Aggregation or Aggravation: Teachers Managing Information

SUMMARY
The riches of libraries are celebrated, while the challenges of teachers' information overlaid is examined. Pattern recognition and data aggregation may help. A new learning commons site for educators is described that builds knowledge through the development and sharing of aggregated personal and group libraries and collections.


 A Quick Story

In the mid Eighties, I was head of library at a large Toronto secondary school. I was proud of my staff, collection, program, and facility.

One September morning, I welcomed a Grade 12 E.S.L. class for its first visit. As students took their seats in the teaching area, I noticed one young adult woman from Somalia who had stopped still at the entrance. She stared past me and slowly began to cry. I asked her what was wrong. She calmly said her tears were happy ones for she had never been in a library before. The books, the signs, and the computers had overwhelmed her. 

Then she said something I will never forget: "I think that all we need to know is here .. and just for me!" 

Coping with Information in the Age of ICT

How I wish that were true. Thirty years later, while I still believe that schools, libraries, and the Internet offer us the world, I am less convinced that the ready access to vast amounts of information has brought us greater knowledge, let alone wisdom.

Sure the apps get bigger (better?), the docs get longer (deeper?), and the networks get more social (more sociable?). However, recent work suggests to me that many teachers feel overwhelmed, not liberated, by the information/communication revolution. Your number of Twitter followers is a hollow gauge of your significance, while the clutter on your Facebook page is no guarantee you have meaningful friendships.

Teacher Expectations as Information Overload

When teachers consider their diverse daily expectations as information, their overload is evident. In the diagram at the right, imagine the information implied in each demand on a teacher's time.

The very technology that was meant to produce the paperless office, the threaded conversation, and the social network has, for many educators, become unmanageable. If we are honest, we tend to use three different strategies to cope:

1. Pretend it will all go away (it won't!). Blissfully forget the tweets, the blogs, the emails, the wikis, the events calendars piling up for weeks in your digital consciousness  — until the principal asks why you failed to read today's online newsletter.

2. Join everything and anything online (don't forget the updates!). For fear of missing that one vital piece of information you need or is needed from you, blog away into the middle of the night and check your cell phone at mealtimes. You'll bookmark more and read less.

3. Manage information (no one said change would be easy!). Treat information as if it were the time required to understand it. Invest the time in sensible, safe, economical, and deep systems to find, create, relate, and share information for professional fulfillment.

Can the busy teacher use new technologies better to manage time and resources?

Aggregation not Aggravation
Marshall McLuhan pointed out that as information accelerates, pattern recognition is "one of the particular new awarenesses of our time" which we develop to make sense of the overload.

So here is my question: If teachers are agents of meaning, how can they best develop ways to recognize patterns in information and make meaning for themselves and their learners.

I think the secret is to harness pattern recognition and to aggregate data before getting aggravated by it. So I have been working with a skilled group of consultants to develop an online tool that will help teachers manage information more effectively for learning and teaching.

Using the idea of the learning commons in general, and testing the site with the teacher-librarian community in particular, the information needs of educators has been analyzed and a social network-like environment created.

The site helps teachers, teacher-librarians, administrators, and support personnel to aggregate disparate resources (links, docs, images, media etc.) into meaningful relationships in what are simply called libraries ... mine, yours, ours.

All resources can be shared within groups that actively participate in wikis, blogs, discussion, etc to extend and build knowledge.

A Way to Build Knowledge
Individuals and groups then can build collections for themselves and their groups. A collection can be assembled from library information found by a colleague or patterns of use to be particularly effective for a particular purpose. Sharing the information in collections builds knowledge.

This lcommons environment provides a growing number of gadgets which will allow teachers not only to create their lesson plan by following a supplied template of curriculum design, but also to create the pattern/template themselves.

Such customization motivates (comforts?) users to embrace change in terms of their own recognizable patterns. It also helps the busy teacher fit resources to the requirements of a particular jurisdiction.

However, only when such a network develops a critical mass of users, can efficiencies of scale lessen workload for all who participate.

An Invitation to Join

Any teacher, teacher-librarian, education administrator or support staff around the world may join at http://lcommons.org. So

... if you are a teacher renewing your portfolio of activities to match curriculum standards

... if you are a teacher-librarian creating a resource library to support a school-wide initiative

... if you are a principal promoting a school blog or wiki with parents and the community

... if you are an instructional leader organizing events and a discussion group, with simultaneous access to shared resources

then http://lcommons.org might be your new pattern.


Try aggregation, not aggravation.