photo © 2009 Rosaura Ochoa | more info (via: Wylio)

“Embedded librarianship” isn’t a term we hear a whole lot in K-12 schools. It’s most prevalent in medical librarianship, in which a medical librarian might join a medical team for discussions or even rounds, providing research and information as needed to solve cases, diagnoses, and problems facing the team. It’s far more integrated than a librarian working out of a medical library, as the team gets to know one another and the librarian becomes part of the everyday, quotidian way of doing business. Nobody has to make an effort to contact the librarian, because the librarian is right there in the team already.

One of my student teachers once did a three-week stint in a classroom (every afternoon, for most of the afternoon) project we might call embedded. While the teacher was the lead instructor, the ST was there to support, give mini-lessons as needed, conference with students, etc. The work happened very much in the classroom, very much under the teacher’s leadership — but would very much have had less depth had the ST not been there.

It’s something to consider as we continue to look for ways to share our knowledge in what is increasingly a classroom-centered ecosystem with classroom-accessed digital resources. It’s also a kind of power shift … not a loss of power, but a different kind of power. There’s something about being in the teacher’s own classroom that puts you right where the learning is without the learning being disrupted by moving to a lab or library. And that’s powerful.

Here’s an example from The Chronicle of Higher Education of how a college class, Twitter, and an academic librarian at her desk worked together in a third version of embedded librarianship.

Might school librarians attempt something similar? Maybe Twitter is blocked in your school, but could you have privileges in a class Blackboard or Moodle site? It’s certainly an option to consider for librarians who want to be helpful at the center of learning.

‘Embedded Librarian’ on Twitter Served as Information Concierge for Class - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

Today, School Library Monthly launched its first email newsletter. It gives a heads-up on …

• stories to read in the current print issue, like UM’s own Addie Matteson’s article on Twitter in the classroom;
• links to full-text stories available on the open Web, including the terrific September - October features by Allison Zmuda and Jean Donham

;

• a link to the handy five-minute advocacy card that appeared on page 2 of the back-to-school issue;
• a link to an easily downloadable version of the new ER: Essential Reads column so you can post it to your site, email it to colleagues and administrators, and see what leading thinkers are reading;
• updates on new publications of interest to school librarians.

The static screenshot (sorry - no clickable preview is available) gives you a sneak peak at the content, but to see everything, click here.

You can also follow SLM on Twitter.

If you like what you see, you can click to subscribe to the newsletter, too, using a link at the bottom of the screen, so you get it right in your inbox.

Hey … while we’re at it, did know know that LIS students can get a subscription to SLM for just about half-price?

My siblings, their spouses, and I love magazines. And for the past several years, hardly a get-together takes place without the inevitable, “I’ve got magazines for you,” and the swapping of a tote bag full of glossy paper. We even scribe our names on the cover so we don’t deliver something someone else has already read. (Honestly, I have no idea where or why this tradition began.)

As a result, sometimes we end up reading mags that are more than a few weeks old.

And that’s what happened with the August 18 issue of Newsweek, which features a really interesting article about the decline in Wikipedia contributors and the possibility that the fad of crowdsourcing its entries is beginning to wane. Whereas people are still active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, there’s something in it for them; in other words, the pleasure we get from reporting and sharing the details and artifacts of our lives still fuels us in ways that creating collective knowledge doesn’t.

Now, Carl and I had a long conversation about Wikipedia and elementary students a while ago, and we both came to the conclusion that we needed to face the reality that kids and families use it all the time, and so instead of banning it and becoming a road block that they veer around, we needed to be proactive and figure out how to help students make sense of it.

At the same time, we can continue helping teachers recognize that assignments that can be completed solely with an encyclopedia — any encyclopedia — alone probably aren’t challenging our students the way they could be. We ended up writing an article about that will be in an upcoming issue of School Library Monthly.

What we kind of ran out of space to talk about in that article was that there are some kind of scary statistics about what’s happening with Wikipedia — and that’s why we want our communities to use Wikipedia with caution. Here are two things we found: Wikipedia editors are down by the tens of thousands, and the average editor (I know, “average” is a squishy term) is a 23 year-old white male. The sheer issue of whether or not that the “average” editor represents the “average” American is a huge cultural issue, no?

OK, OK, back to Newsweek.

It’s always worth having some mainstream media articles at the ready about social media and its impact. So here’s one to browse and to think about.

One final question: In our haste to prepare our students for a crowd-sourced world, is their world going to continue to be crowd-sourced? Or, simultaneous and parallel with the Net Neutrality debate, are we seeing a shift away from communal good online and toward a more selfish or self-centered view? How does that impact how we approach social media and online collaboration in our classrooms?

Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam - Newsweek via kwout