Apparently, it’s mostly the people who work there. From D-Lib’s November-December issue comes a short paper that looked at randomly-selected academic libraries from the QS list of best-ranked world universities:

Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users’ Comments
Michalis Gerolimos
Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece
mike@ionio.gr
doi:10.1045/november2011-gerolimos

ABSTRACT
This paper examines users’ comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of “likes” and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the “like” functionality and most comments on academic libraries’ Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.

While it is a bit of apples and oranges to compare academic library behaviors with those in school libraries, I wonder how this finding jives with what you see happening in your school. Thoughts?

I really believe that even the most traditional school librarian among us is a natural at formative assessment, or ungraded feedback that helps kids get to a better result than they could unaided. We can also practice the feedback loop when we look at student work and use it to revise or improve our own instruction.

Formative assessment can happen when:

we help kids pick a book that’s a better fit than their initial choice
a kid gets stuck on a search and we give them a few new search terms
students are struggling to develop a thesis and we mini-conference
we take a look at bibliographies before they’re submitted or even while research is underway
when we open up NoodleTools, see who’s struggling, and invite those students to stop by for guidance
we collect “how’s it going” forms, one-minute essays (where kids answer a question you pose, responding to it by filling up an index card), or collect “tickets out the door” from kids that we use to plan the next day’s mini-lesson accordingly

What else do you do to give gentle feedback to kids and to yourself? How might your expertise impact “Julie’s” scenario below?

Thanks!

I love this note from Netflix that hit my inbox yesterday. A bonus DVD for the holidays? You bet! Sign me up.

Even though the cynic in me wonders if this gift was motivated at all by the Netflix/Qwikster missteps earlier this fall, I’m in.

What can we do to send our students into winter break with a similar sense of celebration and abundance?