely struck me!  “The metadata is an absolutely crucial part of the knowledge.”  How powerful this statement is becomes obvious as we try to teach our students how to navigate the information jungle.  The book itself was a fascinating look at knowledge and how we have tried to order it historically and why those methods are floundering now.  If you keep up with library news, you will know about the new library in Arizona that decided not to use the Dewey Decimal System!  Blasphemous you say?  Perhaps a little premature, but I’d venture a guess that they are only beginning a trend in a different world order (forgive the pun)!  Metadata is simply information about information.  It consists of the tags we assign information so that we can classify the information.  Head spinning yet?  Well, we are on information overload and we rely on the metadata.  You just might not realize that it is metadata.  One look at blogs and social bookmarking sites will give you a good idea about what this tagging thing is all about.  The premise of the book Everything Is Miscellaneous is that we can no longer use the same methods of classifying knowledge because we as users want our own classification system.  The analogy of leaves on trees runs throughout the book.  We want to organize our leaves in ways that are important only to us.  Thus we apply tags - little descriptors that help us organize what we know and want to know and which allow a single leaf to be classified in more than one place.  So as we use this metadata, it becomes more and more important how we choose the identifiers.  Try looking at one of the social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us.  You can experience how very important the metadata can be!

Tonight at midnight, the New York Times will open up most of its archives for all to use with no fees.  I would love to be in the Board room of some of the major database providers - Thompson Gale, ProQuest.    Is this the beginning of a trend which will allow free access to news archives?  What will happen to fee-based services?  In Baltimore County, we pay quite a bit of money so our students can access information from magazines and journals.  Will others follow suit?  It probably is too soon to determine what the outcome will be, but certainly there is cause for optimism on the one hand.  The spirit of Web 2.0 is very much open-source and this well-respected purveyor of news has certainly made a giant leap.

But there is another interesting twist here.  They did it for economic reasons!  According to the article in the Tines, they could make more from web advertising than from subscription fees!  Thinking back to the dot com bubble of a few years ago, one has to ask is this increase in web advertising revenues going to last, or will it go bust as so many under-capitalized dot coms did in the 90s?  I think not.  Web advertising is here to stay and it has become very slick and almost a complete integration into many websites.  If we examine the behavior of our students we will see that they do pay attention to the ads.  In fact many advertisers are foregoing traditional mediums such as TV to launch on the web.  In the July 2, 2007 issue of Business Week there was an interesting article with a case study for Axe Deodorant.  The company mostly advertised via the web with simulataneous launch in several countries.  The article discusses children of the web generation and how they use the web for information and entertainment and how it is such an integral part of their lives. 

What does all this mean for Library Media Specialists charged with the responsibility of teaching information-seeking and information literacy?  A lot!  On the one hand, we can get access to quality news and information.  But it does come with a price.  It means our jobs as information literacy educators are even more critical.  With advertising becoming more and more subtle, the lines between truth and persuasion can be become very blurred!

As our culture is shifting to one of digital creativity and synthesizing pieces from different arenas to form something new as in mashups, the restrictions of copyright can be a deterrent.  Certainly one of our jobs as media specialists is to teach our students about fair and equitable use.  It is sometimes hard to balance this when we want students to use those higher level thinking skills to construct their own meaning.  Two posts in School Library Journal blogs both address this issue.  In his Digital Reshift Blog, Chris Harris sites Yotophoto, a search tool for copyleft media.  In Joyce Valenza’s  Neverending Search Blog, she also addresses the issue and provides a link to a great wiki which pulls together many resources for Copyleft and Creative Commons media.  Both posts really discuss and provide links to the media as well as discuss the implications of this new class of licensing made necessary by the evolving Web 2.0 world.  We CAN teach our students to be good citizens of the web as well as contributors!

I always seem to come away from Professional Study Day exhausted but with a feeling of a fresh slate.  It was a jam-packed day.  It was absolutely wonderful to see all of the collaborative, twenty-first century presentations.  We truly have the opportunity to shape our students’ future as was demonstrated so aptly by Clarence Wooten.  What a wonderful opportunity to see how we as educators can impact our students!  It was even more wonderful when he remembered his elementary school librarian!  Isn’t that how we want children to remember their experience in our libraries?  The impact of all the technologies that are coming together for our libraries in Baltimore County is mind-boggling.  Working with companies that are open to meeting OUR requirements, flexing and developing their product based on our imput is very powerful indeed.  Certainly there is a benefit for the company, but we also get the means to meet our everyday needs as well.  It truly is an exciting time for our profession.  But it points out now more than ever, how we have new responsibilities to guide our students in the uses of information technology and give them the survival skills to meet success and be a participant in the Information Age.  They are out there swimming in this sea of information - let’s make sure we teach them to swim!

Please visit the School Library Tech Collective X group and be a particpant in my education as well.   I can’t wait to read your ideas and discover your finds!

Check out this video on TeacherTube!  I have been around the profession nearly 30 years and it certainly made me LOL!  It’s a wonder any of us ever went into the profession!  But the profession has changed so much since my days in library school (1970s).  I remember when sound filmstrips were the absolute bomb!  And you were cutting edge if you had a sound filmstrip projector that automatically advanced the frame!  Well, I am a perfect example of “You CAN teach an old dog new tricks”!  In these days, professional reading is more important than ever!  There are so many avenues available to us.  Blogging and RSS are just one of the ways to bring the information to you.  We still teach our students how and where to find information, but now it is critical to add the new dimension of authority!  Library professionals must keep abreast of these new issues in authority.  We must be exploring this new territory ourselves.  We cannot just say My Space -BAD!  We need to know about it, experience it, and teach our students the benefits as well as the risks.  We need to teach them how to use the information in wikipedia - but more importantly, we need to teach them how to collaborate, contribute, and be an active member of the Web 2.0 community.  They will be there - we need to join them on their on turf!

I have followed discussions in other blogs over the last several months on the credibilty of information found in wikis.  Wikis represent one of the new froniters in education.  Educational reform has always been highly debated, and the shift ot collaborative, egaging eduation has come slowly.  The debate over the authority of information found in wikis and their educational uses has called attention, once again, to the manner in which we educate our children.  Millenials are setting the pace for themselves.  The explosion of sites like MySpace and FaceBook, have created controversy because of abusers.  But this is how our students choose to interact with each other.  Though I am not advocating allowing students free access to sites such as these (my school district blocks them),  I do think there are lessons here for educators in the way we approach educating our students.  Lecturing or even showing a video and then having them answer a set list of content-based questions no longer cuts it in the classroom.  Students need to collaborate and create new knowledge.  As part of that process, they need to learn how to determine the validity, accuracy, and authenticity of the information they garner from the net.  This is imperative!!!  Wikis, in particular, hold a most promising platform to allow students to collaborate and create!  Think of how this could be used in a classroom:  collobarative story-telling, lesson plan sharing, professional development, real-world investigations shared around the country and the world.  The potential is limitless.  As educators we need to use these new technologies, not ignore them or dismiss them as dangerous.

The Internet Librarian column in the latest issue of American Libraries has a wonderful piece entitled “What Wonders May Come: a Look Forward to the Marvels of the 20th Century“.    That’s right!  The 20th Century!  The article was discovered in the archives and was written in 1907.  It is actually remarkably accurate in its predictions in many ways.  I love the piece lamenting the fact that the typewriter will inevitably replace the “beautiful library hand in the creation of library cards”.   I wonder what librarians in the 22nd Century would think of an article we would write today about the wonders of the 21st Century?

In the blogroll on the left, I added a link to InfoTangle.  This is the blog of Elyssa Kroski, Reference Librarian at Columbia University.  She has been a speaker at Computers and Libraries.  She gives a quick look at the current state of web design - what’s in on the web!  Other topics include new web desing tools and social networking on the web.  She also discusses new ways to navigate the web and the new principles of web design.  A good read for those designing and maintaining web sites.  Got blog?