From Time magazine comes the news that General Electric’s foundation is getting into the educational funding business.

This morning the GE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the multinational General Electric Company, announced a landmark $18 million investment to support state implementation of the new Common Core standards and train teachers how to use them …

GE is giving $18 million to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit consulting organization launched by David Coleman. Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and classicist who built and sold a successful student assessment company before moving into the nonprofit sector, is one of the architects of the Common Core standards. Student Achievement Partners will use GE’s money to create institutes to train teachers, build an online tool for sharing resources and lessons, and help teachers model best practices with the new standards …

In addition to the size of the donation, GE is running toward controversy rather than away from it. The Common Core is not universally popular, and among many conservative (read: business-friendly) state legislators, the shared standards project is an object of great suspicion, if not outright opposition. And there is a determined group of activists and academics trying to bring it down.

I asked Bob Corcoran, the President of the GE foundation, why they were stepping into the breach when there are so many less controversial ways to be involved in education. He described the development of the standards as an incredibly hard-won achievement, but then pointed out that the coming implementation of these new standards would be the real “test of mettle, a test of commitment.”

Question for you: If you had the funding you needed, what kinds of PD would your staff benefit from if you are in a Common Core state? Now … how could you provide it for no money?

Side note: is it just me, or does it make you just a teensy bit uncomfortable that the guy who wrote the majority of the standards is now getting a huge influx of cash for his organization to help implement them?

Read the entire article here.

On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS - To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!

Sometimes, when you’re really lucky, you get to spend a day with some of your favorite face-to-face librarians and some of your favorite national librarians at the same time. For today’s MAME Summer Institute, Kathleen McBroom and I held down the fort in Michigan while Susan Ballard and Melissa Johnston used Elluminate to provide great information via Webinar.

You can click on the links below to access any of the resources (thanks, co-presenters!).

What was each presentation about, you ask?

Kathleen gave us an amazing overview of the Common Core Standards.

Sue talked about how the need for change and how her Londonderry district had used the AASL Planning Guide to deepen their program development.

Melissa talked about the AASL Building-Level Toolkit, with a strong emphasis on librarian-as-leader.

I looked at five elements of Common Core and talked about how we could use those standards to impact our practice.

Meanwhile, our intrepid Michigan colleagues shared their ideas for flipping the essay, working with primary sources, how they could use the free webinar hosting provided by LearnCentral.org back at home, and more. You can access the webinar archive of any of our presentations (just know that Kathleen and I were often wandering around far from the microphone, so our sound quality ain’t too ideal).

Remember the old TV commercials that used to say, “I’m a lucky dog”? That’s me.

mameleadership2008 / MAME-July-2011 via kwout