Kathleen Porter, November 6, 2010:
I had the great good fortune of attending the School Library Journal Leadership Summit 2010, The Future of Reading, two weeks ago. I am grateful to the speakers, sponsors, and other participants. Here are some shared thoughts and links from my learning-in-progress:
Thanks to Leigh Ann Jones, Lynn Weeks, Sandy Kelly, and Joyce Valenza for sharing thoughts and links.
As Joyce put it in her immediate and encyclopedic blog post, "Speaker after speaker affirmed the value of digital citizenship, inquiry, critical reading, evaluation, comprehension, analytical skills, creativity, and authentic assessment." Key speakers on these points, to my mind, were Carol Gordon, Don Leu, Stephen Abram, and Catherine Snow. I may well have missed someone I should include here -- I'm open to being corrected, and I'm continuing to process. The analogy of drinking from a fire hose came to me more than once.
Part of the fire-hose experience came from staying in plenary session and switching speakers every 15-20 minutes, TED-style. That meant people who have spent a lot of time thinking about their topics condensed the highlights into very short talks, which made for pithy and thought-provoking statements. I give links to the full schedule below but this listing is not comprehensive.
While looking for write-ups on what we mean by new literacies I came across some dated but fascinating discussions at a sub-project of the International Reading Association called readingonline.org: see http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/semali1/#new
Judi Moreillon made a brief, beautiful presentation about levels of content engagement using images of a lizard walking across the surface of water (skimming) and a manatee feeding under the surface (diving in deep).
How do we synthesize the new literacies critical thinking work represented at the conference by Don Leu (UConn), the literacy education research represented by Catherine Snow (Harvard), the inquiry process education work represented by Ross Todd and Carol Gordon (Rutgers), and (for example), the social-authorship work of Andrew Lih (USC)? Who is influencing the education of new school library teachers? Other new educators?
I've proposed a 3D visualization of a carbon tetrachloride molecule, where we put working school librarians as the carbon praxis and use chlorine for the various nodes of related research. Four nodes is arbitrary... this is just one image of stability and inter-relationship that speaks to me. The way I usually visualize it the electron clouds are much larger, so that instead of the emphasis on the bonds we see intersecting spheres of influence resulting in great cohesion. Based on observations and conversations at the conference I would not say that that overlap makes a good metaphor for the relationship of these nascent social sciences.
A separate takeaway for me tied to the future of reading as we have long understood it, the engagement with the printed page, was a hanging question: Is it cool to be reading? How can we make it cool to be reading? Do we re-frame the word? Let's acknowledge that the activity of reading lives in a larger sociocultural context. What if we consider reading text messages to be reading? Text and other signals in gaming? Are we talking about making personal connections with content, construing meaning? "Literacy" seems to have been more broadly defined, "reading" more narrowly. How will our word choices matter?
Four guest students from the University Laboratory High School in Illinois talked about preferring print for their fiction and textbooks reading, and other references online.
As Joyce summarized it, "9. We discussed the potential power for digital texts to address issues of currency, equity, customization, flexibility, collaboration, interactivity, and access." That's a lot! I'd like to break down what we mean by that, and who the key intellectual and physical players may be.
We saw a panel discussion including Andrés Henríquez (Carnegie Foundation), Gina Biancarosa (University of Oregon), and Catherine Snow (Harvard School of Education). They discussed the work of the Carnegie Council for Advancing Adolescent Literacy, which had some damning conclusions for the current state of U.S. literacy education after Grade 3. The researchers did not plug school librarians into their process and acknowledged that was a weakness of the work so far, but that they heard us and intend to remedy that. I personally took the mike to encourage them to collaborate with the folks at CISSL/Rutgers, among others. Joyce V. summarized much of what Catherine presented: "We are not skilled at teaching learners to attack advanced texts or teaching students to learn through reading. We have yet to address major slumps in 4th and 9th grades. Many teachers assume students come into their classrooms as competent readers. Learning to read and reading to learn are tasks for all grades, across content areas. It is important to teach how students to read like a scientist, write like historian. Content area teachers are teachers of literacy. Comprehension is a complex act. It occurs when reader, text, and activity intersect."
Current reports, plus a video:
Leigh Ann's summary: "Speaking of text, what about eReaders? The Carnegie Corporation proposes nine recommendations for eReaders such as operating system compatibility, standard core and innovative features, and reader personalization."
When Chuck Follett, President and CEO of Follett Corporation, took the floor Saturday morning, he talked about the future of reading within the context of the future school library. He quoted David Loertscher and praised Valerie Diggs and the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons at some length -- the only program in the country he singled out. The Massachusetts contingent was very proud on her behalf.
Tom Corbett is Executive Director for Fisher-Watkins Library at Cushing Academy. He had the good grace to spend most of the roundtable break-out session of the second day with me, going over the nuts-and-bolts details of implementation of his digital library at Cushing Academy, talking about federated search providers and licensing terms to minimize costs. Did you know they eliminated their ILS? I believe LIS schools are going to have to reconsider everything... They use Drupal to power their site now. See http://fwlibrary.cushing.org/. The top menu bar is currently arranged with the options below. I've copied verbatim the introductory text from a few of the pages by way of explanation.
"The best method for finding the most useful databases for your assignment is to use the Courses menu above. From there you can drill down to the course of study you are working on and find recommended databases and web sites.
However, you can also browse below to view all of our many databases. You can use the category "tag cloud" in the right-hand column to filter this list."
"The best method for finding the web sites you need for your assignment is to use the Courses menu found above. From there you can drill down to the course of study you are working on and find related databases and web sites.
However, you can also browse below to find research-related web sites recommended by our librarians, teachers and students."
"Listed below are the downloadable Kindle eBooks currently owned by the library. Keep in mind, however, that any downloadable eBook is potentially available to you quickly and easily. Search Amazon to find a title we don't own and request it by copying and pasting the content to the library staff in an email. If the title is appropriate for our collection, we'll buy it and make it available to you on a library eReader. In fact, if you are in the library right now, come by the circulation desk and we'll usually get the title for you before you leave. (See also EBL and GVRL for academic eBooks.)
Happy reading!"
I welcome feedback. Thanks for reading!