Northwest Education: Nexus of Knowledge: the School Library in the 21st Century
Fall 2003
Paula Spooner remembers a day 20-some years ago when she was a library assistant at Oregon Episcopal School. She happened to overhear a casual conversation among teachers about whether computers would be useful at this high-achieving private school nestled in Portland's West Hills. "What about these things—will they have any purpose here?" someone asked.
Sitting beside a gleaming blue iMac in today's computer-filled OES library, Spooner smiles wryly at the recollection. In the two decades since she listened in on that conversation, librarians like her have been at the eye of the technological hurricane, many of them playing leading roles in this whirlwind of change in tools, research skills, teaching methods, vocabulary—indeed, in the very way we as a society think about the learning process. When Spooner was doing graduate work in school librarianship in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet was a term she never even heard. Now, it's an indispensable tool of the librarian's trade.
The pace of change, however, was dizzying and often disorienting. "Even five years ago," recalls Spooner, now the middle school librarian at OES, "we were pulling out our hair, saying, 'Just stop for two years! Don't change the way my word processor works, don't change my access. I just want everything to stay the same.'"
While the tools have changed at warp speed, the mission has remained the same. School librarians continue to do what they have always done best: Manage library resources and give students the skills to find, organize, use, and share information. They've always been the media specialists, overseeing the school's filmstrips, projectors, screens, and videos. But with the advent of the World Wide Web, those clunky, usually outdated 16mm films have been banished to the storeroom, replaced by up-to-the-minute electronic words, pictures, and sounds spanning the planet.
A lot of librarians tell about an "aha!" moment when the enormous potential of digital technology became clear to them. Nikki Maxwell, librarian at Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon, had such a revelatory flash one spring day in 1996. "I was sitting in the library surrounded by stacks of books and other sources I wanted to share with teachers and students without being the proverbial pain in the neck," Maxwell recounts. "I was always interrupting and demanding their time. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that a library Web page could make this information available to everyone, at any time. Making that '24-seven' connection, knowing the Web page would be there consistently and continuously and could be updated, was, for me, the revolution."
For Nora Martin, the moment came five years ago just after beginning her job as librarian at Gallatin Gateway School, a small K-8 school in a rural area near Bozeman, Montana. Browsing her new domain—a collection of tomes mostly donated from a Catholic school that had closed nearly 30 years before—she opened a science book and her eyes fell on the quaint sentence, "Someday, man will go to the moon."
"It was then I began to understand what a difference the Internet was going to make in education," says Martin, the author of several children's books set in the Northwest, including A Perfect Snow and The Eagle's Shadow. "These young people simply must have access to the huge world out there—to the NASA Internet site, for example, which has all the information their books don't have yet—or they will be shut out. Computers are really handy tools for rural kids."
As Internet technology merges into the school environment and students set out to explore cyberspace, they need the skills to evaluate and make judgments about what they find there: how to distinguish government and education Web sites from commercial ones. How to identify information that is appropriate for their purpose. How to read the clues to know the difference between quality data and crackpot come-ons.
"As our sixth-graders do Internet research on Canada for their school trip, we remind them to take a good look at the home page to see who is responsible for the Web site," says Spooner. "How recently was it updated? Have they checked their facts? Does it have a bias?"
Was the site, for example, created by another school child, a scientist, a fringe group, a for-profit business? A church? A nonprofit foundation? A think tank? Is it nonpartisan, or does it promote a particular agenda?
"These questions need to be emphasized with students again and again, from different angles, in different ways," Spooner insists.
Spooner, who sees the middle school years as a pivotal time when students are poised to become thoughtful researchers, is in the process of developing a rubric that sixth-graders can personalize to score search results on the Internet. Using students' own lingo—for example "awesome, good enough, just works, no-go"—they will rate the Web site on variables such as source authority, appeal to kids, variety and quality of information, and appropriateness for the project. "We need to emphasize that when you find these sources so easily, you must take a closer look before you're sure you've got what you need," says Spooner.
Martin, the sole librarian at a 148-student school in a poor district, uses a broad approach to teach media literacy skills, incorporating traditional print media, grocery-store tabloids, and even urban myths. "Kids love creepy stories and the creepier the better!" says Martin. "I have them read five urban myths on an Internet site—like the one about the woman who found spiders hatching in her big hairdo—and we dissect those stories. We talk about context and the clues that help someone decide if the stories are true. We relate this to the Internet, where the truth is also pretty hard to discern at times."
Martin emphasizes that learners need a sequential pattern to follow in order to evaluate new information and fit it into their basic foundation of knowledge.
As her students mature, she guides them toward actual sources that scientists use and talks about how those researchers distinguish good information from poor. For example, she has students examine online NASA satellite images to learn how to interpret infrared photographs taken from spacecraft. Another unit focuses on truth in advertising. After examining Web sites promoting products like sneakers and jeans, her students gain a healthy skepticism as consumers.
These kinds of exercises, Martin says, help kids "make the transition from simply seeing information on the Internet or in the newspaper to incorporating it into their own knowledge base and using it in an honest and indepth manner in their personal work. I don't think the middle schoolers have completely mastered this skill, but they do begin to grasp it."
Martin's students leave middle school with a solid understanding of how to use and assess Internet sites. "I've had quite a few students come back to tell me that their early lessons in evaluating information on the Web have really helped them in their high school classes," she reports.
Still, the computer is simply one more research tool. "Sometimes," says Spooner, "I feel like saying to my students, 'There is more to life than Google.' I remind them that while it may be easy to get a hit when they type in key terms, they won't always get the information they need for their project. That's why, often, by the time a class is a half-hour into research, two-thirds of the students have migrated to books."
Kay Evey, librarian at Tukwila Elementary School near Seattle, starts second-graders on the Internet by tailoring Web sites to specific classroom projects. "For a unit on the seashore, for example, I might develop a Web page with lots of graphics that guides the children to appropriate sites we want them to explore," she says. "It's a controlled Web."
Tukwila third-graders are allowed to use the databases that are on Evey's library resources page—encyclopedias, magazines, and books—and search engines such as KidsClick!, Yahooligans!, Ask Jeeves, Searching With Kids, TekMom, Earthlink Kids, and AOL@School. "If students still have trouble finding something, I search the Internet and put links on the resources page for them," says Evey, who chairs the Elementary Level Committee of the Washington Library Media Association. "I call it controlled Internet searching, which means I do a lot of weeding to eliminate those sites that are too adult or inappropriate. Children at that age will see a pop-up message that says, "You're a winner!" and ask to call the number."
By fifth grade, Evey's students have learned how to use Google, AltaVista, and other adult search engines. But she works alongside them to make sure they know how to use key words and search strategies effectively. "I tell them they waste as much time with a million hits as they do with none."
In an age of bar-coded books, digitized catalogs, and automated circulation systems, librarians have more time not only to teach and give more direct support to students, but also to collaborate with classroom teachers. For Maxwell, a progression of teamwork opportunities began with the "aha" moment that resulted in her first Web page back in 1996. Soon after, Churchill was included in a pilot project of the Oregon School Library Information System (OSLIS) that provided six middle and secondary schools in Oregon with a set of customized online databases called InfoTrac. Developed by library media specialists to train students and teachers in Internet research, OSLIS also offered tutorials focused on collaboration between classroom teachers and librarians. "The most immediate difference both the teachers and I noticed was that those students who complained they could find nothing relevant for a report or project disappeared," says Maxwell.
OSLIS, a consortium of educational institutions, continues to provide Oregon schools with free access to high-quality Internet information along with media literacy curricula, including "how-to" Web sites for elementary and secondary students, with parallel teacher resources.
Several years later, Maxwell stumbled across an Internet site that shed new light on how librarians can work with teachers to develop research skills at any grade level. WebQuest, developed by Bernie Dodge, a professor of education technology at San Diego State University, provides a paradigm for an interactive Web page tailored to a particular classroom project. In a guided process that Dodge calls scaffolding, students are trained in how to make sense of new information using problem solving, judgment, analysis, and synthesis.
Using the WebQuest model, Maxwell partnered with the school's health teacher to create "Facts and Feuds," a Web page for a required ninth-grade class called Lancer Skills. Students take a stand on a controversial medical or social issue such as physician-assisted suicide or drug testing for athletes, develop three arguments to defend their position using print and Web resources, and present a final paper and a speech to the class.
Maxwell's Web site breaks the assignment down into task, process, issues, and evaluation, and provides students with links to books in the school library, to online magazine and newspaper articles, and to Web sites. From there, the students are left to explore and use critical thinking skills to arrive at their final product. "Ideally, the task is a scaled-down version of something that adults do on the job, outside school walls," Dodge notes on his Web site.
The love of reading has not been lost in the scramble to groom good citizens of the networked world. Librarians are still devoted to instilling in kids the delicious thrill of finding a really good book—a thrill that lasts for a lifetime.
"I don't feel as if I've solved the question of how to integrate technology with a love of reading as much as I'd like," says Martin, winner of the 2003 Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award for her latest book, Flight of the Fisherbird. One strategy she employs is to rotate information literacy units, enforced browsing times, and "intense reading, reading, reading," she says.
"To teach a love of books, I use a 'visceral' approach that is very different from when I'm teaching technology skills. We read passages out loud and talk about how the stories make us feel and things like that. I try to convey the joy of words and language that books have always represented for me."
Maxwell agrees that reading for enjoyment tends to get lost in the shuffle of technology. "Kids are busy, too, and it's hard for them to give priority to sitting down with a book," she says. "So we're trying a number of things, like setting up online book reviews, where kids can share information about books they've read."
At her middle school library, Spooner conveys her passion for books by encouraging students to define themselves as readers with unique characteristics. "We talk about what a 'good book for me' looks like," she explains. "Students describe the genres, authors, and characters they love, and talk about how they find good books, where they like to read, and what adults in their lives have done to encourage them to read."
Although getting kids to curl up with books remains a cherished value among school librarians, their role in the realm of teaching and learning has expanded and deepened greatly in the digital age.
"I spent my youth in dusty stacks, and to the extent that anyone is nostalgic for their youth, I would long for that," says Spooner. "But the Internet is an embarrassment of riches that represents an amazing challenge to us to use it well. Now, what we as information specialists can do for students is help them become more sophisticated and skillful in how they sift and sort to find the best information, digital or print."
For Martin, the enduring challenge as an educator is to impart a thirst for knowledge to students, by whatever means. "Whether we're reading out loud or teaching how to use the Internet, I think it's important to give young people that sense of joy that comes from learning—recognizing learning and utilizing it. Computers are just one more tool."
I moved from the classroom to the school library media center in the late 1980s, shortly after the introduction of the first CD-ROM database at an American Library Association convention. At that time, most instructional software was stored on floppy diskettes, which had a maximum storage capacity of 800 kilobytes of information. The CD-ROM, on the other hand, housed the unheard-of quantity of 650 megabytes.
Those early CD-ROMs stored items such as Grolier's Encyclopedia and Wilson's Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature. It was text only—no graphics or other multimedia elements. Still, what a difference! Students seemed drawn to computers as if they were magnets. Keywords helped them find information quickly and easily.
We school library media specialists, however, had other concerns. First, we had to find funds for the $2,000 CD-ROM workstations—not to mention the electrical outlets to plug them into (in those days, outlets were scarce in both classrooms and libraries). By the early 1990s, school architects were at last planning adequate numbers of electrical outlets for both new construction and renovations. Meanwhile, CD-ROM databases and encyclopedias were becoming more sophisticated and started to include multimedia elements. Multiple-user licenses arrived—an option that allowed students in both libraries and classrooms to simultaneously access the CD-ROM's contents.
The Internet entered the picture in the early1990s. The early Internet access tools, Telnet and Gopher, quickly gave way to Mosaic, a precursor of Netscape, for navigating the Net. With the advent of these Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), the number of Web sites started growing exponentially. Librarians then faced a new challenge: how to teach students that just because information is on the Internet doesn't make it true. So we added Web site evaluation to our information literacy skills repertoire.
At about this point, technology's impact on school library reference collections was clearly illustrated to me. In the fall of 1995, I invited Jan Anderson, the librarian at Missoula's newly opened Chief Charlo Elementary School, to speak to the students in my reference class at the University of Montana. Anderson showed up with her entire print reference section on a single dolly. These three cartons of books—plus a World Book Encyclopedia that she didn't bring—were all she needed because so much of her reference collection was by then on CD-ROM, freeing up her book budget and shelf space for other types of print materials.
As we moved toward the turn of the century, CD-ROM databases and encyclopedias began shifting to the Web, allowing for daily updates and student access not only from the library but also from the classroom or from home.
Will computers replace books? I sincerely hope not. But I do believe that we should have the best reference tools available in our school library media centers. Computers, for the foreseeable future anyway, seem to be providing those tools.
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