Helping Them To Get IT:
How Teachers and Library/Media Specialists Can Change The World

By Ferdi Serim & Janet Murray

The health of our society depends upon an expanded literacy for all citizens. Problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills, together with cultural awareness and information literacy are the new fundamentals of civic life. However, far too often, public discourse about educational improvement and technology suffers from a fixation on the "hard costs" (such as computers, networks, software, etc) while unthinkingly replicating the systemic dysfunctions that may inevitably thwart even the best supported efforts to improve learning. Without addressing the limitations imposed by the segregation of functions into discipline based categories, we can't get there from here.

However, we have a new opportunity to transcend this limitation. The publication of Information Power 2 by the American Association of School Librarians provides a common ground for everyone who works to help students learn. These objectives for students form the most compelling reason I've found for the use of education technology.

AASL: Information Literacy Standards
 

However, these opportunities for learning depend upon the quality of teamwork between people who don't usually talk to one another: Classroom Teachers, Library/Media Specialists, and Administrators. You may remember from your schooling the image of the Fire Triangle. Only when there is fuel, oxygen and heat can fire be sustained. Achieving technology's potential for learning requires a similar set of conditions: evaluated, organized content is the fuel (provided by Library /Media specialists; carefully planned instructional experiences is the oxygen (provided by classroom teachers); the commitment and energy to make things happen is the heat (provided by administrators). Fire fighters know that all it takes to extinguish a fire is to break the link between any three of these elements. We need to be fire builders who can spark the flame of lifelong learning, and reliably sustain these fires.

Building Bridges for IT Teams

We often have difficulty seeing ourselves as a community, given the specialization of skills required for any of us to do our jobs, as well as the increasing cacophony of contested resources, conflicted priorities and stereotyped characterizations that come between us and understanding. Yet we must build bridges of understanding between the islands of excellence that typify contemporary education disciplines.

Khalil Gibran's observation that humanity "is a bird which needs both wings to fly" suggested that we can't hope to progress as a species without the distinct and unique gifts both men and women give to life. When he said it, it was revolutionary and controversial. Today, learning communities must rely on both classroom teachers and library/media specialists, each of whom are the wings required in order to soar.

Instruction doesn't work in a vacuum any longer, and access to a torrent of information has paradoxically resulted in greater need of the trained information specialist to organize and present what's available in ways that promote meaning. Knowing what to do with that information, when and how to craft tasks which work developmentally at age appropriate ways represents a great part of the shift teachers must make from being "dispensers of facts" to "facilitators of knowledge building". Neither teachers nor library/media specialists can fully serve learners without the other, yet neither has been guided in their professional training to know how to work with these vital "other members" of their community.

Janet Murray is emphatic in her recommendations to the library/media community: "School library media specialists are ideally suited for the task. We have the training and experience to introduce new materials and make teachers comfortable using them. We have a vision of the technology-based future of information access and a mission to transform our image from stodgy curators of dusty books to lively teaching partners in a dynamic instructional technology center." – Janet Murray, MMS November 98

Mike Eisenberg and Carrie Lowe tell us that what's needed is "a true integration of information, library, and instructional technology services, systems, resources and roles in a unified Information & Technology Team." They elaborate, "The members of the Information & Technology Team can be found within your own school: technology teachers, library and information professionals, and key administrators. All you need to add is commitment, enthusiasm, and teamwork. A unified I&T Team is one where team members work together to provide services and resources to classroom teachers, students, and even parents. Schools with strong, committed I&T Teams invariably see great results in their schools, and not only in terms of what their students are learning. These collaborative programs enjoy excellent funding, the respect of their colleagues, and influence over administrative decisions." – Mike Eisenberg and Carrie Lowe, MMS March 99
 

Networked Knowing

Only by focusing on people can our current fascination with technology have any hope of positive result. Technology has no intrinsic purpose, it merely provides us with ways to act on our purposes. Networked knowing is more than the "Net" side of the equation; it has equally to do with new ways of working together. These ways of working are the most natural thing in the world, even though the introduction of computers, networks and other arcane devices makes us think otherwise. From inside our brains, to outside on a global scale, we are wired to be knowers, and we learn through connecting.

"We are a social species, so intelligent behavior is distributed, in that knowledge and skill specializations allow us to temporarily borrow the brains of others, and to reciprocate," says Robert Sylwester, a noted brain based education pioneer.

It's time for us to use networks to share our brains, as we begin to use Information Power 2 to guide our efforts. Both library/media specialists and teachers share a desire to create "collections with selection" and to ensure access to quality information has increasingly relied upon networks. In many smaller schools, the technical responsibilities tend to attach themselves to the most enthusiastic or visible users of technology, so many of us have come to know far more about the workings of networks than we ever wanted to! In larger districts, these functions have often become centralized, with the quality of partnership between the technical staff, the library/media staff and the instructional staff determining the quality of the program.

Khalil Gibran's observation that humanity "is a bird which needs both wings to fly" suggested that we can't hope to progress as a species without the distinct and unique gifts both men and women give to life. When he said it, it was revolutionary and controversial. Today, learning communities must rely on both classroom teachers and library/media specialists, each of whom are the wings required in order to soar.

Instruction doesn't work in a vacuum any longer, and the access to a torrent of information has paradoxically resulted in greater need of the trained information specialist to organize and present what's available in ways that promote meaning. Knowing what to do with that information, when and how to craft tasks which work developmentally at age appropriate ways represents a great part of the shift teachers must make from being "dispensers of facts" to "facilitators of knowledge building". Neither teachers nor library/media specialists can fully serve learners without the other, yet neither has been guided in their professional training to know how to work with these vital "other members" of their community.

The Online Innovation Institute (OII) is a results driven organization, which offers professional development workshops to help students and teachers improve classroom achievment. OII provides educators with a learning environment to support integrating the Internet into their individual teaching styles and offers a combination of online and onsite collaborations in which participants develop projects to use in their classrooms.

Helping large numbers of educators to become comfortable, confident and capable in using technology to enhance learning is one of our greatest professional challenges. Within OII, we've used networks to reinforce the face to face community building, enabling individuals to grow orders of magnitude faster than they'd thought possible. Our current model is called the Four Directions for Lifelong Learning, and incorporates the Information Literacy Standards, breaking them into four pairs of skills and the application of those skills (Communication & Collaboration, Exploration & Evaluation, Navigation & Research, Synthesis & Presentation).

MultiMedia Schools magazine, in conjunction with the Online Innovation Institute (OII), has arranged to provide a year long series of professional development materials to assist you in organizing workshops for your peers, parents or community so that everyone may understand and apply the potentials of the Internet for learning. Participants extend what they already know about teaching and learning by gaining skills required to participate productively in a networked world of knowledge building. Completing the online activities this agenda leads you through will help you and your peers make the best use of your community's investment in technology.

Origins of the Four Directions

"Among the People, a child's first Teaching is of the Four Great Powers of the Medicine Wheel. To the North is found Wisdom. The South is the place of Innocence and Trust. The West is the Looks-Within Place, which speaks to our introspective Nature. The East is the Place of Illumination, where we can see things clearly, far and wide....

"At birth, each of us is given a particular Beginning Place within these Four Great Directions. This Starting Place gives us our first way of perceiving things, which will then be our easiest and most natural way througout our lives. But any person who perceives from only one of these Four Great Directions will remain a partial man." - from The Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm

This imagery, which depicts life as an opportunity to come to terms with the lessons from each of these directions, has helped us make sense out of the potentials of the Internet. Our Four Directions are paired in skills and their purposeful application. In order to participate in online collaboration, teachers must acquire online communication skills. In order to evaluate online resources, we must develop a systematic method of exploration. To accomplish research on the Internet, we must learn to navigate skillfully. To share what we have learned, and make the learning our own, we must employ a method of inquiry which requires synthesis. We use these attributes to organize the processes we offer to individuals who work with us in the Online Innovation Institute, but they will work for anyone.

Ways to Use the Four Directions

As a reader of MultiMedia Schools magazine (or visitor to the MMS website), you may use the Four Directions free of charge, courtesy of the Online Innovation Institute. There are additional services that OII can provide on a cost recovery basis, should you desire them, as described at the OII website (http://oii.org).

Note: the pullout described below is included in each issue of MultiMedia Schools magazine, accessible online under Current Issue

Do It Yourself - With the pullout section at your side, go to your computer and follow the activities you'll find online. Be sure to post your questions and comments to the interactive sections, as this will be your means of linking with other educators who are working through the same Direction you are. Because the activities are self paced, you can schedule your "sessions" at your convenience during the 8 week period between MMS issues.

Form a Study Group with a few of your colleagues - Plan a convenient time to get together with a group of 3 to 5 of your peers on a weekly basis to discuss your findings from the results of the activities you've completed. Before long, each of you will have encountered resources, strategies and people who can help you meet local challenges with distributed expertise. The pullout provides a way of organizing your progress as you work through the steps. The online collaboration areas provide a way of "comparing notes" with other educators around the world who are completing similar activities during the 8 week period between MMS issues. OII can assist you in developing dedicated, closed listservs and discussion areas for your team, and obtain an online coach for your group if desired (costs vary based on size and duration...contact OII at http://oii.org)

Organize a series of workshops at your school - Options are only limited by your imagination. You might schedule a monthly PTO/PTA night to demonstrate the potentials and build skills among people you need to support your program. You might set up a series of workshops for School Board members. The pullout section provides all these people with a way of working through the activities between face to face sessions at home (or at publicly accessible Internet computers) and building community as they build skills. OII also works with districts to build their own capacity to design and conduct ongoing professional development activities on a contract basis

Conclusion

There has never been a better time for us to recreate learning "the way we always dreamed it could be." Although the task is daunting, indeed impossible for any individual or single discipline to achieve, by reaching across disciplines, and working toward a shared goal of information literacy, we may go beyond the paltry dreams we've settled for up until now. There is no more important goal than learning how to learn, and it will take all of us to succeed in making this a reality for students everywhere.
 

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