From Seth Godin’s blog, written for marketers but equally useful for those of us in school libraries:

Your customers and employees and investors students and staff will remember how you treated them when times were tough, when they needed a break, when a little support meant everything.

No one in particular will remember how you acted during the boom times.

The presses were rolling around the country early this morning to report yesterday’s election results.  How did various newspapers, representing various editorial points of view, report the outcome?  Check out the Newseum’s online display of today’s front pages from around the world.  Seeing how different news outlets reported the same story can be an intriguing teachable moment for students.  And take a look especially at the front page of my own local paper, the Detroit Free Press, where Obama’s win takes up only the space above the newspaper banner, ceding front page space to local races and state ballot initiatives on medical marijuana and stem cell research. Here’s the front page as it appears on the Free Press site:and how it appears at the Newseum site: \What’s going on with these two front covers? Guess it’s time to plunk down my fifty cents and buy a copy.(Found via Weblogg-ed)�

Kay sent me a link to a New York Times Election Day interactive image, shown below as a static screenshot.The graphic shows which newspapers made a presidential endorsement: red for McCain, blue for Obama, and gray for no endorsement.  The size of the text reflects the size of the paper’s circulation.  If you visit the New York Times site and hover over one of the papers, you can learn more about why a paper might not have made an endorsement and/or the historical endorsements of that party.  This is cool in and of itself, but it really got me thinking about how much information was able to be crammed into so little space.  I tend to be a text-based person, but I sure did learn a lot from this graphical representation.So here is our challenge as 21st-century librarians — we can work to craft opportunities for students to express their learning graphically and not in text. We can guide students and challenge them to make graphical representations that are rich with content and strong communication devices.  We can also work with students to interpret this text into numerical data, something that is useful for standardized tests, or to help them seek out patterns in the data.Our students tend to think more visually than do their teachers … are we doing enough to help them capitalize on those strengths? �