How should libraries treat patron information? Privacy rights? Marketing? It is important that the patron's privacy be respected, but we must still market to our patrons. Interesting case here…
The reason I care about this at all is two reasons. One, there is a useful analog with libraries and how they handle their email lists of patrons. Obviously patron data is private and comes under whatever privacy laws a state has and whatever policies the library has. But is a library allowed to market to patrons? Or give these lists to peopl to market on the library’s behalf? This was the concern when the public library in Dixon California emailed patrons to let them know about ongoing library renovation plans and asked them to consider making donations. People who are not pleased with the library renovations, the Dixon Carnegie Library Preservation Society, is arguing that the librarian acted improperly when they gave patron email addresses to a consulting company without patron consent. Now let me just state I pretty well side with the library on this one, but it’s sure to be an increasingly contentious topic as libraries have more and more diffrent kinds of patron data to keep private.
Read more here…
This is interesting information for all educators and librarians, and brings to light a great deal about how our students are using technology
Read more at Read/Write Web
What Students Want: BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
The study found that 20% of kindergarten through second graders said they owned cellphones. 29% of third through fifth graders do. 51% of middle schoolers and 56% of high schoolers do. Smart-phone usage among these age groups is increasingly common too. 34% of middle school and 44% of high school students reported being smart-phone owners.
Smart-phone and cellphone ownership opens a lot of doors to the much-touted mobile learning, the ability for students to have 24-7 access to a computing device, whether they are at home or at school. And the high school students surveyed said that they were interested in using their phones at school to check grades (74%), to conduct research (68%), to take notes in class (59%), to collaborate and communicate with friends (53%), to use the calendar (50%), to access online textbooks (44%), to send an email (44%), to learn about school activities (40%), and to create and share documents and videos (37%).
The majority of parents surveyed – 67% – said that they were willing to buy their children a mobile device for school if the schools allowed it, and parents seemed particularly interested in their children using these devices in order to access online textbooks. In tough economic times, with schools facing increasing budget shortfalls, this parental willingness to foot the technology bill may be something educators want to pay attention to.
Despite students' and parents' interest, administrators in the survey were not supportive of cellphones in the classroom. "When we asked administrators about the likelihood of them allowing their students to use their own mobile devices for instructional purposes at school this year, a resounding 65% of principals said "no way!" And even within the cohort of administrators that use a smart phone themselves, only one-quarter of them said they are likely to allow students to use their own mobile devices this year."
What Students Want: Unfiltered Access
The survey found much support for increased access to digital tools in the classroom, with educators, parents and students particularly interested in online textbooks. Nonetheless there were some interesting differences between what digital skills teachers thought were important and what skills students thought they needed to know.
Despite the national emphasis on increased use of digital tools and online learning, students say they continue to be frustrated by their access to technology at school. When a similar survey was undertaken five years ago, students' number one complaint was the speed of Internet access at school. Now, they point instead to school filters and firewalls. 71% of high school students and 62% of middle school students say that the most important thing their school could do to make it easier for them to use technology would be to allow them greater access to the websites they need.
While CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, does require schools block students' access to obscene and harmful images, filtering is often extended to a variety of other sites, including many social networks.
Are Schools Doing a Good Job with Instructional Technology?
How well are schools doing in leveraging new technologies to enhance learning? The survey asked that simple question to the various stakeholder groups (students, parents and educators). And the results are pretty telling:
74% of high school teachers, 72% of high school principals, and 62% of parents of high school age children said yes, they thought their school was doing a good job using technology to enhance learning and/or student achievement.
Only 47% of high school students agreed.
Interesting opinion piece about how the so-opting of standardized testing by parents could lead to a negative outcome for teachers. Until we get rid of high-stakes testing this problem will not go away.
"I'm worried that parental resistance of standardized testing will become part of the rationale for greater school choice, which in extreme cases is antithetical to public education. I'm also concerned that newfangled resistance of standardized testing will dovetail with the anti-teacher animus. That is, those with limited knowledge of how our education system works will blame the teachers for abdicating "real" teaching in lieu of test preparation. Or, if public opinion starts to sway more forcefully against test-driven reforms, then political and corporate allies in the war on public education will co-opt this message and toss that hot potato in the laps of teachers. I'm telling you, one day that music is going to stop and I can almost guarantee that, whatever ultimately happens to testing, educators are more likely to lose this game unless they take charge of their own resistance."
Interesting article about the good and bad of social media in schools and libraries. Ultimately I think it remains a powerful tool, but with much power come much responsibility.
Read below…
Social Networking In Schools: Educators Debate The Merits Of Technology In Classrooms
In this digital world, opportunities for education are available like never before. Though teachers using online tools are empowering students take part in their education, they may also expose them to inappropriate material, sexual predators, and bullying and harassment by peers.
Teachers who are not careful with their use of the sites can fall into inappropriate relationships with students or publicize photos and information they believed were kept private. For these reasons, critics are calling for regulation and for removing social networking from classrooms — despite the positive affects they have on students and the essential tools they provide for education in today's digital climate.
The positive effects of social networking sites in education are profound. According to a study conducted by the University of Minnesota on student use of social media, students who are already engaging in social networking could benefit from incorporating it into curriculum.
[The word] ‘library’ derives from the Latin ‘liber’, meaning the inner bark of a tree — an early form of paper — the primary meaning of the word is “free, independent, unrestrained.” Books and liberty are born of the same parent. ~ Susan Olding
I would love to see this app develop. Now all we need to do is get mor IPads into schools!
"Inkling investors include McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. The appeal for these investors is easy to see — a game-changing device (the iPad), an innovative multimedia textbook platform, and a way to get rid of a portion of the used textbook market. Currently, the Inkling app gets mixed reviews, with many citing a lack of content as a downside. With the recent addition of Pearson and McGraw-Hill, this may change. And, of course, as a recent PC World article says, digital textbooks are nothing new. Many attempts at digital textbooks have been made, from the Kindle DX platform to CourseSmart to ScrollMotion."
A judge in the Google books case has made a ruling…sort of. He said that more work needs to be done. I agree with the passage below that Goolge's scanning on many books is a good thing, but they need to be on the public domain, not for profit
From The Scholarly Kitchen:
"Judge Chin did not reject the settlement outright — he left things open for further attempts at getting things right. He does suggest that most of the issues with the settlement can be solved by making inclusion in the index “opt-in” rather than “opt-out.” This is a serious blow to Google’s business plan, but ultimately in the best interest of the public.There is great merit in what Google is trying to do, but the way their doing it is problematic. Making the world’s literature searchable enables discovery on an unprecedented scale. Bringing orphan works back to life is a tremendous boon to the world’s pool of knowledge, as it would recover vast amounts of potentially lost information.
The problem though, is that Google is trying to do all this privately, to sell all of that information through its own bookstore, to put it behind its own paywall. The key word in the phrase “public domain” is “public.” We need a settlement that opens this material, essentially our cultural heritage, to all of us, not just to one for-profit company which could operate without competition."
WP is a ton of great things; a blog, a CMS, and photo gallery, and whatever you want it to be. Plus it is manageable with just a browser, a text editor, and a little know how (and even the know-how level is not very high). Oh yeah, it's growing…
That is a great question. One opinion is below. I believe that since the library is a central point of a school at any level it needs to be as soon as financially possible. You can only get by for so long with just access to digital documents, services, and databases.
"Community colleges are growing by leaps and bounds these days. And much of that growth has been in branch or satellite campuses.
This kind of expansion, however, has created a vexing question: When is the right time to add a library? Accreditors require community colleges to provide library services to all of their students, no matter their location. Still, there is some leeway as to whether a physical space is needed on all branch campuses. Given this gray area, some community college officials wonder when simply providing library services to branch campus students is insufficient and a physical library is necessary."
I believe that this is something we as educators and (future) librarians need to really think about. How do we market ourselves…
The Ubiquitous Librarian (Brian Mathews)
UCSB is a very outdoors oriented campus. If you put a university on the beach I guess that’s what happens. Everyone rides bikes and there is a skateboard lane too. With nice weather year around it makes sense that students want to be outside.
I realized that we needed to do some external (outside our buildings) marketing. It is part of the culture here to drape and plaster signs & posters everywhere along paths and I wanted us to be a part of that.
I’ll skip the assessment and composition process, (read the book!) and just say that I discovered a handful of basic library services that needed more exposure— combined with a need to reenergize or actually clarify our campus brand. A large portion of our students have a narrow view of what the library is and so one of the tactics I wanted to explore is external signage.
We developed what we call our THINK LIBRARY campaign.
