Standards: “What Was Happening On The Day You Were Born, Information Power 2?”
Remember when they used to show reruns of black-and-white game shows on TV on the TV stations with the double digits on the bottom dial? Games that showed, “This is Your Life”?
Well, welcome to today’s broadcast of On the Day You Were Born, Information Power 2, where we take a look at other things that were going on at the same time that IP2 was released.
Our tale begins in present-day 2008, with a discovery:
Before my move in March, I made a big purge of the files I had been keeping from my days as a clasroom teacher. Those poor files had sat, unopened, through four moves and four jobs, so I was pretty sure I didn’t need most of them.
One of the things I found was a 1999 email from the crackerjack librarians at my former school, who wanted to share with the staff an exciting new online tool with a revolutionary way to sort and prioritize results. Google. Was it really just 10 years ago that we didn’t yet “Google it”?
Now fast forward to an email conversation I had with Enid. (A great benefit of spending 15+ months of exhausting work as Program Chair for the International Association for School Librarianship is that you get to have great conversations with folks you then look forward to meeting in person!)
She had been looking at the CSLA standards (based on Information Power 2) and the new AASL Standards. She said that when she looked at them side-by-side, the CSLA standards were more about location and access, and the new Standards are more about synthesis. Brilliant!
And then it hit me. Information Power 2 was the last major school library policy before Google took over, changing the world’s approach to information access forever. Who needed location and access? Just Google it!
On some level, did Google steal IP2’s thunder? More after these commercial messages!
Fast forward to 2007 - 2008. Now Google is everybody’s search tool. Now what do we do in that new reality of search results in less than a second? When the chores of flipping through the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature is automated, digitized, and instantly on your screen or in your friend’s email inbox?
The chore has been automated. Now what are we going to do with that information, in quantities we’ve never seen before, with multiple or dueling perspectives, some stuff written by experts and some by Uncle Joe in his basement? We need to engage our brains, work through it, sort it, discuss it, separate the useful from the unhelpful, knead it, manipulate it into something new, and share it. And THAT’S what we find in the new standards.
We had resistive colleagues who fought Information Power and IP2. But now, we’re in a different theatre, with different scenery and different props. How much longer, even with Benevolent Google as our overlord, can we argue that our curricula be rich with Dewey practice and OPAC searching skills?
That work has been automated so much that now we can move our energies to cognition. Processing, perusing, comparing, weighing, debating, “kneading” (as is said in Japanese lesson study). It’s a new skill set we adopt as we pull away from our “easy” Dewey lessons and instead change our paradigm of who we are and what we can offer.
And that’s the end of today’s episode. Hope you’ll leave a comment of what you think the next year might look like for the Standards.
Image: AASL Standards cover manipulated using Photofunia
August 11th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
In fact, Kristin, we can take this cogent analysis one step further–I would argue that Google is the bridge between the old standards and the new.
Aside from my feeling that the word “standards” in the title of our new document implies a very binary, pass/fail, silo-based approach to student engagement completely counter to the document’s content (I prefer to call our new document a framework), if one looks at Google’s corporate philosophy, it will ring some bells.
To wit: “At Google, we put a lot of thought into improving your online experience. We’re alarmed by what we believe is a growing disregard for your rights as computer users”(http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html).
Another section of the corporate philosophy lists Ten Principles that Contribute to a Googley User Experience:
1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.
(http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html)
It is Google’s commitment to the human user, not the software, at the center of the search engine experience that just might have started or be evidence of a push back against the alienation of an externally evaluated, technology-driven information experience.
Kind like our new document, Whole Child, P21, etc., are pushing back against high stakes testing and curriculum constriction, eh?
Googley yours,
Marcia
August 16th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Oh my, I think I’ve enrolled in more grad classes just in time. Yikes! As a digital immigrant, I will make every effort to keep up but please help. How do I convince the tech people that we need more external access while they try to protect the internal system at school?
I’m sharing my new-found knowledge with the other media specialists in my district when we meet the end of the month. Any words of advice? I have copies of the new AASL framework for each of them plus my copious notes from the MAME summer institute.
We’ve been warning the kids especially at the elementary level away from Google, in part because of the vastness of the information. So if I’m understanding this change correctly we should be educating them more on proper in depth use of it as a tool. Stand me on my head why don’t you?
Head spinning but in a good way,
Barb