The SurRural Librarian

As much as I enjoy Apple’s new Mighty Mouse, I will state unequivocally that it should not be foisted upon people of less than eight years of age. I have seen first hand the havoc that cute little scroll button and those squeezable sides can wreak. Helping a class of 1st graders try to navigate KidPix with those things was enough to make me pass out with exhaustion. (They scream every time the dashboard pops up, they think they broke the computer.)

I’ve had to move them all into the upper grades, and replace the lab ones with cheap old dual-click jobbers.
Hmm, I wonder if Apple had to pay to use that name.

This month I’ve been working with my 5th - 8th graders on their online research skills. Two misconceptions they have (and I’m sure they got these ideas from adults) is that every page ending in .edu is legitimate, and every .org is a non-profit.

After years of working in colleges where every undergraduate & staff member gets web space, I’ve seen plenty of ridiculous information on urls ending in .edu like this and this.

So imagine my horror to see this story:

Filter-Savvy Students Barred from Most of Web
As of October 20, students of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District headquartered in Palmer, Alaska, are no longer able to retrieve websites on classroom or media-center computers unless the site ends in a .gov or .edu domain name, the site is a database whose content is licensed by the district, or the district has approved an educator’s request that the site be unblocked.

Not only is it patently ridiculous to assume that every .edu site is educational, but it’s an insult to our students to filter the internet this way (or any way, frankly). It reminds me of the day I accidentally shut down internet access in a high school in China by typing in the url of a site I wanted to show the students, instead of using their pre-approved bookmarks. Hmm, now what’s the difference between the Chinese form of government and our own? I’ve forgotten.

In the continuing noise about Wikipedia versus Britannica (and others), I have yet to hear anyone mention the one thing that on first glance is the most glaring difference between them.

Today I was working with the JH kids online. At one point, one student was on Wikipedia and the student next to him was on Britannica. The one on Britannica started asking me questions about the honkin big, blinking, ugly adds. (They’re becoming quite critical of all the advertising they’re seeing online, it’s great).

Britannica is covered in cheesy flashing advertisement. There is none on Wikipedia.

Now, you might say there is some thinly veiled advertising inside Wikipedia, with some companies writing up their own products. But I’ve found they do a pretty good job of weeding those out and leaving more informative posts behind.

So, Wikipedia is free. And there are no adds. That’s two more big thumbs up in my book.

My favorite piece of snail mail this week came in the form of the annual conference mailing from the ACRL. It’s in Baltimore this year and the Keynote speakers include John Waters *and* Nina Totenberg. Who thought up that duo?

This is the first time I’ve been sad that I left college libraries, I just can’t see asking my school to pay for the trip. I think I might just apply for a scholarship.

The new Google for Educators site is up and running and there is some interesting reading. I am always happy to find a new source of lesson plans, that’s for sure. I do hope to see more content here soon though, it looks a little thin to me.

The most surprising thing is the Google Teacher Academy where you can actually GO - as in “get on a plane and go” - spend the day with Google. I never really thought about Google being any Where, as in the Getrude Stein meaning of there - where.

But huh, go figure. You can go chat with the real live Google folks and get some training in their fun toys. Then you can go back where you came from and deliver the message to your teacher-homies. My question is, do you get paid to promote Google’s products? Or is the a volunteer corporate shill opportunity? The site says they’re still working out some of the benefits. I hope one is cold, hard cash. They certainly seem to have some they could share.

This is a straight-up word processing lesson I thought up while walking the dog. It turned out really fun.

I noticed many kids didn’t know the difference between copying and cutting. I also noticed they needed practice pasting things in the right place (and only once), moving the cursor around and using keyboard shortcuts efficiently.

I made a web page filled with random words (I used a current classroom unit as the theme.) I made copies of the same page and handed them out to the students. They had to cut up the page - one word per piece of paper - and reorganize the words in any way they wanted onto a piece of colored paper. (Their teacher said it looked like a ransom note when they were done, and so was born a lesson name).

Then I told them to go to the web page, copy the words into a document and rearrange them by cutting and pasting, exactly replicating the version they created by hand. And they had to use keyboard shortcuts to do it.

(The kids love shortcuts and pick them up very quickly. Though many still use their mouse hand to type them, and I’m trying to get them more comfortable apple - xing with the left while mousing with the right. I’m forever going on about it, like it’s violin lessons.)

Having them cut the words out and glue them down again really helped them understand the difference between copying and cutting (and it gave us something to discuss as they cut up their strips of paper).

They thought it was a hoot, and some kids were very challenged by it, while others surprised at how good they were at it. A number of kids stayed in for the first few minutes of recess to finish (their idea, not mine) so I guess they didn’t hate it. All in all, pretty fun.

One of the grownups in my online research class is doing her research project on Quaker education and the use of technology, so in class the other night we did a little quick surfing to see if anything was out there.

We ran across this list of questions developed in a workshop at the Second International Congress on Quaker Education in 2000.

I don’t know too much about Quaker beliefs, but boy these questions are super.
I’m just weighing the pros and cons of a redesign for our school web site, and I’m finding these both clarifying and thought-provoking. Here are two great ones…

2.  Technology and Community
How can information technology enhance human interaction?  In what ways is technology bringing people together, keeping them apart?  In what ways is technology affecting the sense of community at the institution?

4.  Technology and Economics
How will the growing educational uses of information technology narrow or widen the gap between the quality of and access to educational experiences for those who are divided by wealth?  How will participants deal with the disparity of access to information technology within a technology-rich school situated within a poorer community?

link

Today the Junior High kids and I jumped into online research for their class sustainability project. Last year (my first) things didn’t go so well online. Today was so much better, I hope we can keep it up.

I needed to convince them to pay attention to their sources. So before unleashing them on the internet, I told them about the bogus, hateful martinlutherking dot org. (link to ALA description) It’s the first non-sponsored hit on Google, sadly, but that fact certainly helped me get my point across. They were shocked.

When I discussed with them the list of questions I wanted them to answer, they embraced the idea quickly, and really gave it a good try. Here are the questions I asked them to try and answer.

• Who is the Author or Authoring Organization?
• Do you recognize them as an authoritative source?
  Do another search if you need to.
• If you’re just using one part of the web site - what is the Home Page?
• What is the date written? (if available)
• Is there an “About” section? Or a Mission Statement?
• Contact Details - is there a physical address? An email address?

I explained that not being able to answer these questions didn’t necessarily mean they should avoid the site, but that they should talk to me and together we’d investigate further. Just these few questions got them to slow down and be much more guarded about what they were reading. It went really, very well.

BTW - that site is surely the first hit on Google because of its popularity as a teaching tool among librarians. It would be great if we all could stop linking to it from web pages. The more links, the better the ranking. It’s gross that we’re helping keep it on top.