Super late to the party: Dan Cohen & the DPLA.
An enthusiastic take by Sarah Barbrow on Dan Cohen’s appointment as the founding executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, which I share.
The New York Times is running one of its Room for Debate series on the future of libraries. The four debaters (so far) are Luis Herrera, director of the San Francisco Public Library (and a board member of the Digital Public Library of America); Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Buffy J. Hamilton, a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia; and Berkman fellow Matthew Battles. All four of their essays are excellent. And each of them answers the “debate” question in the affirmative: yes, we do still need libraries. Of course, they are right.
It is worth backing up and asking why this question even applies. What would lead us to question the library as an institution? After all, as the authors point out, they are more popular than ever by many metrics, including how many people still walk through their doors. Why is this even a “debate”?
It’s a debate because too many people think that we don’t need libraries when we have the Internet. That logic couldn’t be more faulty. We actually need libraries more (as Luis Herrera points out) now that we have the Internet, not less. But we have to craft a clear and affirmative argument to make that case to those who don’t work in libraries or focus deeply on their operations. Librarians have to make a political and public case, which is too rarely being made effectively today.
These days, in most towns in America, the same debate recurs each year when budget time rolls around: what’s the purpose of a library in a digital age? Put more harshly: why should we spend tax dollars, in tough economic times, on a library when our readers can get much of what they need and want from the Internet? In the era of Google and Amazon, the pressure is on libraries. Every year, as more and more library users become e-book readers, the debate rages a bit more fiercely.
The annual conversation about libraries and money is hard in the context of academic institutions, too. Libraries have long stood at the core of great schools and universities. In many fields, the library is in fact the laboratory for the scholars, whether in the humanities or in law. The texts, images, and recordings in these libraries are the raw materials out of which scholars and their students make new knowledge. But increasingly, scholars are turning to digital sources – databases, commercial online journals, Google Scholar – to do their work. Does every university and every school need to invest millions of dollars each in buying the same texts and bringing them to their campus?
The future of libraries is in peril. Librarians and those of us who love libraries need to make an affirmative argument for investments in the services, materials, and physical spaces that libraries comprise. This argument must be grounded in the needs of library users, today and in the future. The argument needs to move past nostalgia and toward a bright and compelling future for libraries as institutions, for librarians as professionals, and for the role that libraries play in vibrant democracies.
Many libraries are making this argument, implicitly, through their good and promising works. You need go no further than a visit to Luis’s San Francisco Public Library to see how exciting libraries can be today. The Chicago Public Library, under new director Brian Bannon, is doing many promising things, including the MacArthur Foundation-funded YouMedia. The public libraries in New York — I’m most familiar with NYPL and the Queens Borough libraries — have extraordinary things underway. So does Amy Ryan at the Boston Public Library. There are cool things happening in Chattanooga, by all accounts. And these are just big public libraries. Many academic libraries and small public, county, school, and special libraries are busily charting a new and positive future. We need to get the stories of these leaders to be the narrative about libraries today.
We can establish a bright future for libraries. I think it can be done by working together to take ten steps:
The argument that libraries are obsolete in a digital era is faulty. But those of us who love libraries need to make the case for why that’s so. This case has everything to do with libraries finding compelling ways to support education, helping people to learn, thrive, and be the best civic actors we can be. We have to recreate the sense of wonder and importance of libraries, as public spaces, as research labs, as maker-spaces, and as core democratic institutions for the digital age.
Tonight at the Phillips Academy faculty meeting, we are talking with Dr. Gerard Gioia of the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The purpose of this discussion is to ensure that we are adopting best practices to protect our students from traumatic brain injury (TBI), or concussions, and that we have sound policies and practices in place to help ensure that students get treatment and care for injuries they do sustain. Dr. Gioia is a very clear and effective speaker with access to a great deal of relevant data and practical guidance for schools.
We are talking about the concussions that are most commonly seen in residential academic settings. Research shows that about half of all concussions in these environments occur in the context of sports (hockey, lacrosse, football, and soccer are among the most common) and about half in everyday life. After a student has a concussion, we, like many schools, have adopted accommodations for them on a case-by-case basis.
According to Dr. Gioia, the definition of traumatic brain injury, or concussion for short, is an injury to the brain due to a blow to the head or body that jerks the head forward and backward. The damage is a “software” problem: that the brain’s electrochemical function changes as a result of the trauma. Put a slightly different way by Dr. Gioia, it’s less of a “hardware” problem than a “software” problem. Kids experience physical, psychological, cognitive, and socially-related symptoms that can last for hours, days, and much longer. Concussions happen much more than we realize, among both kids and adults. Injuries are one-off; there’s no one-size-fits-all in terms of the way to treat it and how quickly to bring kids back into their ordinary pattern of life.
The primary effect of TBI is to damage the working memory. Students can experience slower reaction times, have trouble paying attention, or struggle with concentration. Students can also experience greater irritability as a result of the injury. Recovery time tends to be between 1 day to 140 days. Our understanding and treatment modalities need to take into account this range and the variation within it.
Dr. Gioia suggests that best practices include ensuring that kids experience no additional forces to the head during recovery, by keeping them out of sports and other activities that might lead to re-injury. Running, jumping, jogging the head; working too hard on homework; and emotional stress all can harm the brain further during the recovery period. Students who have experienced a concussion especially need to rest their brain and get good sleep. We need to help facilitate their physiological recovery. The cognitive demands of school can slow recovery or exacerbate the negative impact of the injury. (Studies show that math, it seems, is the hardest thing for students to do, by far, after a concussion.) Dr. Gioia recommends a moderated approach to bringing kids back into their regular activities after a concussion. The rest right after the injury is most important, with only a gradual increase in activity thereafter. Dr. Gioia suggests setting up a team on campus that works with students after concussions, which is the approach that we’re taking at Phillips Academy.
Dr. Gioia ends with a positive message: these kids who get concussions will get better.
Tonight in the faculty meeting at Phillips Academy, we will discuss Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi. (Steele is a distinguished social psychologist; former provost of Columbia; now dean of education at Stanford.) It’s an exceptionally good book on many levels, assigned to the full faculty by the Access to Success working group at Andover. The social science he presents about stereotype threat is deep and revealing; the personal narratives are compelling; and the ideas for concrete action at schools are constructive.
Steele’s book should be required reading for anyone who works in a school. More broadly, anyone who cares about the present and future of American democracy should read it. The topics that he takes up — the risks associated with stereotype threat and implications for education, politics, and identity — belong at the top of the list of important issues that we face as a country.
It seems fitting to be having this conversation tonight, on the 50th anniversary of James Meredith’s registration at Ole Miss. Yesterday’s lead story in the New York Times (by Adam Liptak) also highlighted the important new challenge to affirmative action that the United States Supreme Court will hear this term. (From the story: “On Oct. 10, the court will hear Fisher v. University of Texas, No. 11-345, a major challenge to affirmative action in higher education.”) It’s unfortunate that we are still struggling at the level of admissions of diverse communities; the discussion should be much further along than it is today.
Instead of arguing about the rules for admissions and whether our campuses should be truly diverse in the first place, the conversation should be about what schools should do once we have highly diverse communities. This issue is crucial to the future of Andover and our educational program. It’s not enough to admit students from a broad range of backgrounds; it’s essential that we are intentional and effective about how we enable all students to succeed and enjoy their time at schools, including but certainly not limited to Andover.
This morning, Prof. Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is at Phillips Academy, Andover, to lead us, as a faculty, in a community conversation to start off the year. Mimi is setting forth the core data and arguments behind Connected Learning, which is our professional development theme at Andover for the year. She has us all on an Etherpad page hosted by Mozilla (a “mopad”) as a back-channel, which is leading to lots of discussion about whether we can pay attention to her lecture as well as our own chat session (not to mention Twitter stream and live-blogs, like this one that I’m writing contemporaneously).
The Connected Learning model is built around encouraging kids to tie together their learning in three areas: their Interests (diverse, self-directed), their Peer Culture (the social, peer-driven), their Achievements (academic and otherwise), in ways that are both online and offline. Mimi also talked some about the desired outcomes for Connected Learning, the 21st century skills and deeper learning. She stressed that it is very early days in terms of how digital media and education are evolving, and that assessment and evaluation are major areas for future focus and collaboration. For more on the theory of Connected Learning, see a seminal blog post from Mimi (which includes a seven-minute embedded video) and many other posts from the DMLCentral community.
Mimi stresses, and I completely agree, that a technology-centered approach to education isn’t ever going to work. There are many experiences that we can draw on to show that this is true: TV and education is just one example. Our approach needs to be grounded in clear and compelling pedagogical goals, figuring out where technology can help and where it cannot. Our use of technology can help us to transform teaching and learning in fabulous ways, but the technology will not do all that on its own.
Ways to follow along: our hashtag today is #connectedandover. Mimi Ito can be followed @mizuko. And Andover’s Twitter handle is @PhillipsAcademy. And for other schools: I highly recommend a professional development day focused on Connected Learning — it’s both provocative and a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, Andover students are trickling in all around us, with many more to arrive in the days to come. Some are back for sports, others for community service, others who are international students coming from around the world. It’s our goal to connect the learning happening in these many domains, in the service of our students’ overall education and growth.
With thanks to my friends at Phillips Academy and the Berkman Center, I’ve got a new look to my old blog. I’m excited to write my first post to try it out, on the day when all the Phillips Academy faculty return from the summer (welcome back, colleagues!) for our Convocation ceremony together tonight in the Cochran Chapel.
And tomorrow, we welcome Mimi Ito as our first professional development speaker and discussion leader for the year, on the topic of Connected Learning. I am deeply grateful to Mimi for agreeing to travel across the country to help us kick off the new school year.
John Palfrey 