Or, they could spend more time on gathering/creating top-notch content (what we really want from them) and then figure out some sort of an industry consortium model for a single, shared interface. That way we aren’t paying each of 10 or so companies for doing interface development work. This was especially obvious when five companies sat on a panel reporting on their progress towards creating a spell-check for their products. Do they each need to labor to reinvent the wheel? Furthermore, each time a company changes their interface to differentiate themselves from their competition, we end up having to re-teach yet another interface design instead of focusing on content.

As came from a discussion during that panel, the first step is probably for information providers to work together to identify common data elements for an XML schema. By having common elements (like “title,” “grade level,” etc.) it will be easier to integrate content with widgets and other third-party interfaces.

After that, it is probably time for the database vendors to make a tough decision. Are they going to be 21st century content providers or 21st century interface designers? I am not convinced that a single company will be able to tackle both of these massive tasks concurrently.

Following up on David’s comments about refocusing attention on the larger supported concept of reading as opposed to the individual container of the printed book, it is interesting to place this conversation in the larger stream of writing going on in the technology world right now.

Writing on the O’Reilly Radar blog (Tim O’Reilly of the technology books with animals on the cover, not the other one), Mark Sigal tackled reading yesterday in a post titled “Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)“.

Mark is not a librarian, nor is he in any way associated with education. He is, as his bio notes, “an eight-time entrepreneur who has spent the past 21 years seeding new ventures in the digital media, social networking, software-as-a-service, mobile device and embedded systems spaces.” So, how does this layperson view reading?

Well, first let’s establish that he loves books: “the book is the best, most universal, vessel for an improved learning culture/experience.” Pretty unambiguous. And yet, this is an article about reinventing the “book” to create a more effective and efficient method of delivering the book via updated methods we can now use in place of the 2,000 year old printing technology that has served us well lo these many years.

To make his case, Sigal references another recent article from Open Book Toronto, “The Future of Publishing“. In this interview of Sean Cranbury, he has more love to share for books. “I like things that occupy space, that have a certain heft, that hurt when people hit me with them, and no one has ever hit me with a web page. At least not in the physical sense.” He goes on…

“Books can challenge us with their thingness. The design and dimension of a book; the quality of paper stock; the floppiness, the arch-ness; the full-colour fold-out poster; the analog bleeds of ink into the fibers of a page of sloppy/endearing drawings by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions; the smell that they accumulate over time, especially when shelved in old bookstores owned by the wily and cantankerous — all of these things are irreplaceable. The web can imitate them, showcase them, allow us to edit, discuss and read their contents, or tell us about them in ludicrous detail from every point of view while linking the book across time and space to other destinations in other remote, insubstantial digital terrains.” [Cranbury]

The interviewer in this article, Hugh McGuire, shares Cranbury’s sentiments (and mine!):
“But as much as the sensual nature of books gives them great power, those things evoke sensory memories and they are secondary to — or the result of — having read and been moved by books in the past. I remember the smell of libraries because I was in libraries because of the writing in those books. The libraries, pages, print, typography all exist in order to allow me to get access to that writing. The sensual bits are all important, but they come second to the stuff that is in books.” [McGuire]

He sums this up in a statement mirroring what I have said in many blog posts, articles, impassioned conversations, and conference talks: “I love physical books because I love what is in them; I don’t love what is in books because of the physical objects.” [McGuire]

Without trying to put words in David’s mouth, I think that is what he was trying to point out in his earlier e-mail. David loves books, but he cannot easily access the printed vessel that libraries have endowed with this mystical fetishism. Is not the heart of a library the contents of the books and not the books themselves? While Cushing Academy might not have traveled the smoothest path in their transition to a digital collection, and while there is a risk of lost elements within the collection, is it not our duty to support their digital library in its fragile infancy when it’s need for help is the greatest?

In the larger world, or at least in the larger technology world of which we are becoming citizens whether or not we want to, the move towards digital publishing and digital books is pretty much being seen as inevitable. Print newspapers and magazines are on their death beds. Publishers, as seen in the Rebooting the Book article, are struggling with changes as well. This is not the death of books, newspapers, or magazines, however…just the death of the traditional printing model.

As McGuire notes in “The Future of Publishing”: “for all the talk about the death of books, could there ever have been a better time in the history of the universe to be a book lover? Just look at the wealth of information, writing, podcasts, resources of all kinds about books and writing available on the web now. There are fewer book review pages in newspapers, sure, but hundreds of booky bloggers writing about books, writing, literature, design, typography. I have 238 book blogs feeding into my Google Reader, there are about 500 posts a day, sometimes more, all about books. I could never read them all.” [McGuire]

Books will change, but they will survive. Albums did not disappear as vinyl records changed to plastic CDs and then to digital MP3s. Vinyl is going strong in niche stores, a smaller format for publishing, but one imbued with all the love and art that goes into a quality book today. Apple just released a new format for beautifully constructed digital albums in iTunes 9 launched earlier this month.

Libraries will survive. What is stored in our current printed books is too valuable to loose. And yet, we too must change. Cushing Academy took a brave step forward into the digital chaos that we are all facing. They should not be vilified, but rather honored. In truth, it is our fault that their steps included missteps. We were not there to lead them as we should have been. Where is the AASL Guidebook for the Digital Shift? Where is the AASL Handbook for Digital Reading? Where is the leadership?

If we are not willing to take on leadership in this critical issue, then shame on us for finger waggling after the fact.

1) Given the confusion between the very limited actual permissions granted and the much more open permissions that AASL thinks are provided for use of the standards, can you help clarify what the desired level of permission for educational use is?

2) Is AASL willing to allow educational, non-commercial use of the standards as a part of derivative works? I.e. can states or districts adopt and adapt the standards to meet local implementation requirements? Can teacher-librarians quote standards in lesson plans or include them in curriculum maps? Can the standards be aligned with other library activities?

3) What barriers would prevent AASL from releasing the standards under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license, a tested license that allows free use for personal and educational purposes while protecting the standards from commercial use?

4) If the need is to protect revenue (a critical element, I fully understand) would it be possible to provide the Creative Commons license as just a member benefit? Would this perhaps encourage members to stay members for a higher level of access to the standards while also encouraging districts or states to join as organizational members to gain access to use of the standards?

Let me put this a different way. Think of the AASL permissions for use as a web filter. Those permissions are filtering our access to the standards just like a web filter blocks us from sites. The problem here is that AASL is running what is called a “white list” filter; the most restrictive kind of web filter that checks each attempt at access against a list of allowed sites. What might work better is a “black list” filter that presumes that use is okay except for a select few instances that are denied.

Why is the white list so bad? Well, each new attempted use of the standards must be checked against a list. That places a huge chilling effect on innovation with the standards. If I want to use these great standards, I can only do those things that have been done before and are on the approved list. For example, the current permissions do not allow librarians to quote the standards in their lesson plans. While Alison Cline has assured us that oversight will be corrected, what about the next thing? If permission is added for librarians to “quote standards on their lesson plans”, they still won’t have permission to add them to curriculum maps. What if someone wants to have a standard of the month to share at faculty meetings? That is a new permission that would have to be added. What if a state or district wants to apply the standards and create a local adoption plan? Again, that is currently denied and would have to be added.

Seems to me that it would be much easier to presume that we, the member librarians who wrote the standards, can do what we wish to push forward implementation of the standards in a non-commercial way. Instead of freezing innovation by making librarians look over their shoulders for the copyright police as they attempt to navigate a restrictive list of allowed uses, open up the possibility of new uses. We can keep patching up the cracks in the permission list as they are identified, or we can instead change the policy and create a new vision for innovative use of the standards that respects members and encourages adoption.

Therefore, I am suggesting that the member-authored AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner be released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) License [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/]. This would mean that instead of having to check for permitted use, librarians could instead make use of the standards in non-commercial ways provided they meet some requirements. The use would have to be attributed back to AASL, it could not be commercial, and any resulting derivative work (like a state adoption plan or district implementation or handy admin guide) would have to be freely shared under the same license.

Doesn’t this meet the requirements of what we want to do? It protects the standards by preventing commercial use while allowing us, the members, free access to our standards.

One area of concern was identified, however. In the Standards in Action book, there is a great 2-page spread on the self-assessment strand that speaks directly to the student. One librarian asked if she could make copies of the pages to share with students. That led me, as an ethical user of information, to check on the copyright and permissions for the book.

What I found was quite chilling. Though these two pages present a letter to students, there is no permission given in the book to allow copying of those pages to share with students. I thought maybe there would be something online, so I checked the standards website to see if there was a PDF or other permissions statements there. Indeed there is a new Permissions for Use page for the standards, but what I found there actually made things even worse.

Under the new permissions for use, I actually had to tell librarians that they can no longer quote the standards that they are using within their lesson plan documents! Given the push to spread the standards and the whole Learning4Life initiative, this is surely in unintended outcome of AASL’s attempts to secure the standards. And yet, an over zealous locking down of the standards is unfortunately preventing most use.

As stated on the permissions page: “Permission must be requested for publishing or posting a portion of the text or the original document in a print or online publication or on a Web site as well as linking to the PDF.” [AASL] A lesson plan is a print or electronic document, therefore permission must be requested for quoting the standards as is usually done in a standard lesson plan format. Additionally, a lesson plan could be considered a derivative work under the current wording: “The learning standards document is considered the core content if the publication cannot be written without the use of the content of the learning standards document. Such usage requires a license agreement and may include a fee.”[AASL]

A fee for including the standards in each lesson plan?

Most librarians in the workshop assumed that the permission for educational use granted in the standards document covered use in lesson plans. I did as well…until I read the new permissions page. The permissions page limits educational use to only the pdf document itself. “The PDF versions available on the AASL Web site are intended for personal and educational use. Printing or forwarding copies for your own private use or to share with others for purely informational or educational purposes is acceptable.”[AASL] Any quoting of the document (i.e. listing standards on a lesson plan) would fall under the “Publishing or Posting Excerpts” section and would therefore require permission (and maybe a fee) for each lesson plan.

I love the new standards. I think they represent a great new way of looking at how we need to change learning and teaching for the 21st century. And yet, as much as I love the standards, the current permissions for use make it nearly impossible for me to share them or use them.

AASL, won’t you please consider freeing the standards for a bit more use? Perhaps a Creative Commons non-commerical license? Or maybe members can be granted additional license to use the standards as part of their member benefits?

Twitter hash tag #FreeTheStandards

[UPDATE 11:46am] Allison Cline, Deputy Executive Director of AASL, noted in an e-mail response that this is indeed an unintended wording and that AASL does not wish to fetter non-commercial use in any way. While this is great news, the fact remains that the current permission page does restrict use…even non-commercial use. There is no educational exception made for quoting standards, creating derivative works using the standards, or even linking to the standards.

While it would be nice to be able to attribute some sort of causal relationship between the title and the salary, I am pretty certain that it is much more correlative in its nature. California, for example, uses the teacher librarian title and also has some areas with very high costs of living that probably lead to higher salaries. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to speculate just a bit?

What is your title, and do you think it matters in how you are perceived (and paid)?

Being able to highlight and annotate pages is nothing new, but the ease with which this and other tasks is accomplished using the WebNotes extension for Firefox is quite refreshing. After a bit of playing around thanks to an invitation from ReadWriteWeb this morning, the most notable thing about WebNotes is their attention to small details. I must confess that my favorite feature so far - and the one that will probably lead to my leaving this installed for easy access on the occasions where it would be a very useful tool - is the ability to show or hide the extension/toolbar with a single click of the icon in the navigation toolbar area. Other sites (*cough* Diigo *cough*) just get to be so annoying with a toolbar that takes over after every update despite my constantly turning it off. I appreciate WebNotes giving me an easy way to access their toolbar during those times when it will be needed, and then easily hide it when I am not annotating.

So what else does the tool do? The standard mixture of sticky notes, highlighting, and organization are supplemented by a few ideas that make WebNotes especially nice for schools and libraries. After annotating an article or other content, a teacher could use WebNotes to create a permanent link to the marked-up page that could be shared with students. Or, students could use WebNotes accounts to annotate pages and share them with the teacher as an assessment of note taking skills (hint: highlighting the whole page is a fail).

Another way to share is the WebNotes daily report tool. Users can create PDF or HTML renditions of their sticky notes and highlights from around the web collected onto a single page. Since you can generate reports by folder, librarians could create a new folder for a reference session and then send a customer an annotated report at the end of the research help session.

So overall my first impression is very positive. This is a clean, simple application that does a small thing really well and offers some innovative new ways to interact with output for sharing. As noted above, I especially like the unobtrusive nature of the tool as it hangs out waiting for a time of need. I have to think that this is something that will be in my Firefox extension list for a while to come. If you would like to try it out, drop me a comment or send an e-mail. I have a number of invites to share for the currently restricted beta.

Part of embracing gaming in libraries is learning the lingo that accompanies online gaming and the less academic side of the Internet in general. Like LOLCats, pictures of cats with funny or snide annotations, the title to this post can be used as a measurement of your online credibility. So let us delve deeper…

• Pwn: This intentional misspelling of the word “own” probably grew from accidental typos in online games when players tried to tell others that they had been “owned” or beaten rather soundly. Now to pwn has come to be an insider way of claiming victory. Though one must be careful in verbalizing this too much (just like trying to say ROFL makes you look a bit daft), it can be pronounced as either “pone” so it rhymes with own, or sometimes as “pawn”. It is most often used as a verb - I pwned you - but can also refer to general actions as in “I brought the pwnage.” Getting pwned is not a good thing as it tends to make you look like a total noob.
• Fail: Not necessarily a gaming term, but rather the LOLCat derivation de’ jour on the Internets (see how I added an “s” to make this a sarcastic reference?). To fail is pretty self-descriptive, it is used as a rather obvious label to a picture or situation that represents a total breakdown of expectations. An example fail was identified here a few months back - note that not only does the sign presuppose that libraries must be quiet (FAIL!) it then proceeds to misspell quiet as quite (EPIC FAIL!). Please also note that fails are much funnier when not explained.
• FTW: FTW - For The Win - represents the opposite of fail. A win is a success, and often one realized in the face of hardship or overwhelming odds. Identifying that something is “for the win” is tantamount to saying that it is a good thing or a desirable outcome. At the conclusion of an especially successful reference interview, a student might proclaim “Librarians FTW” to acknowledge the high level of expertise that you brought to the search process. One must be careful int he use of the abbreviation for this in certain company, however, as it is also the accepted short form of f&%k the world for some subcultures.

You can learn more about the complex love-hate triangle that is pwn-fail-ftw by watching this very helpful documentary from Rocketboom. Until you are fully versed in the proper usage of these complex words, please be cautious in your attempts to represent. Nothing would be a bigger fail than to fail in using the word fail - talk about a self referential loop that would skyrocket to epic faildom almost instantly.

Once you are pwning fail for the win, however, you might consider showing off your newly discovered cred by labeling book displays with these terms. What books embody pwnage for instance? A great opportunity to highlight some books where the underdog comes out on top and wins in the end. Or, you could label Twilight as a SCARY VAMPIRE FAIL and offering a selection of more traditional horror books instead (though feel free to include a footnote on Twilight as Romance WIN). Have a bit of fun, acknowledge current Internet memes, and hopefully encourage a bit of reading as well. Just make sure that the usage is authentic!

Hi Colin,

While I loved the fleeting thought that CBS News might actually be interested in my little blog, that feeling quickly passed. If you actually read my blog before sending this out, then it might have occurred to you that I would more closely identify with the the real story behind the story you guys covered; The absolute mess of assessment in our educational system.

If students are cheating on tests, the easy answer is to blame the students for their lack of ethics. Given all the positive role models for ethical behavior children have these days (our government, wall street, etc.) then surely it is their fault that they are trying to find an easier way to endure the mind numbing regurgitation exercises we foist upon them on a regular basis.

Instead, it might be a bit more effective to talk about the real story here. Why are teachers using assessments on which students can cheat? Just like with The plagiarism on research papers, the problem is most often not in the copying, but in the failure of the initial assignment to present a rigorous and authentic assessment situation. Only the fault doesn’t lie entirely with the teachers. Though I came from being a classroom teacher, I am not sure I could still face the immense pressures teachers are under these days.

So are my questions When is CBS going to take a stand and look at the need for rigorous, authentic work in our classrooms? When is CBS going to stop focusing on cheating students and focus on cheating test companies and corrupt governmental departments that brought about the total failure of Reading First? When is CBS going to stop focusing on fear-mongering and instead join in the effort to bring about real change in the educational system?

My readers aren’t really in to re-postings of press releases without additional comments, but since I have taken the time to write you back in hopes that someone on your end is reading this I will also take the time to share the news about your story so my readers can construct their own conclusions regarding my interpretation of the story.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my questions.

Chris
__________________________________________________________________
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Small, Colin wrote:
Hi Christopher,

My name is Colin Small and I work for the CBS Evening News. A story aired this week that I think your blog readers might be interested in. Our science and technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg examined videos made by kids, for kids, teaching each other just what teacher’s don’t want them to learn: how to cheat.

Check it out the story here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/20/eveningnews/eyeontech/main4622153.shtml?tag=topStory;topStoryHeadline

And this is a blog post on the same subject: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/11/20/eveningnews/techtalk/entry4620394.shtml

Please let me know if there are any questions.

Thanks,

Colin

Objective 11: Introduce the learning standards and guidelines to the national educational and school administrator organizations that will have the most influence over their implementation.
As AASL works with the leadership of these national organizations, we can also work with local affiliates and members. Can you present at a local reading association meeting or a teachers’ association meeting about the new standards? The more local members we can touch, the better the larger discussions will go as the standards are introduced at state and national conferences.

Objective 12: Have 25 percent of each state’s school library media specialists attend a learning standards and guidelines session (national, regional, state, local) in the first two years that it is offered.
I hope AASL will consider creating presentation templates for official workshops that they will release freely for use by AASL members in local trainings. The challenge will be to reconcile the desire for control over the message with a need to spread knowledge about the new standards without a huge cost.