Lorna the Librarian

The Kartchilamás

I have written several posts within the last few months on taking time off from “the internet.”  I now live with daily power cuts so it has become an easy task! Let’s backtrack.

I awoke one morning surprised to find that my computer had turned itself off and on in my absence. Unsaved work had disappeared. I wondered if my son from afar had been messing online with it, but I didn’t think much more until I met up with some friends.

“Firemen perished fighting a wildfire down near the naval base,” they said. “Munitions exploded.” “Power station hurt.” “Naval commander, police, national guards killed.”

I felt instantly thrust into a bad situation and went home to Twitter and BBC to find out what was really going on. In 2009, munitions from Iran bound for Hamas and Syria had been discovered by the United Nations off the coast of Cyprus on board a Russian ship. Cyprus was asked to board the vessel and confiscate the containers. Several nations including France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.A said they would help in the disposal of the dangerous load.

The Nabob of Cyprus danced the Kartchilamás over the coals of a souvla pit to juggle friends and foes alike. In short, he made political steps at the expense of his own country and people.

Ignoring help from others, he stacked metal containers of dangerous munitions on a naval base next door to a newly constructed power station and there they rested nearly two years baking in seasonal heat waves. By July 4^th of this year, fireworks started popping in the containers and all the nabobs called an ineffectual emergency meeting two days later. After 5 more days, the main power station on the island of Cyprus was destroyed by nine powerful blasts as one container after another blew their tops. Thirteen people lost their lives. A modern, Mercedes filled, consumer driven society flip-flopped backwards.

I don’t worry about having too much internet access now, thanks to the nabobs! Every midday when the temperatures are hoving around 110-120 degrees, my fans stop, car alarms ring, my refrigerator cycles off, my iPad puts an email in the out box. I have learned to turn off my computer in the early morning since you never know when a generator may break and another unannounced cut may happen and yes, I need a UPS if I can find one. You may wonder why I didn’t mention air conditioners stopping. We’ve all been asked not to use them by the power authority. I sweated profusely through the first two weeks after the explosion. Now I use them sparingly.

In the wider community, events take on an otherworldly dimension. A patient in a dentist chair, full of Novocain, drill working and zap, power cut; bread in a baker’s oven halfway done, zap, power cut; crossing an intersection, zap, lights go out; riding elevator, zap. Coffee makers at Starbucks, tills and credit card machines, electric doors, electric cradled phones, digital clocks, gas pumps, fruit and vegetable storage, pharmacies and meds, imagine the possibilities! With frequent cuts, all things electric with a few years on them begin to malfunction like modems, and I now fear for the life of my newish refrigerator. The big conversation starter: “How you doing with the cuts?”

On Twitter, I found an article about the Cypriot guinea pig and how Cyprus deals with its crisis may portend the fate of other modern economies. For now businesses have reverted to closing up in the afternoon and water cuts have been reinstated, common practices from before the year 2000. But how can you pick up Nicosia, a modern capitol city filled with businesses from across Europe and place it in a last century rural setting without sending modern business packing? It’s not just inconvenience that a power or water cut describes but the chance of economic failure.

A friend put it this way: We are so dependent on electricity and when it is gone what do we do?

Candles, anyone? Or how about an energized, public-spirited community to boot the old nabobs, take control of Cyprus’s destiny and save it from economic ruin?

What do you think?

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Camp NanoWriMo!

Has anyone out there tried the NanoWriMo adventure in November? The time when you just write and write because you desperately believe you can create a novel.

I tinkered with the idea of taking to this writing road for a few years and finally this past November took the leap away from doubt and towards belief and started writing a story. I woke in the early morning hours, wrote, got ready for my library job, went to work, came home and started writing all over again. What I discovered in the process was that I began to take on the life of my characters because I had to get out of my head and into theirs to know how to move the tale along. It was the best writing course I could have ever signed up for. At the end of the month I had written 50,000 words and had a rough draft. I loved every day. I loved what I was doing.

How does all this fit with libraries and librarians? Part of my job is to promote reading and writing with my students. Part of my job is to book talk and highlight novels and authors. Part of my job is to be a storyteller and make characters jump off the page. Part of my job is to help students craft essays based on research.  I need to put pencil in hand just like they do.

By the way, Camp NanoWriMo is starting July 1^st and that’s tomorrow! I am onboard again. What about you?

Why Use Film? ALA Standards for the 21st Century: think, create, share and grow. Examples.

Our Kindergarten children were paired and asked to think about how they were different from their partner. They explored their differences and created a script highlighting what they discovered. The librarian took their ideas and together they interpreted them through short film sequences. The children worked on how to narrate their script and then it was taped and edited by the librarian using iMovie. The narration was added to the images and all was shared as a little film with the larger school community. Through film, the children were able to better understand the concept of difference and in a positive way grow.

The First Grade film project was collaboration between the classroom teacher, the art teacher and the librarian. The children created paintings in art of their partner. They wrote scripts in their classroom and they also worked with the librarian to Photoshop their photos, enhance them for the film and narrate the scripts.

American Library Association Standards for the 21st Century Learner: Learning Dispositions

We send our children to school to be prepared for an unknown future, for a lifetime of change. Acquiring knowledge will not guarantee success. They need a disposition to allow them to be ever resourceful to ride the waves of this change with curiosity, resilience, flexibility,  imagination, the ability to be critical, reflective and make self-evaluations.

For example, I can show students how to evaluate web sites, but if they don’t feel that this evaluation process is important they will return to old habits blindly choosing the first sites that pop up on Google. I can expect students to use multiple resources in an assignment, but it is their curiosity that will motivate them to do that on their own. If they can’t find appropriate resources will they be resilient enough to brainstorm new ways to find the needed information? If they choose a specific thesis for their IB Extended Essay and then encounter conflicting information, will they have the adaptability to change their focus, revise their thesis or start again? Dispositions matter! After that first job interview, will they grab onto those habits learned of reflection and self-evaluation to be prepared for the next? When their field of study disappears, will they have developed the creativity to reinvent themselves?

We send our children to school to not only learn skills and acquire knowledge but also to develop the dispositions of learning that will carry them through the ups and downs of their lives.

Taking a break from technology?

Several weeks ago, I wrote how students at Hofstra University in New York engaged in an entire week without any internet connection. It was stated that the “experiment” was to broaden the students’ perception of themselves in the world.

Over the Easter holiday, I spent time on the campus of the University of Michigan and had the opportunity to attend a class in the School of Information. Since older people, business leaders from the community were also present that afternoon, I fit in. The students presented information on studies they had made for several well-known internet businesses that served schools. I was interested in listening to their findings until I became distracted by the clatter of keyboards around me. I turned my attention from the stage to the students in the audience. They madly worked on Facebook, Youtube, and e-mail switching from one to the next as seasoned users unaware that I was observing them.

I went to lunch the next afternoon with a professor who is a specialist on database use. I mentioned my student observation of the previous day. “Yes,” she said.  “They have an addiction.” She went on to relate how she has been studying the behavior and thinks that the students are unable to sit quietly with their own thoughts. Being plugged-in is a welcome distraction for them.

Tiffany Schlain, recognized by Newsweek as a force in twenty-first century thinking, an internet pioneer, a filmmaker, and founder of the Webby awards that recognize excellence in internet sites, thinks the answer to this dilemma of the internet as a distraction is to un-plug. She and her entire family un-plug for 24 hours each weekend. She states on her blog, “Five weeks ago, Ken and I started unplugging with the girls from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday for our technology shabbat. We tried this in the past, but now we’re taking it seriously. I am finding it profound. How big time feels. How expansive space feels. My mind is able to breathe in a way that it needs. I think we all need… and I definitely recommend trying it.”

Maybe we should all consider unplugging. What do you think?

A week without Facebook

Students in the School of Communications At Hofstra University in New York  are currently engaging in an entire week without Facebook, texting on their phones, without the internet. These digital natives will be forced to imagine a world without the convenience of Google, Wikipedia and instant communication tools. Not that these world altering tools are bad; the idea behind this experiment is to broaden the students’ perception of themselves in the world: a world without “mice;” a world where “grounded,” community involvement, group work takes on a whole new meaning. Imagine Cyta, the main internet provider on the island going down for a week! To be honest, I don’t think it would be just the digital natives who would suffer. What do you think?

You ask, “Should I buy a Kindle?”

This past Christmas Eve, a small box was set on my lap by my son and daughter-in-law sporting Cheshire cat grins. I unwrapped it and pulled out an iPad nestled inside a zipped pouch. Much like my iPhone though larger, I found it easy to use and I moved from Facebook to Google to Mail and back again. One application, the “Kindle for ipad” opened up Amazon and with one touch of my finger, I downloaded the novel Corrections by Jonathan Franzen all within less than a minute. It took me several days to begin reading it.  For several more days, I thumbed and read through the paperback Water for Elephants. When done, I turned it over, read the back pages, the front pages and then let them fall to ease as I put that paperback on the night stand.

It was then that I considered the iPad in its case on the chair across the room. I picked it up, opened Corrections and taught myself how to work with this new reading medium: no page numbers, no way to tell how big the book was going to be, no smell. But here’s the clincher: no dirt, plot details if you want them, touch an unknown word and its definition pops up, swipe the glass with your index finger and the next one appears, take a break and bookmark the page with a finger’s touch, change the print size for tired eyes. It took me about three days to know I would never go back to paper except to read those books already in queue; it took me three days as a librarian to recognize the sea change in front of readers; three days to realize that books weren’t going away as all the nay sayers were howling, they were just changing. Do I recommend a Kindle or iPad or whatever you want to call this post modern ebook reader? Positively yes, they are for everyone, the tiny ones, the elderly and everyone in between. And frankly, I don’t miss the smell.

Why Teach about Plagiarism in the Exploratory Research Classes?

Upon returning from the Jamestown colony to London in 1611, William Strachey went to Shakespeare’s newest play The Tempest. It didn’t take him long to realize that the play was based on his own notes of the sinking of the ship Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609. His unpublished account of this adventure must have somehow gotten into Shakespeare’s hands.

Shakespeare was a great borrower of ideas at a time when not much was made of it. He profited from this ability. Strachey died a pauper although he has since gained recognition from scholars for his work, A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption…from the Islands of the Bermudas and its influence on Shakespeare.

Many others have followed or preceded Shakespeare’s footsteps as borrowers of the ideas of others over the millennia. Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg got the concept for his now famous social network from an earlier brainchild of fellow Harvard students the Winklevoss twins; they weren’t pleased and sued in twentieth century fashion. He paid them off eventually with $65 million.

Within the last month, why did the current German Minister of Defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg forfeit his job? Simply, he copied large sections of his dissertation from other sources without recognizing them. It isn’t illegal to plagiarize in the strict sense of the law. You can’t go to jail for it; but you may get sued. You may lose your job.

In academic circles it is considered a moral offence. My son attended a university in Wisconsin where the students were taught to write at the bottom of every test and assignment that the work they were submitting was entirely their own under the premise that cheating actually allows the cheater to advance at the expense of fellow students. It is a fairness issue. The university felt that this honor code promoted trust and openness in the community.

AISC has an academic honesty policy that is signed every year by our students. They learn that IB candidates can lose their diploma if they plagiarize. They learn that cutting and pasting information that they find through Google searches into their essays and research assignments can be easily identified by a new program that the school now uses called Turnitin. They learn about the importance of citations.

I believe that to be able to craft your own ideas is a worthwhile pursuit even beyond the issues of morality and fairness, the pain of lawsuits and job loss. Reading about what others believe, recognizing your debt to them through citations, then thinking about what you believe and sharing these ideas with others may open collaborative pathways to innovative, even revolutionary ideas and creative works like The Tempest and Facebook. In the end, all ideas, yours and mine are just links in the chain.