The Guardian: “The Secret Life of a Librarian”

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

I enjoyed this anonymous essay on public libraries in the Guardian (UK). The closure of libraries in the UK is a growing reality, whereas that has not been the case here (knock on wood) but there are several issues that resonate with what I see across the library landscape. Predominant among those is the question of looking outward versus inward (a la Harwood and other environmental scan projects) and whether libraries are truly meeting their missions of serving all or merely the middle class.

There’s a nice anecdote about odd things used as bookmarks, but you’ll have to click through to the full article to find that yourself.

Armed with my diploma and a burning social conscience, I set out to change the world of public libraries. Nearly 40 years on I have made the smallest of dents in its battleship armour. But on the way I have made met some amazing people.

My bosses have mostly been of the keep-your-head-down-and-don’t-rock-the-boat variety. Colleagues have ranged from shrinking violets to strident activists who share my passion for social change …

The only regret I have about my long career in public libraries is that I have not been able to convince more librarians that they should be less book-focused and more people-focused; that they should look outward to the community rather than inward to the library; that they should get rid of desks and counters and do more active roving inside the library and outside in the community; that they should put less emphasis on the excellence of the collection and more on providing books that people actually want to read; and, most important of all, that libraries should be community-led and based on the needs of the public they serve.

Nonetheless, this critical viagra tablet in india circumstance has a host of other spam trigger words. Reason behind male erectile dysfunction:The reason behind the impotency are smoking, best buy on cialis alcohol, unhealthy lifestyle, stress, depression and anxiety. These foods not only cause life threatening disease viagra viagra sildenafil but also disorders which can affect your sex life. Men suffering from erectile dysfunction are always under the risk of performing below average during sexual intercourse. order uk viagra What I dislike most about the profession is its insistence on standards of excellence and a rule-bound culture which tends to exclude those for whom public libraries were founded in the first place – the deserving poor and, indeed, the undeserving poor as well. For it is a fact that libraries are used most by those who need them the least (the middle class) and used the least by those who need them the most (the working class).

The job has not changed fundamentally from when I started out. Libraries have been modernised through technology but their underlying strategies, structures, systems and culture remain the same. We have a plethora of rules and regulations, and the part of my job I dread the most is having to ban someone from the library, because usually they come from the section of society that needs libraries the most. But this is more than balanced out by the many pleasures of the job, which include helping borrowers to improve the quality of their lives and meet their needs – whether that is for books and information, or helping them to find a job or a roof over their head … While we cannot demonstrate a direct link, every librarian knows that we are an important ingredient of the glue that sticks communities together.

 

 

 

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ESC 20

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

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Book Recommendation: Innocent Experiments by Rebecca Onion

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

Remember this clip from the White House Science Faire of President Obama helping 8th grader Joey Hudy shoot off a marshmallow cannon he made with the help of the folks at Home Depot? So did reporter and author Rebecca Onion, who mused about what this revived focus in informal science work meant.

She set forth to study the informal science movement over the past 100 years in a series of vignettes collected in the newly-released volume innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States (University of North Carolina Press | Amazon | Project Muse (subscription required) | Google Books Preview ).

 

 

As shown in the the table of contents below, her research takes her on remarkable journey.

 

Chapter 1 takes her to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum between the World Wars, with descriptions of children (mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly male) learning classification and tree identification but ultimately leading to a group of boys running the museum’s wireless system.

 

Chapter 2 studies the rise of chemistry kits and the ways in which the “naughty” behaviors of those who used them (again, mostly white, middle class, and male) began to be seen not as mischievous but as scientific. Chapter 3 looks at the movement to identify and showcase scientific talent (again, with males as key figures and female budding scientists as those guided by males, dating male contestants, or visiting the Hope Diamond), with a desire to find prospective scientists who also met society’s ideals for sociability. Oh, and most of them, just to be clear, were mostly male, mostly white, and mostly middle-class. See the pattern?

Chapter 4 delves into the role of science fiction, particularly the worlds created by Robert Heinlein. (Teachers and librarians, beware: he’s got harsh words for both of these traditionally female-dominated professions, though some of his harshest words were reserved for his editor — and Newbery Honor awardee Alice Dalgleish).

Chapter 5 looks at the early years of San Francisco’s Exploratorium and wonders aloud if, just as with the male chemistry kits, the movement to learn science through exploration is more about play than about scientific acquisition. Thankfully, gender plays less of a role here, but the pedigree of the Exploratorium’s founder makes for a good jeopardy question, as it is none other than the brother of Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project.

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Screenshot of Table of Contents of Innocent Experiments

I’ve been recommending this book to everyone I see because it raises some crucial and critical questions about the role of informal, out-of-school science in the development of the scientific workforce and in the development of science skills. Here are some of the many questions that my team and I found ourselves asking as we read:

  1. For decades, there has been an intent to develop more scientists through interventions like museums, science competitions, and even science fiction. Has it worked? To what extent?
  2. What is the difference between “cool” science (think of the hair-raising Van de Graff generators or the Diet Coke and Mentos explosions at a Maker Faire) and the day-to-day work of scientists? Does interest in “cool” lead to professional engagement? What is the missing piece there?
  3. What pieces need to be in place in order for children to not only experience science but develop meaningful/rigorous scientific understanding?
  4. Over and over again, there are events in American history that are that generation’s Sputnik. (Think, for example of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech, in which he referred to the need for more research and development by calling it “our generation’s Sputnik moment“) Do we succeed in rising to the challenge today? Historically?
  5. Today’s maker movement has been accused of catering to an audience that is primarily male, well-educated, and middle class, the same population Ms. Onion refers to repeatedly in movements of the past. How do we get past this as the primary audience, 100 years later?
  6. Do we have the right players working with young people to develop scientific thinking, understanding, processing, and reasoning? How would we know that we were successful in this way?
  7. One of the implicit themes of Ms. Onion’s book is that perhaps what we’ve labeled as informal or out-of-school science is actually play. Yet politicians and decision-makers are often far more committed to spending money on science/STEM/STEAM/STREAM/STREAMS/HAMSTER (!!) than on play. Should we try to change the narrative? What are the risks/benefits of doing so?

All in all, this has been one of the STEM/maker books I’ve read lately that has challenged my thinking the most. I highly recommend it. You can get started reading it below, as much of the first chapter is available via Google Books.

Anyone else read it?

[Cross-posted at MakerBridge and Making in Michigan Libraries]

 

 

Posted in Makerspaces/Hackerspaces, Michigan Makers, STEM | Comments Off on Book Recommendation: Innocent Experiments by Rebecca Onion

Booklist Makerspace Webinar

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

[decorative] image with name and date of webinar

Hi! Today is the Booklist webinar on Making in Early Elementary Grades! These links may be helpful:

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Quotables: Barack Obama on science, technology, and American ideas

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

Barack Obama is guest-editing this month’s Wired. Gotta say I will miss a president who can name-drop Grace Hopper. From his editorial:

[W]hat really grabbed me about the film [The Martian] is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem.

I’m a guy who grew up watching Star Trek … [w]hat I loved about it was its optimism, the fundamental belief at its core that the people on this planet, for all our varied backgrounds and outward differ­ences, could come together to build a better tomorrow…

I believe we can work together to do big things that raise the fortunes of people here at home and all over the world…

Let’s start with the big picture. By almost every measure, this country is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or even eight years ago. Leave aside the sepia tones of the 1950s, a time when women, minorities, and ­people with disabilities were shut out of huge parts of American life. Just since 1983, when I finished college, things like crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and poverty rates are all down. Life expectancy is up. The share of Americans with a college education is up too. Tens of mil­lions of Americans recently gained the security of health insurance. Blacks and Latinos have risen up the ranks to lead our businesses and communities. Women are a larger part of our workforce and are earning more money. Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age…

This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-­looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges. Science is how we were able to combat acid rain and the AIDS epidemic. Technology is what allowed us to communicate across oceans and empathize with one another when a wall came down in Berlin or a TV personality came out. Without Norman Borlaug’s wheat, we could not feed the world’s hungry. Without Grace Hopper’s code, we might still be analyzing data with pencil and paper.

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Because the truth is, while we’ve made great progress, there’s no shortage of challenges ahead: Climate change. Economic inequality. Cybersecurity. Terrorism and gun violence. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ­antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Just as in the past, to clear these hurdles we’re going to need everyone—policy makers and commu­nity leaders, teachers and workers and grassroots activists, presidents and soon-to-be-former presidents … We need researchers and academics and engineers; programmers, surgeons, and botanists. And most important, we need not only the folks at MIT or Stanford or the NIH but also the mom in West Virginia tinkering with a 3-D printer, the girl on the South Side of Chicago learning to code, the dreamer in San Antonio seeking investors for his new app, the dad in North Dakota learning new skills so he can help lead the green revolution.

That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody. That means creating not just a quicker way to deliver takeout downtown but also a system that distributes excess produce to communities where too many kids go to bed hungry. Not just inventing a service that fills your car with gas but also creating cars that don’t need fossil fuels at all. Not just making our social networks more fun for sharing memes but also harnessing their power to counter terrorist ideologies and online hate speech.

The point is, we need today’s big thinkers thinking big. Think like you did when you were watching Star Trek or Star Wars or Inspector Gadget…

We must continue to nurture our children’s curiosity. We must keep funding scientific, technological, and medical research. And above all, we must embrace that quintes­sentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the bound­aries of what’s possible. If we do, I’m hopeful that tomorrow’s Americans will be able to look back at what we did—the diseases we conquered, the social problems we solved, the planet we protected for them—and when they see all that, they’ll plainly see that theirs is the best time to be alive. And then they’ll take a page from our book and write the next great chapter in our American story, emboldened to keep going where no one has gone before.

Gosh, we’ll miss his optimism!

Posted in Quotables | Comments Off on Quotables: Barack Obama on science, technology, and American ideas

Things Learned On The Road This Summer, Part II

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

Blank Cover for Made Magazine

Last month, I wrote about some of the things we had learned traveling the state with maker professional development.

This month, I’d like to focus in on one finding in particular: the relative lack of awareness of Make magazine and the ensuing implications in rural and underserved communities.

Partway through the summer, we changed our summative activity that the end of the three-day workshop. Our colleague Amber created a blank parody cover of Make magazine called Made, and we invited participants to imagine that Made was going to create a special issue focused solely on their makerspace. They were asked to provide the cover headlines that would relate to the vision they had worked on during the workshop.

And that’s where things got interesting. Overwhelmingly, only one or two attendees had ever heard of Make magazine.

So what are the implications of this? What does making look like when the flagship publication isn’t a reference point?

Our observations are that without that supposedly canonical reference point, making in libraries and K-12 schools (our two primary audiences) tends to be:

  • the STEM tinkering model of commercial kits, not raw materials put to work to create a personal vision
  • more focus on soft skills
  • less focus on drones and more integration of stereotypically female activities like sewing, quilting, and knitting
  • more focused on low-cost activities that can scale up for groups rather than individual activities that cost $50+
  • less focused on Arduino and professional-grade coding

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Do you notice anything similar in your space?

Cross-posted from the MakerBridge blog

Posted in Arduino, IMLS Grant: Making in Michigan Libraries, Makerspaces/Hackerspaces | Comments Off on Things Learned On The Road This Summer, Part II

National Archives animated GIFs from Giphy

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

What’s not to like about this, from a set of animated GIFs made from National Archives footage?

h/t Kathy Ishizuka, SLJ Newsletter
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Quotable: Unplugging

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

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Booklist Webinar on Early Elementary Making Coming 10/20!

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

[decorative] image with name and date of webinarPlease join me for a free Booklist webinar, sponsored by Cherry Lake Publishing, on Thursday, October 20, 2016, at 2pm Eastern / 1pm Central.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about:
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Primary-aged children are natural makers. They couple their imaginations with the physical and digital worlds as they poke, prod, push, pull, pixelate, and produce.  Whether using digital tools, circuits, robots, or recyclables, many of the core questions are the same: What is our role as facilitators of maker mindset and purposeful exploration? How do we set up spaces that welcome creative interactions with materials and peers? In celebration of the launch of the Makers as Innovators Junior series for K-2 students, Cherry Lake Publishing invites you to engage with these concepts and build or refine your vision for playful thinking. Presented by series editor and University of Michigan School of Information faculty member Kristin Fontichiaro and moderated by Books for Youth editor Dan Kraus.

You can register here. If you cannot watch the webinar live, an archive link will be sent to you a few days after the live event.

Posted in 3D Printing, Makerspaces/Hackerspaces, Professional Development, Public Libraries, School Libraries, Webinars | Comments Off on Booklist Webinar on Early Elementary Making Coming 10/20!

Hello, AASLH!

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Kristin Fontichiaro

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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Hello, AASLH!