More conversation over the keyboard at the Greenwood booth … Sharon Coatney, co-author of the series, tells me that the third book in the Mac Information Detective series will be out in February. These books are about how to do research with K-3 kids. It comes as a kit: a picture book and an educator’s guide. The picture book is a readaloud that introduces a club of students who discover something in nature that they want to learn more about. Each book emphasizes a different part of the research process: questioning, digging for answers, and evaluating the process.

Once again, teaching through story!

After looking forward to Daniel Pink’s presentation for over a year, a four-hour flight delay kept me away. Luckily, Kathy Fredrick, who is writing Web 2.0 articles for School Library Media Activities Monthly in alternate months with me this year, was there and has this guest blog post!

Daniel Pink’s talk was A-MAZ-ING! I sat with a high school librarian from my district, and we are going to go back to our district and talk about empathetic signage at our next librarian’s meeting. I know we can make a huge difference with our students by acknowledging their emotion around our “no eating,” “keep the noise down,” etc. The one example that he used was waiting for a line in an art museum cafeteria. Just as he was ready to melt down, he saw a sign: “Don’t worry, the line moves quickly.” How sweet…

Kathy’s comments echo what most people had to say about Dan Pink’s talk.  The idea of empathetic signage seems to be one of the most resonant points of his keynote.  I hope Kathy will share her librarians’ ideas after their next meeting.

For those of you who are equally taken with the idea of empathetic signage, you might also want to check out Dan Pink’s blog, where, in the past several weeks, he posted quite a few times about the topic.  It’s neat to see how the idea kept growing until the point that he presented about it!

He also made a pecha kucha slideshow about empathetic signage.  Pecha kucha is a new Japanese fad where you make a PowerPoint presentation with exactly 20 slides, and each slide stays up for exactly 20 seconds.  What a great idea to put a new spin on an increasingly worn-out warhorse.  (Another PowerPoint game I’ve read about is an improvisational speech.  A random PowerPoint is downloaded from the Web on who-knows-what topic, then you have to fake your way through the speech.  How geeky is it to actually think this could be a fun party game?)

I wonder if this Web site, that generates signs that look like highway signs, could help us on the journey to more whimsical signage.

Speaking of signage, you might want to check out Debbie Stafford’s post to the AASL blog about an AASL session on designing media centers.  Presenter Steven Baule suggested that when you build or redesign a library, you should put up temporary signs, see how they work, then order the “real” signs.   What a great idea, and a very student-centered one!

Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, by Kendall Haven

Boy, do I have the best seat in the house here at the Greenwood booth, where authors and librarians are gathered in conversations. It’s such a rare treat for authors to get to talk together and find common threads (just as it’s unusual for us librarians to get together and talk). Books are flying, cameras are out, and we’re having a great time. We should all be so lucky.  I’m here with Sharon Coatney, who edited this book.

She says, “It’s a great book. It’s like The Power of Reading, by Steven Krashen. It’s the research behind storytelling … its value in education, the value in memory, the memory in understanding.”

Here is a quote from Kendall’s introduction:

I have reviewed over 350 research studies from fifteen separate fields of science. Incredibly, every one of those studies, as well as every other study they cite — every one — agrees that stories are an effective and efficient vehicle for teaching, for motivating, and for the general communication of factual information, concepts, and tacit information. Not one doubted the effectiveness of stories!

Library 2.0 is about stories, isn’t it? The tales we tell in blogs, the stories we share in podcasts, the experiences we exchange on YouTube and Flickr.  When we peel back Library 2.0’s technology widgets and tools, we find that the underlying values — like sharing stories — remain.