Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts

The Techno-Savvy Family 2012

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SUMMARY
Does technology fragment family life, encouraging family members to prefer private screen gazing to conversation, physical play, and community involvement? A provincial statutory holiday prompts the author to question whether family members are using technology to deepen their lives together.

Family Day

In Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, we have just enjoyed a statutory holiday, meant to support families. As the Ontario Government states:
Generally speaking, most employees will get a day off with pay enabling them to spend time with their family and loved ones. It will also give employees a day off between New Year’s Day and Easter, which is a long period of time in which people need a rest.
I see the day as a chance to get out with family members and friends and celebrate our shared life together. Most malls were closed, along with banks, supermarkets, and libraries. However, on such a warm day, there seemed relatively few people walking and playing outside. Where was everyone?

I suspect the usual culprits: television, video games, email, and social media. I'm probably exaggerating but I wonder if we are losing the arts of living in gaining the smarts of computing.

Family Snapshot

Don't misunderstand me. I treasure my own tech life and see the benefits of the "interweb" for my extended family. My wife has a new iPodTouch to swiftly access her favourite BBC news, music, and readings. My daughter carefully researches university grants online, while my son and his friend break new ground in techno-rap. My brothers and their wives are web-savvy genealogists, photographers, and inventors. We keep in touch with family in the UK via email. My mother at 87 has embraced the iPad and now reads again with big print and well-lit screens.

But are we closer as a family simply because as individuals we are privately wired to the web? Connectivity is not synonymous with connectedness. As parents, we are now promoting the sustained telephone conversation over the truncated email or text. This weekend's board games of Scrabble and The London Game engaged us more deeply in family togetherness than watching a movie on TV would have done.

Family Connections

My ironic illustration above frames a real hope for families today. I would not turn back the clock—from digital to analog—to the good old (stereotypic) days. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. But the holiday caused me to ask if families are finding fruitful ways to harness technology to really connect: to talk more, explore the natural world, play creatively, and be neighbourly. Sometimes this means turning off, not tuning in!

We address the problems of using technology in schools often enough but fail to question our growing absorption in virtual pursuits throughout a typical family day. Parents complain that it is difficult to find time to eat together, yet no one wants to miss the latest text or tweet. I fear more family time is spent discussing the latest gadget than the effects of technology on our life together. I also worry that we continue to substitute passive consuming for active living. Are we, to borrow Neil Postman's warning about television technology, "amusing ourselves to death" with the latest technology?

How many of us turn off the computer on holidays? How many could? Most kids don't even see this as a problem. And no amount of free time, holiday or not, seems long enough to encourage important reflection about how technology is changing contemporary family life.

Can we sustain a strong family life in the Information Age, a life that should be marked by balance, time, and awareness? These old virtues could be good criteria to apply to our home use of technology.
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Learning Commons Episode 1: Timeless Ideas in Ontario and Nineveh

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SUMMARY
Examination of the concept of the learning commons begins with reference to Together for Learning from the OSLA. The ancient library at Nineveh provides a context for such concepts as organizing knowledge for power and civilization.


A Timeless Idea: The Learning Commons

Libraries, and in our case school libraries, are now examining the concept of the learning commons as a major theme for 21st century learning. Over the next weeks, I want to add to the narrative about the learning commons, both theoretically and practically, with reference to past, present, and future explorations.

I have already referenced the great work done by the Ontario School Library Association in Together for Learning: School Libraries and the Emergence of the Learning Commons. This 2010 document is having a global impact in its call for change:
A Learning Commons is a vibrant, whole-school approach, presenting exciting opportunities for collaboration among teachers, teacher-librarians and students. Within a Learning Commons, new relationships are formed between learners, new technologies are realized and utilized, and both students and educators prepare for the future as they learn new ways to learn (p.3).
I will be launching a new series on the learning commons in coming weeks. I will also be offering teacher-librarians a unique opportunity to join a special virtual commons that could help to realize this change. Along the way, I want to put this innovative idea within the context of past libraries: their history, purpose, characteristics, and legacy for our times. I'll start my narrative with the oldest western example we know anything about.

Western representation of the royal palace at Nineveh
The Library at Nineveh
I, Assurbanipal, within [the palace], took care of the wisdom of Nebo. The whole of the inscribed tablets, of all the clay tablets, the whole of their mysteries and difficulties, I solved. (Cylinder A, Column I, Lines 31-33, in Smith, George. History of Assurbanipal, Translated from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. London: Harrison and Sons, 1871: pg.6)
Ashurbanipal, now in the British Museum
The first great ancient library in the western world would seem to be Ashurbanipal's royal library at Nineveh. Ashurbanipal was the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (668 BCE – c. 627 BCE)..While archival material had been kept by previous rulers, the young king Ashurbanipal had a cultural and political purpose in rigorously gathering world knowledge into one place. Knowledge was power. He commandeered, bought, stole, and had copied as much Babylonian material as he could. While he paid select Babylonian scribes to collect and copy texts, he is said to have chained others to their places. He seems determined to secure material that was already fading in human memory.

His library is known to us because of one the great ironies of history: the burning of the city of Nineveh by the Medes baked and thus preserved thousands of cuneiform tablets. The majority of these are housed in the British Museum which continues to research them. Read about the Ashurbanipal Library Project here and listen to an informative podcast from the BBC here.

Scholars now think that with the size of its collection of tablets, leather and papyrus scrolls, and wax boards, Nineveh's library surpassed the subsequent rival, Alexandria. While divination texts dominated the collection, mythological texts, literature, history, government archives and religious works were gathered in the thousands over a twenty-five year period. The king would brooke no rival, at the end of a pen or the sword!

Tablet of Gilgamesh found at Nineveh now in the British Museum
We do not know what the library looked like, though a romantic (copy-written) image here evokes its splendour. However, we do know it was an organized collection with genres in separate rooms perhaps. And thanks to the library, we have preserved the fullest copies of the epic of Gilgamesh and a pre-biblical version of Noah's flood.

Is Nineveh a Learning Commons?

While this is not the criteria for judging Nineveh's importance, three things stand out for me as I try to contextualize and construct the concept of the modern library/learning commons. Ashurbanipal's royal library

  • established the library as a force for civilization by preserving both current knowledge and knowledge that was threatened by forgetfulness and loss
  • recognized that knowledge was power — power to rule wisely beyond a particular time
  • applied organizational principles to systematize vast resources to use them effectively

It was not a modern library commons mainly because of the absence of democratic access. It served only an elite, specific culture. However, we would do well to judge its importance in terms of our global hopes, not of domination but collaboration. If King Ashurbanipal had had the Internet, he would have embraced it. Perhaps in a wave of universal wisdom, he would have unchained his scholar-slaves and traded in their clay tablets for IPads!

Note: Thanks to LookLex Encyclopedia for my educational use of the images about Nineveh.
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Gauntley's Best 4: Reference Websites for Secondary Schools - Libraries, Museums, and Galleries

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Internet as Culture 
The Internet is now woven into the fabric of our culture. In fact, it is a culture of its own. Our children who have grown up as "digital natives" (Tapscott) know this, though tell that to my mother, now celebrating her 87th birthday with her new IPad.

Culture on the Internet
On the other hand, there are also cultural treasures in their own right to cheer about on the Web. From the beginning of the Internet, museums, art galleries, libraries, and library organizations have developed rich resources to lure the curious and knowledgeable through their digital portals. 


Summer of Culture
As summer holidays begin, why not visit some of the following great public institutions or private enterprises on the Web. As in a real day out, these virtual sites provide tours, collections, galleries, activities, news, games, reading lists, and selected resources to brighten up your summer. Teachers: why not send this list to your students or their parents, to encourage family learning over the holidays. The complete list of the past four reference-based blogs is now available on my Pages section too. Happy holidays.

Libraries, Museums, and Galleries

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Gauntley’s Best 3: Reference Websites for Secondary Schools - News and Media

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News and Media as Reference
Online news and media are central to our life and education. However, in a world glutted by the sheer number of news and media sources, it is hard to pick those which are of lasting value - for today at least! 
Students engaged in inquiry and research need assistance in selecting relevant, authoritative, and diverse media, either to jumpstart a project or widen its scope and perspective. Browsing and searching online news and media sites and portals require sophisticated skills in reading media, especially to make sense of bias, interface features, interaction of image and text, and archival conventions.
RSS Feed Readers/Aggregators
I have come to rely on RSS feed readers/aggregators to organize my daily doses of world media. An ideal pre-assignment for inquiry and research would be for groups of students to create a reader page and discuss its effectiveness and relevancy for the task at hand. You might want to check out Heinz Tschabitscher’s About.com Guide to see what is freely available. Engage students in class analysis of the different features, advantages and disadvantages of each application for a richer experience.
Personal Favorites
Here then are some of my favorite world news, book reviewing, film, and image websites, including sources particularly of interest to teachers and students making news, not just reading it. Sometimes, I am amazed by the generosity of certain organizations, companies, and institutions in supplying such excellent educational resources. The National Film Board of Canada, the George Lucas Educational Foundation, and PBS are three of the best examples below. 
As usual, I have added this series to my Pages section for convenience. 
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Gauntley’s Best: 1. Reference Websites for Secondary Schools - Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Almanac, etc.

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Remembering vs. Searching

To be efficient and focussed researchers, teachers and tudents should actually know content-rich resources by name rather than relying always on search engines and random links. It is particularly important that in a time of information flux we are able to carrying a personal memory-bank of dependable sources around with us from one learning situation to another. Bookmarking is a kind of digital memory but it can become too easy a depository to "dump" things into. Everyone can remember YouTube and Google's URL. Where would you repeatedly go for a good online dictionary or almanac?
A New Blog Series Starts Today

As a teacher-librarian, I can not resist beginning a new series here which identifies key websites for teaching, learning, and curriculum support.  I will use a directory approach that allows you to see all of the sites at a single glance. All links are live from this blog.
The criteria I use to choose these sites are the same six that I would teach in the school library: authority, accuracy, currency, relevance, comprehensiveness, and accessibility (aka. friendliness). For this blog, I will concentrate on sites which are mainly free of charge, clear of ads when possible, and not based on database subscriptions that many school libraries are otherwise able to offer. 
Reference Websites Kickstart Research and Inquiry
Like traditional reference books, reference-based websites are dependable friends, often used to begin a research project. They both strengthen students' research and inquiry in five ways. They
  1. quickly establish a point of departure
  2. summarize important factual information about people, places, and things
  3. establish answers to explicit factual questions.
  4. present overviews of information that might otherwise swamp apprentice researchers.
  5. encourage deeper browsing and discovery, through directed references and hyperlinks. 
Reference Websites for Secondary Schools: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Almanacs, etc.
My first list today is of key reference websites for secondary students that highlight online encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Canadian sites are in red. Please let me know if you find these sites useful and if you have additional favorites.
By the way, each time that I add new lists, they will be added as tables in convenient groupings to the Pages section on the right frame of this blog. Check the first one here. 
In the coming weeks, I will provide similar lists for information portals and web directories, news and media sites, and libraries, museums and galleries. I will then proceed to cover the same territory for elementary schools.

Become a real webmaster. Amaze your friends and memorize the url or name of these sites!
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