Playing by the rules

I had a chat with someone about whether they should join one of the teacher librarian email lists. Would it lead to them developing a greater disrespect for their colleagues, was the gist of the question. My answer was basically yes, which is interesting because I am glad to be part of the list. Yet, most of the posts are irrelevant things which clog my inbox and there are plenty of questions which I think any librarian worth more than $2.50 an hour should already know. But then I need to remind myself, a lot of these people are working in isolation from the librarian arm of their profession. They don't get support to attend conferences, they don't have the time or inclination to read all of the odd stuff which I read online. Their stupid departments won't let them look at youtube or even boing boing at work, they probably don't read EFF or think much about DRM or Creative Commons...

So, I forgive these people for asking stupid questions. The ones that drive me mad are the ones who don't realise they don't know anything, who will leap up with an opinion despite actually having less sense than the poor person asking the question (who at least knows they are ignorant on the topic).

An example? Why, yes I do have an example...

Downloading You Tube clips is a bit like kids in the candy store. You can't always have what you want - no matter how much money you have or how much you want it. Describing how to circumvent the 'you cannot have this to store and keep' rules - to me - is a bit like telling kids it's OK to steal from the candy store if they don't have enough money! The bottom line is - if you cannot live without a particular clip, contact the person who posted it and ask for their permission. If permission is not given - for whatever reason - too bad, so sad. The world will not end. We can't always have what we want. One of the difficulties with sites like You Tube - while they have fantastic and often hilarious clips that would engage students, they are quite often a mix of original and 'copied' material. This may mean that the person who posted the clip doesn't have the right to give you the right. If you are seriously trying to do the right thing in regard to copyright, you need to be cautious about this aspect in particular.

Did I roll my eyes and get back to cataloguing? No, I can't do that. I needed to surgically excise the stupid before it infected others. The trouble is, the sharpest tool in my surgical kit is the rubber mallet of sarcastic insults.

I'm going to argue with a few points you have made,

Firstly, while I applaud the idea that schools should play by the rules, it is important to remember that we play by different rules. This is not a bad thing, in education we are looking after the interests of our students first and foremost. And the education of our students is an important issue for the nation as a whole. Australia needs an educated populace, so why should we be bound by the same rules as the great unwashed sitting at home watching you-tube for a laugh? We pay for screen rights, we have copyright exemptions (some of which have been hard fought to get and some of which we may lose in the future if society continues to act like the special interest group of publishers, record companies and film studios has some sort of monopoly on deciding what is in our best interest).

To continue your you-tube/candy store analogy. We are not random candy store customers, we are market researchers bringing in new mouths/brains for a taste testing session. If the candy store owner demands that the kids who come in with us pay for the candy we have asked them to taste then it is a candy store run by a moron of the highest order.

To drag the analogy even further. The person behind the counter in the candy store is not always the owner. Just as the person who posted the clip is not always the copyright holder. So asking them may be completely pointless. There is a lot of content on youtube which it is perfectly legal for us to use without having to ask permission, so why add unnecessary steps to your process? I know you recognised the person who posted the clip doesn't always hold the copyright, but the example you gave of "a mix of original and 'copied' material" fails to take into account that it is often perfectly legal to use extracts of another's work. It is also legal to use someone else's work for parody or criticism. There are a whole manner of legal ways to use someone else's intellectual property. Sure, you should be making sure you give proper attribution but that is another issue.

Likewise, when it comes to adding content to an intranet or a moodle style site. Yes, asking for permission works, but why go to all that trouble if you can legally do it under the current copyright framework? I know that when I am asked about things like this it is more often something which is needed in the next five minutes (or on a good day, tomorrow). Your chances of getting a reply in that timeframe are slim at best but remember, we have all sorts of educational exemptions we can use.

Using the exemptions and licences we have as educational institutions is not robbing the candy store. No, wait, I am going to use an exclamation mark! Perhaps even two!!

Not only that, asking permission to use something you are already entitled to use just creates work for the poor fool who created the work you are using (as well as for you). I know a couple of very frustrated people who write very rude and sarcastic emails when people ask if they can use the Creative Commons licensed photos they have on flickr. Sure it isn't the fault of the masses that they are unaware of the different types of licence which can be used. But we are not the masses, we are specialists and this is our field. If we don't do this properly ourselves, how can we stand up before a government enquiry and tell them that not only are we worth having, but they need more of us and we could do with a pay rise thanks for asking?

The kids who come to my school deserve every opportunity I can give them. If there is an exemption I can use which will save me a few dollars then I will use it because every saving I make means they have more resources available to them. If there is a technology I can use which will save the time of the teachers in this school, then I will exploit it because any time I can save them is time they can use for the school, for the students or for themselves (and most of them deserve it).

(now to continue the candy store analogy to the nth degree, if I go to the candy store and buy a bag of ginger creams the candy store owner does not tell me that I have to eat them all myself. He doesn't get to tell me where I can eat them, if I give the bag to a friend he doesn't care, if I haven't eaten them in a certain time frame he doesn't get to reclaim them. Plus, if I come in and take a photo of the ginger creams he can't charge me with shoplifting. nor can he charge me with any crime if I go home and make my own ginger creams. In fact if I go into his store and he is rude to me, so I go buy my ginger creams at another shop there is still nothing he can do about it.)

Some of you may enjoy this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 (sorry it is youtube, my school lets me go there because someone at my school had common sense at some point, I don't know who they were, but I thank them). To get on my soapbox a bit more here, there is a broken business model out there and there are plenty of people within the publishing, film and recording industries who recognise it but it is likely that the current copyright regimen will need to collapse completely before we get any real reform. The question of how we in schools deal with that in the meanwhile is fraught (at best). To compare copying to theft is a flawed analogy. But to compare copying in an educational setting to theft is not just flawed it is wilfully denying access to information and potentially (given we are often the copyright specialists in our schools) confusing the hell out of a whole host of teachers and students.

Why I didn't quit facebook

A couple of days ago it was Quit Facebook Day. The idea seemed to have spread online that facebook was an information vampire (and not a baseball playing, sparkly one). It was sucking up your (and your friends) information, it was causing you to be unemployable. You know because of all those photos of you drinking absinthe and biting the heads of budgies could decrease your chance of getting that job working for the Sydney Anglicans' department of being very, very moral.

Stephen Abram had an interesting post on the subject. Walt Crawford had a different view. But I didn't quit, I didn't not quit because of the recent changes to their privacy settings but I did not quit because facebook still works for me. It allows me to keep in contact with a few groups of people I would probably not keep in contact with otherwise. Not that I don't want to be in contact, but rather that I am lazy about things like letter writing. it also allows me to let people who seem to want to be in contact with me for some reason feel like they are in contact. Sure, I hide their feeds so I don't have to be bothered by their inane prattle. What was the point again?

I didn't quit facebook, I have however deactivated all my email accounts because I am worried about all the Nigerian email I get.

Countering the facebook experience is the fact that I haven't been on second life in almost three years. Why? Well, while facebook, despite its flaws is still best for what it does, Second Life doesn't actually seem to me to do anything. I enjoyed second life, met a few library folk there whom I may not have met in meat space, but it didn't do anything for me. I see SL as being an idea of what is to come, so I think it behoves information professionals to be familiar with the technology, to test it and see what we can do with it. But I have done that and am waiting for what comes next. That said, I didn't need to sign onto a web site to tell people I wasn't using SL. I didn't have to convince others to quit with me, nor did I even delete my account, just like I didn't delete my geocities account, nor make any announcement to tell people I don't use my yahoo chat any more. To move to the furthest reaches of sarcasm, I didn't send out a press release when I decided not to buy a new microfiche reader for Alice Springs Public Library. Dead tech doesn't need to be announced it just fades away.

What am I missing?

One of my recent posts got this comment

"Ms. Yingling said... Wow. I am sorry that you are so angry about so many things. The one thing I did notice is that you speak very infrequently about books. I do very little with technology because so much of my time is spent as Readers' Advisor, and that works very well for me. I hope that things improve in your world"

So, I decided to think about what I am missing in my current way of running a school library.
For example, today in the library I had a Wolfmother concert playing on my IWB. It was loud and raucous (kind of like a lot of my students). I wandered around the place, laughing at the kids who were photocopying bits of their anatomy (I think we need to get some sort of swipe card system on the copier before I end up finding copies of bits of anatomy I do not wish to see) and generally being social. I didn't do much reader advisory (I let one of the senior girls into the back room to look at the new books and asked her opinion of what I've been buying) but I did talk book with a couple of students (and x box with a couple of others).

The library here is not yet a hub of literary activity. Borrowers are the minority of my users, the majority would be here for; computers, air-conditioning, a social space or a safe place from the confusing melee of the playground. Does that make me any less a librarian or my role any less librarianish? Well, it probably depends on where you have been and what you have done. Working in Alice Springs Public Library I spent as much time dealing with the homeless as I did dealing with reference requests. The library there was also a safe place for the disenfranchised and a cool place in the NT heat and we aimed to walk a balance between being a drop in centre for those who had fallen through the cracks in society and being a source of fiction reading and a location for research. After all, the homeless were as much our patrons as the backpackers who wanted internet access and they were still going to be part of our community when the American servicemen and women of the Pine Gap Base took their return flight.

But even in the less socially disadvantaged Penrith, I worked for a library service which aimed to be at least part social space. I organised cartooning workshops for the school holidays, clowns, musicians. I once had a drumming workshop, foolishly I decided to have it in the main library rather than in our theaterette as I wanted all the patrons to feel part of the school holiday program. Some of our Mills and Boone readers didn't seem to see it that way.

Which takes me to another point, it isn't that long ago that the idea of fiction in a library (especially populist fiction) got librarians all hot and bothered. Now we have those who seem to feel their job is all about fiction (which sometimes it is, check your job description if you are unsure). But if you are a school librarian you have much, much more to be working on.


In a recent post, Teresa Bennett touched on the idea that some librarians are not teaching information literacy skills to their students citing the example of a TL who directed library staff to put‘selections of items from the class topic on a trolley so the students wouldn’t have to waste time finding items in the catalogue or on the shelf. NomesD took it a bit further in a comment on the same post saying

"academic librarians have to deal with the utter ineptitude of so many TLs when their students get to university. So many students have never found a book, have no idea what a call number system is, let alone how to use keywords, or how to - God forbid - evaluate information, especially on the internet."

And having worked in a couple of academic libraries I can clearly state that there have been many (oh so many) students who get to Uni with fantastic traditional literacy skills but a complete ineptitude when it comes to finding information. So, it turns out that librarians telling students how to find information, rather than spoon feeding them facts, are not causing the students to waste their time. Rather they are teaching valuable skills, skills which will be needed if that student decides they are going to go on to further study.

So, why do I speak infrequently about books? Especially being as I love books, be it curling up with some Kierkegaard or de Botton for my own amusement or reading Isobelle Carmody because, despite disliking her writing style, I do feel I need to know my collection and what my students are reading. Why don't I devote huge chunks of my blog to reviewing the books which sit on my bookshelves? Well I read and love reading but people reading this blog are by and large librarians, I don't need to sell them on the idea of books. Nor do I need to expound on the benefits of literacy we are all aware that reading is fantastic.

So, does doing what I do work for me (and more importantly my students). It is still to early to tell, but in a school of 500 students I average about 60 students in the library each lunch break. I am taking that as a good sign, just like I am taking the fistbumps and high fives I get when I go to the shops on the weekend as a good sign (please don't tell me they are being ironic. I love my delusion).

The next step though is to get more of those kids who come in here to find the reading material that rocks their world (not just the old copies of Where did I come from). But it is also to get those kids who are online doing their work to understand how to reference the stuff they have used, how to find better stuff than they did last time and how to make sense of the masses of data that exist. And it is also, getting the kids who are playing games or watching videos of people being hit in the balls by children, to feel comfortable enough in the library and with me that when they decide they are going to work that they can ask me for help.

So yes what I do works damn well for me and if things improved any more in my world I would imagine I was dreaming.

Chipping at the edges

As I have mentioned before, the school I am currently for has a rather neglected library. It has been under funded and under staffed for a while now. So I am here to, among other things, get the place up to scratch.

But, I do find sometimes that my mind gets me into some sort of state of inaction. I look at al the 30 year old books on environmental issues and the books on terrorism which discuss the possible ways we could deal with the IRA (and don't mention Islam at all) and think, right first I have to weed. But then I look at the bent shelves and think, no first some general tidying. However at that point I look at our new (but odd shaped) tables and think, no I need to find a way to reconfigure the space, but no point doing that until I move some shelving to create space. Though, moving would be easier if I bought wheels for the shelves. That said, I should probably buy some new uprights because some of our shelving is too tall for our middle school students. But is there any point doing that before the builders come in and knock out a couple of walls because then I would be in a better situation to realign things...

There is more to it than that, but you get the idea. I am looking at so much work that I get confused. I do need to do another big weed (so far I am only up to the 600s) but the part time TL they had last year didn't spend all of the budget so there is a lot of buying I need to do and I don't want to leave that too long.

My point? Do I have one?
It is that no matter how much I do on any given day, I still leave feeling like I have hardly scratched the surface of what needs to be done.

Despite that, the Principal brought some people over (who they were or where they were from I didn't find out) but they came to talk to me about building type things. Which walls I want knocked down, where I want my circ desk moved to, where I want new walls built, which of the bizarre nooks and crannies in this stupidly inappropriate building could be filled in to create new bits of building (and to make the library less hexagonal).

So, I know that I am being supported in my plans to make this library not just pretty, but usable. Now all I need to do is put this mental block aside and choose any of the things on my list to do today.

The Australian Library Blogosphere Exploods

(which is kind of like exploding, only quieter, as befitting a library)
WTF?

I don't know...

Shall I start again?
Well, over the last half an hour twitter has been abuzz with the idea that we should blog every day for the month. I won't explain too much, if you care to know more you can check out CW, Snail or Libraries Interact.

So, what new things do I have to say that make it worth blogging every day? Oh, wait. I am not going to blog every day (didn't I mention that?). Sure it seems like a good idea, but I think instead I will blog every workday. So, no public holiday posts and no posts at the end of the month when I am working the Larapinta trail (no, not all of it).

Damn, I distracted myself from my own question,
What will I blog about?
Probably I will try to put online a few of the ideas I have about the library camp section of the ALIA Access conference and see if any of you folk can help me get my head around some library related stuff.

why do they hate me?

OK, perhaps I am being over dramatic (and perhaps posting this on my blog rather than as a reply to the list I will be talking about is a tad passive aggressive?) but...

The recent government enquiry into school libraries has lead to a spike in posts on the OZTL_NET list. Amongst these posts (and here) there have been some at which I take umbrage, but I have decided not to engage in a land war in Asia pointless online argument. Instead, I will work out my thinking here on the blog and then decide whether I have anything to add to the debate.

What has been said?

Well, in short there have been questions asked about how to properly staff and resource a school library. There have been some, nay, plenty of very good arguments for teacher librarians (TLs), but then some TLs have taken a slightly different tack and argued against public librarians (seems to be shorthand for non-teacher librarians) and their suitability in a school setting.

So,
as a school librarian who has come to this position via (amongst other things) public libraries I have found a lot of the negative stuff rather affronting. Take these extracts (from a couple of different people) for example

A public librarian might learn *some* of these (teaching) skills through the school of hard knocks, their own child-rearing, journal articles, or short professional development courses...

It's a legality that while students are at school they *must* be under the supervision of fully-trained teachers at all times. If a school opted to staff its school library with parent helpers, clerical assistants, or a former public librarian, the students could not legally be left alone in their presence.

In Australia, public librarians are not teachers in the sense of having a teaching qualification and therefore an understanding of pedagogy, curriculum, student management and administration and all those sorts of things... They may have learned about information literacy and children's lit during their qualification but it is all that other stuff... that requires that extra year at least.

A non-teaching librarian (with no teacher qualifications) might be called upon to demonstrate skills to library patrons, but they wouldn't be designing a program of lessons (for school students) with no teacher input.

Can I argue with these people? What do I offer that a TL does not or what don't I offer that a TL does and am I just being over-sensitive when I feel insulted by these posts (and others like them)?

Before I reply, I will make it clear that I am thinking for the most part about high school libraries, rather than primary school libraries. I think a TL is much more important in a primary school setting. That said, given the choice between a teacher who is not a librarian and a librarian who is not a teacher I would suggest the library needs the librarian more but the public system in Australia does not make employing a librarian possible while many of the school librarians I meet are teachers not TLs.

Public librarians are not teachers...
No, fair call, I am not a teacher. In fact I keep forgetting what a pedagogy is, but does that disqualify me from performing my duties here?
I don't believe so. Sure, perhaps others here are better trained in the theory of teaching but unfortunately a lot of them don't know the things which I teach. Search strategies, referencing... There seem to be a lot of gaps in the knowledge of many teachers in these areas. Would these gaps exist in the knowledge of a TL? I would certainly hope not but then, just as I know plenty of overly conservative librarians who are reluctant to embrace change there are plenty of TLs who are in the same situation. TLs who still act like the book is the be all and end all of the profession, who engage in petty and pointless arguments with students about the unsuitability of wikipedia or whose library are dry vaults, tombs to the memory of a bookcentric information gathering process.

As a non-TL, I may be called upon (so these folk believe) to demonstrate skills, but little more. Well, in fact no. I am writing lessons (and have delivered lessons) to students on topics relevant to the library, to research, copyright, referencing. Yes, I have done so at the behest of a teacher and that teacher has been present with me when I have delivered the lesson. But there has been enough respect shown for my professionalism to allow me to deliver the lesson as I see fit.
It is interesting that in my last position, no one thought it inappropriate for me to write and deliver lessons to students in higher education (including those studying for a B Ed). So, somehow I am qualified to teach teachers, but not to teach their students?

Now, of course my last job was as an academic librarian rather than as a public librarian. But I did feel that the public librarian term was being used as a catch all term for non-TLs. Still, in defence of the public librarian... As a public librarian (Children's and Youth Services) I was regularly invited into schools by TLs or teachers to talk to students about research skills, to demonstrate databases and to teach them how best to use these resources. No one ever asked to see my proposed lessons beforehand. No one ever saw fit to correct my pedagogy (can you correct a pedagogy?). Plus, the public library is often the place where kids come and do their research. And due to the rarity of a kid who knew what the hell they were doing when it came to researching their work the public librarians are often the ones to teach that skill. Now, sure the one on one nature of teaching research skills in a public library make it very diferent from a classroom but it is certainly not an unusual thing for a public librarian to be doing.

The legalities of leaving students supervised by non-teachers vary from State to State but as a non-teacher I certainly would not want to be shuffled off sideways and told to teach year 9 English. In fact, even were I a qualified teacher, I wouldn't want to be shuffled off sideways into a classroom because that would cause all sorts of problems for the correct running of the library. Indeed, that is (at least part of) the reason why my school decided to employ a non-TL. Because I am here and can not be dragged off to become a free relief teacher.

Yet, despite the fact I am not a teacher it is quite legal (here in the NT) for me to be running the library at lunch time and after school (we average about 65 kids in the place at lunch). This does involve student management which, despite my never having done my Dip Ed is not dissimilar to the sort of crowd control I would use in a busy public library. In fact, at one stage in one public library I would regularly be doing storytime for 90 pre-school kids. So yes I have learned these skills in the school of hard knocks.

Which leads me onto another aspect of this public library dissing. Where do teachers learn their student management? I would say in the school of hard knocks, the same way I learned. Why would I say that? Because I have friends who are teachers, I work with teachers and I have watched teachers. New graduate teachers do not arrive fully operational and ready to go. Just as new grad librarians do not have all the skills they need. They arrive with some ideas, some part formed skills gained during practicum and they leap out of their nest and try to fly. The theory you gain during your studies in a good resource, it gives you something to model your style on and something to fall back on when things don't work but it is not everything. I have seen new grad teachers who have the personality to leap into a classroom and do all they need to do with consummate ease. But I have also seen teachers with years under their belt who crumble (or worse yet, begin screaming and shouting) at the first sign of dissent of defiance.

The bit of paper is unfortunately no indicator of how well someone will perform under real world conditions so, in the right school, with the right conditions and the right person I stand here and tell you a Public Librarian can do the job and do it well.

Andrew (librarian idol, who is like me an ex-public librarian now working as a school librarian) wrote a post where he looked at the difference between the deprofessionalisation of librarians and the employing on non-TLs in schools. I would like to suggest that employing a librarian is not in any way deprofessionalising. It is looking for a different skillset, but my skills are every bit as professional as a TL. Unfortunately, the posts I have been reading (and the comments on Andrew's blog) seem to clump all non teachers into one big basket, so the arguments against employing a librarian are the same as those against staffing your library with a support officer or with parent volunteers. This is unfortunately a very disingenuous line of reasoning and completely ignores the professionalism of a librarian.

Like Andrew, I recognise that a Dip Ed could "enhance my current skills" and unlike Andrew I am lucky enough to be in a position where my employer would support me in gaining that nice bit of paper. But, if I were to go out and get it, my reason would be that it makes me more employable, not that it is in any way necessary to do my job and do it well.

Argh, some things are new. Lets all panic!

If I may quote the principal of this? school...
(emphasis is mine)

...It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand!
There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None...

Most students are part of more than one social networking site.
Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don't install it behind their back, but install it!

Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need...
Have a central "docking station" preferably in your bedroom, where all electronics in the home get charged each night, especially anything with a cell or wifi capability (Remember when you were in high school and you would sneak the phone into your bedroom at midnight to talk to you girlfriend or boyfriend all night - now imagine what they can do with the technology in their rooms).

If your son or daughter is attacked through one of these sites or through texting - immediately go to the police! Insist that they investigate every situation. Also, contact the site and report the attack to the site - they have an obligation to suspend accounts or they are liable for what is written...

The threat to your son or daughter from online adult predators is insignificant compared to the damage that children at this age constantly and repeatedly do to one another through social networking sites or through text and picture messaging.

It is not hyperbole for me to write that the pain caused by social networking sites is beyond significant - it is psychologically detrimental and we will find out it will have significant long term effects, as well as all the horrible social effects it already creates.

I will be more than happy to take the blame off you as a parent if it is too difficult to have the students close their accounts, but it is time they all get closed and the texts always get checked...

Some people advocate that the parents and the school should teach responsible social networking to students because these sites are part of the world in which we live. I disagree, it is not worth the risk to your child to allow them the independence at this age to manage these sites on their own, not because they are not good kids or responsible, but because you cannot control the poor actions of anonymous others...

Sincerely,
Anthony Orsini
Principal, BFMS

I think I have already expressed the idea that schools should be about schooling and that if the teachers of my kids were to start intruding into our lives outside of school I would be expressing my displeasure quite bluntly.

There is some decent advice in this message in terms of being aware what your kids are up to, but there is so much stupidity that it beggars belief. I think it may be time for people to pull out their copies of On Liberty and see if they like anything John Stuart Mill wrote. What? Doesn't everyone have a copy of On Liberty?
Well, then go to a library and borrow a copy!

The tyranny of the majority shouldn't be what drives our decision making. Sure it is hard sometimes in a school setting to deal with the individual. I see teachers still using the cry "one of you is talking so you will all stay back" and I remember the mouthy young kid I was. I remember often wanting to get up and walk out rather than accept the punishment for the actions of others (and sometimes I did).

But, how can we think this is acceptable behaviour? Because they are younger than us, is this the only reason?

I know that some people (mostly on the left) have the idea that the real purpose of school is to create grist for the mill. We are all sent into these factories to be indoctrinated in order that we become good plebs and live our lives in the role society hands us. I hate that idea and don't believe that is what modern schooling should be about. We are not creating cannon fodder for the frontline or mindless drones, we are here to help small humans to become the best adults they can be.

So, perhaps "...the school should teach responsible social networking to students because these sites are part of the world in which we live..." but even if that is not our role, it is certainly not our role to prevent them engaging with that part of our modern world.

Do I teach responsible social networking. Well, not exactly. It comes up when I talk to the kids about online research, but the social networking sites are blocked by the NT education department. Perhaps it is logical to ensure there aren't too many shiny things to distract the kids but it does mean we are not engaging with the kids through those networks. There is no twitter back channel displaying school news (although, I am hoping I can get one up and running some time soon). There is no library facebook page with research hints, I would like there to be one but even if there was the students would only be able to access it from home. And any parents who listen to a Luddite like the one quoted above would be preventing their kids from joining the conversation anyway.

To quote Mill "over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign" this includes the freedom to hold an opinion and the freedom to publish it (I'm not sure Mill would have used facebook as his medium, but I strongly suspect he would have supported your right to twitter inanely and blog without censorship).

Goodhart goes to school

Are you familiar with Goodhart's law?
No, not Godwin's Law of NAZI analogies. While that may have some impact on your school or library (teaching kids how to debate or write signs for a teabagger rally), Goodhart's law is the one I was wanting to think about today.

Goodhart came up with his law during the Thatcher years in Britain and it related to monetary policy. In brief it suggests that measuring something changes it (yes, that is similar to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but that is quantum theory and I don't usually like the idea of assuming that what is true of waveforms is a universal truth to live my life by). But Goodhart goes further than that, to suggest that in finance or social policy the change makes the measuring unsuitable for its original purpose.
So...

A government decides to test all students nationwide to determine how well students are reaching certain educational markers (good idea).
but then...

Private schools work out that they can use a bit of game theory and teach specifically to the test. Thus improving their appearance of success (but not necessarily improving real world outcomes for their students).

So, our public schools follow suit (teaching to the test). Private schools must then raise their performance again, so poorly performing students are jettisoned before the testing date or given a convenient diagnosis of ADHD or dyslexia to allow them extra time on the test.
And...

Before you know it you have a test which measures nothing more than the ability of teachers and administrators to play the system.

As you may gather, I see very little of benefit in the information I as a parent can gain from the my school website that our wonderful Labour government has set up. It shows almost nothing which will allow me to work out how my child will perform in a particular school. Not to mention, if I am sending my kids to a public school, I have very little choice where they will attend (the nearest one is usually the rule). So, if I am well off (or willing to make sacrifices) I can send my kids to a private school. But if I am well off I am probably living in a good socio economic area and as such will be close to a well performing school.

This is old news I know. But the complete stupidity of thinking that you can measure the ability of teachers through standardised testing performed every few years is insane and it is about to happen again. Except, it seems a lot of teachers are now willing to take a stand and are refusing to administer the test.

Damn, I have come to the end of my post and have reached no conclusion.
umm...

Goodhart's law makes sense to me. There, done.

But, all I know of Indian burial grounds I learned from a Stephen King novel

Today my inbox contained an email which I had received via OZTL_NET (cross posted on six other lists) entitled "What does Neil Gaiman know about American Indians?".

This email was from a Professor of American Indian Studies and pointed to a blog post she had written concerning some remarks the Author Neil Gaiman had made in an interview about The Graveyard Book. It seems the professor had concerns that these comments were ill-advised in relation to the true nature of American history.

I shot back a reply to the list (but not to the cross posted lists) saying that I thought the comments made sense in the context of the book (and perhaps made a joke in there about reading comprehension of the original poster).
I considered sending @neilhimself a tweet to let him know there was a blog post out there in the world which seemed to be suggesting he was... ? Racially insensitive, culturally ignorant?
but I decided that I am not such a fanboy that I needed to do that.

A short time later I noticed via the Tweet Tubes that Neil was aware not only of that post, but also of another post which seemed to take things further and suggest that his quote (if not he himself) was racist.

Neil lashed out, using foul language like 'twit' but then recanted and apologised for it. But the damage had been done and internet white knights rode into battle, some defending their hero Neil while others rode in to defend the two bloggers who had called out this racist Brit.

All in all it was a wonderfully amusing internet sideline for me today, but it left me wondering a few things.

Why do people get so offended so easily, why do we all feel we know the authors whose books we read, is this all a storm in a teacup...

oh, and did the original blogger invoke the name of a literary celebrity beloved of many online folk just in order to ramp up some blog traffic? If not, why would she be emailing a list for Australian teacher librarians to mention her blog post?

Apparently there are follow up blog post on the issue, but I don't believe I care to read them. I think I'll read a book instead but if it has Indians in it I will make sure I consider the cultural implications. Ohh, seems spaming newsgroups and bagging authors may be a good method to get your point across?
I wonder if anyone out there in academia is looking at the representations of Indigenous Australians in children's books? I know that Biggles in Australia is appallingly racist but I don't know many kids these days who read about Biggles and his chums. And if I were to come across a kid with a love of the hero of the Camel Squadron, I think I would be able to have a nice conversation about outdated British imperialism and ideas of racial superiority.

Don't ask "can I" ask "how can I"

I have noticed during my long career as a school librarian (almost an entire term now), that school librarians seem more likely to ask the question "can I?" when dealing with technological or legal issues.

As in "Can I use this youtube video in class". This is problematic (it seems to me) as the answer that is easiest to give to that sort of question is "no". A no answer is completely safe from a legal standpoint. However, from an educational standpoint it is a crappy answer. Especially as most of the people who are going to answer your question for you are not specialists in the field you are interested in.

Your principal is not a digital media specialist.
Your IT guy is not a copyright lawyer.

I would like it if School Librarians (and teachers themselves) started phrasing their question "How can?"

As in "How can I legally use this youtube clip in a mashup". That way, you are forcing the person you are asking into a different mindset. They may have to answer "I don't know" but they are then admitting they don't know rather than giving you a default "no".

From there, you can move onto finding out the real answer.

You can create mashup works using videos covered by a creative commons licence or of “insubstantial portions” (the words of the act) of a copyright work.
You can get permission from the copyright holder to make use of their work, you could be covered under your educational licence.

Parody and satire do give you another exemption. You can use copyright material for the purposes of parody and satire without permission, provided your use is fair. This would include things like the Hitler videos which were all the rage on youtube recently, where the use of the original work was necessary for the parody to succeed.
(It is worth noting that the act does not define parody or satire, but that probably doesn't mean you can invent your own definition).
You can also make use of an original work without permission if you are doing it or the purposes of criticism or review. So a student could make a video where they analyse works as examples of film making or style and could extract examples from the work they were discussing....

I've been watching this mindset online in the questions TLs are asking each other, but I suspect that the same passive questioning is being used when we ask for;
new shelves,
bay ends,
a bigger budget,
money for a visiting author
a week off to go to a conference...

And that is my thought for the day.
Thank you, come again.

My reply

Seems most folk want to reply to me privately on this issue, rather than add any support for me via blog post or on the original e-list.

I wonder why?

Anyway, this was my reply. It took me a while, and is as considered as any of my opinions ever is. And perhaps more thought out than most.

I paste it here unedited.

OK,
I am going to take the rope you have given me and use it to hang myself.

Yes, it is a non-issue, I made that statement and I stand by it. It is part of a modern day version of reds under the bed driven by a media who either does not understand the issue or deliberately misrepresents it to the public. This is not trivialising the issue. And I am sorry if it appears that way, however I take the issue very seriously. But no matter how I look at it I just come out with a different conclusion to some of you. Or perhaps it is just because I have looked at the statistics and read the studies, rather than relying on the investigative journalism of Today Tonight for all my fearmongering needs.
Why is it a non-issue?

Because it is part of our current societal belief that we can make the world safe by eliminating risk and danger.
Because it is so statistically unlikely that the fear we put in these kids is more problematic that the danger.
Because the worst case scenario should not be the driving force in all our decisions.

You have personalised the debate, so allow me to personalise it myself. When I was about 13 a very good friend of mine was killed while cycling out to a river for a swim. I often cycled with him, that day I didn't. However, cycling was not to blame. Nor were rivers. It was an unfortunate confluence of events which lead to his death.

What the hell am I talking about? I am talking about the fact that a week or so after his death I cycled the exact same road on my way to the exact same river or a swim. Yet somehow I did not die.

Likewise with your student, there is a horrible confluence of events which no doubt lead to her situation. Yet does that mean that we need to ban metaphorical bicycles? No, it doesn't. It means we do need to teach kids a few things about personal safety but these lessons will be laughed out of the classroom by almost all of our students if they are presented in the paranoid and overly simplistic fashion that some on here have demonstrated.

The idea that a school photo existing online has any parallel with the death of your student would be laughable if it wasn't so often the way the debate is directed. By creating this paranoid fear we are doing damage to our children, this is not just true of online paranoia but of the way children are taught 'stranger danger' or the way I meet so many kids who are too scared to climb a tree or the number of my 8 year old's friends whose parents are too scared to let them ride bikes or walk to school and as such these kids grow up thinking that anything which scares you slightly should be avoided.

There is a line between risk management and risk avoidance, and too many people today seem to have forgotten that kids need to be taught to manage risk rather than have us round off the corners of the world and send them around wrapped in cotton wool.

But enough of me riding my hobby horse. What are the facts? http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV194.pdf
http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/internet-crimes/factsheet_1in7.html Sure, these are American statistics, but they are the best figures available that I am aware of. Anyone here want to claim that Australian kids are less safe online than American ones?

To those of you who have watched me destroy my professional reputation on here today while sending me quiet messages of support off-list, here are a couple of things worth reading on the topic of over protective parents (which I think we can apply to school librarians).
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2009/05/04/free_range_kids/
http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

and, how to talk to kids about the issue (the sane way)
http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/internet-crimes/safety_ed.html

Yes, I continued the debate.

OK, I can be quite rude sometimes caustically sarcastic perhaps. But come on folks, "The stupid. It Burns"

I will avoid going into detail about the various bush lawyers who leapt into the debate, all with their personal ideas about copyright law

Dear John Regardless of the personal practices of particular photographers, international copyright law still vests the photographer with the copyright ownership of their images.

No, it doesn't! That is simply untrue under Australian law, there are just too many variables to make that statement.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is a breach of the Privacy Act if she hasn't obtained permission of all the people in the photo to use their image or name.

Ah for crying out loud. We are librarians folk, we have the ability to look stuff up. Two clicks later and I can confirm that the Privacy Act covers personal information gathered by " government agencies and private sector organisations."
Wow, the Privacy Act doesn't cover information 13 year olds put on Facebook? Who could have guessed that!
Even private schools aren't included in the act unless "they have an annual turnover greater than $3 million, or provide a health service"

OK, lawyers aside...

How should I respond to this;

John
I am deeply concerned by your trivialisation of an issue about which so many of our colleagues
have so justifiably expressed concerns.
Why?
Because one of our ex-students (aged 15 years) was stalked and murdered by a middle-aged interstate predator who "discovered" her via her social networking page (MySpace).
A non-issue? I don't think so.

I will await people's ideas of how I should have responded, then will put up how I actually did respond. Sound fair?

The internets are going to rape your children!

As a school librarian, I have of course subscribed to an email list of school librarians. This has opened the floodgates to a lot of emails, most of which I read the subject line of, before deleting; some of which I read and am grateful for but others which lead me to the conclusion that many in my profession are a group of reactionary old fools who should be put out to pasture before they create another generation of kids who think libraries are pointless.

Take today's example (one which got me up on my soap box in the forum and now here in my blog, where I can write without the "OMG paedophiles are everywhere" brigade having the right of reply).

The issue of school photos on facebook came to a head with an email which read (in part);

We have a Year 6 child who has scanned a class photo... to her Facebook page.
We now realise that we will have to put something in place in terms of
privacy etc. This was done at home with the child's own property. Do you
involve yourselves in this or is it a home issue? ... is it OK for her to post photos of other kids without their permission? Can we really do anything about this?

I replied in calm and measured tones;

I'm going to leap in on this one and say "do nothing"
As a parent, I would be appalled if my daughter's teachers thought they had any say in what she did on facebook. I am surprised that there are teachers who think that there is any role for the school in this. Aside from the fact that the photo was taken at school, what is the issue?
Is it OK for her to put up photos of the other kids without permission? Yes. There may be a copyright issue depending on who your school photographer is and how they feel about it, but that is not a school issue, it is for the photographers to follow up if they feel they need to. That aside, the kids will fill their albums with photos of each other. Photos from the school social, from the camp, from the swimming carnival...
As for teaching kids about their safety and privacy online, most of them know more than most of their teachers. At least, by the time they are 13 (the age when you can get a facebook account - unless they lie about their age).

Now, some of the folk took issue (and quite rightly too) with my saying the kids know more than most of their teachers by talking about how little protection many of them use online. It was a throw away line and while I still believe I could argue my point I will try to focus on the real issue. Such as the person who said;

there are also safety issues because any would-be predator now has enough stuff to start a conversation with either that child or one of her friends....
There could be repercussions from the photographer against the school....
If I were in your shoes, I would be contacting the parents and explaining the privacy issues and asking them to ensure that the student removes the photo.

Seriously? Arghhh
paedophiles?

Let me go out on a personal limb here and say that the world is mad. But that is no excuse for those of us who should be educated to believe this sort of A Current Affair rubbish.
Forget the paranoia and look at reality.

Slipping out of my School Librarian role for a moment and into my parent role, if a teacher was to contact me about my daughter's facebook profile I would be asking them why the hell they were looking at it, and questioning why they didn't have anything better to do with their time. If they added the paranoid OMG the paedophiles are everywhere rubbish I would be hard pressed not to laugh.

My eldest (13) is on facebook, her photos can be seen by her friends. If her friends are in the photos, then those photos can be seen by their friends. Who are those friends of friends? Who cares! As I said before, the world is mad. We have taken risk management and decided if there is any risk we will manage it by eliminating it. Risk can't be eliminated, nor should it be. Kids should be given the opportunity to learn how to accept risk and how to deal with it is a sensible fashion.
Remember folks, the reality is that abuse comes from those our children know. Uncles, grandfathers, friends of the family...
Yet, I don't believe the school has a role in telling parents not to let the kids visit their grandfather without a chaperone, so why should we be butting in on their online private life,
Unless your school has a particularly high number of students who are on the witness protection program, this is a non issue.

As you an imagine, my logical and reasoned approach was greeted well. Actually, that sounds sarcastic. But I did get a flood of emails along the lines of "thanks for not drinking to cool-aid" But those were all off-list. On list there were messages like;

...it is implicit in our duty of care that students cannot be tracked through FB, Google or anywhere else if we can prevent it...
I wonder what the outcome of a lawsuit might be if something happened and it was proven that I, as a teacher, knew about it and did nothing.

And the person who wrote that was lauded as

...a voice of reason in this discussion.

Seriously, that is a voice of reason? that is not a voice in the same vicinity as reason. That is a voice of paranoid insanity. If 'something' did happen. What the hell is 'something' and how is something prevention a part of my job description?
Some of the paranoia seemed also to be about students whose non-custodial parents must be avoided. OK, now we at least have a real issue to discuss. Yes, if there are problems in custody battles we don't want that student on the front page of a major newspaper with directions to their home. But, rather than go for an instant paranoid overreaction, how about we hope that the custodial parent is sane enough not to have their kid on facebook at all.

Trying to be logical in this, how many random facebook profiles of 13 year old girls would I have to search through in order to stumble across a photo of my own child if they were not on facebook? The odds are astronomical and I would have a much better chance of finding my child by randomly standing outside actual schools watching kids come and go.

Trying to be logical again, I decided to look at the other issue, copyright. Because the paranoid librarian quoted above made a good point in a later email;

It is part of our role as the school community's information specialist to inform the school community about the legal aspects of IP, copyright and acceptable use, including legal ramifications of possible use.

I called three school photographers at random and asked them where they stand on the issue.
Their answers were a unanimous acceptance that kids (and their parents) will put the school photos online. They all said that the only reason they would care about digital reproductions would be if the someone was trying to make a profit from them.
So, there is one less issue for everyone to cry "OMG people is going to sue us all ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" about.

None the less, the debate continues online and I am currently deciding whether to continue trolling the message board with my persistent and countercultural insistence on not being paranoid.

Girls are more mature: now with wings

Lunch in the library today was a quiet one; only about 65 kids in the place at any one moment. Yet despite the fact that I have a lot of kids in a fairly small library they were behaving quite well today. Seems my methods are working, certainly at the beginning of the year I was having about 50 kids in the place and it seemed like a riot.
However since then I have managed to learn classroom management skills (downside of not being a teacher was that I hadn't done this before. Although doing storytime for 60 pre-school kids in Penrith library had certainly provided me with some skills in crowd control at least.)
I have been trying to be nice to the kids, I know that trying to be everyone's friend is a bad plan. But I have a sense of humour, I don't try to take out my own inadequacies on the kids and I don't feel upset when the girls sit among the shelves and giggle about my hairstyle.

Still, I digress. A post on how I would make a much better teacher than all these actual teachers can wait until later (and is contingent on me not examining my thesis too closely for flaws).

So, today. In my quiet library...
A young boy, amongst a small group of young boys, was teasing a couple of girls. Nothing which would warrant my intervention. Instead I feigned disinterest and watched as these girls maintained the moral high ground. I was very impressed, they did not rise to his bait, continued talking quietly amongst themselves. I thought a bit about my own behaviour at that age and mused somewhat about the difference in maturity between boys and girls of the same age.

Until, with the sounding of the bell, the boy of our story rose from his seat and walked towards the door; with a feminine hygiene product stuck lovingly between his shoulder blades. Like some sort of tampax brand angel wings.

What is a school librarian?

Andrew, over at Librarian Idol has an interesting post on his first visit to an ASLA meeting. I find the questions he raises quite interesting. I think a librarian without teaching qualifications is a better fit in the school library that a teacher without library qualifications would be.
Sure as a librarian I may be biased in that direction but I would be interested in hearing what others think. Like Andrew I am a school librarian now, but I am not a teacher librarian. But hey, last year I did a guest lecture to some primary education students on making to most out of their librarian. So what difference does not being a teacher make to the skills I bring to the library?

Well in my case it means I didn't think I had much in the way of behaviour management. But last Friday I managed to break up a fight (albeit between 2 year 7 nerds) and stop a case of racist teasing.
Plus I am managing 50-80 kids in the library each lunchtime. Initially I was doing this alone, but on the day I hit 80 I decided I would talk to the senior staff about a bit of help. Now I get an 18 year old who is working at the school for a gap year to help me at lunch time.

Like Andrew I am getting involved in things outside the library. I spent a day coaching an under 13s league team at a carnival and I ran the cross country. Both good things, and both have given me the chance to get involved with kids for whom the library is not the number one destination.

At the moment I am working hard to get the library up to what I consider a decent standard and I think that this is a librarian's job rather than a teacher's. Not that a teacher wouldn't have been able to do my job today, pulling off horribly outdated books. A books where Cliff Richard talks about teen culture (1973) a book on cinema talking about a new film called Star Wars. OK, those were spectacular examples and most of the books I am deleting are newer than that, but unfortunately not much outdated. Computer books don't have a long shelf life, books on teen culture or books on health issues need to have pictures which current students can relate to.

But I digress...

so, rather than try to clean up this post I will publish it and tell you to go read Andrew's post instead. He is being a lot more lucid on the topic than I am.