Category Archives: reading

Libraries and the Future

books, Libraries, reading

I am a bibliophile. I bought an old house partly because it has a library to house my books. While I do read e-books, I love the feel of a book in my hands. If you care at all about my love of books, I have a whole blog mostly devoted to reading and books.

But the point of this entry is to muse a bit on libraries. I’ve been thinking a lot about them recently for two reasons.  I started this year as I do many years with a resolution to buy fewer books. Actually, the resolution was to spend less money in general but since books are a big part of my discretionary spending, they are pretty much the same resolution.

In addition, I was asked to do a short talk about the role of libraries in the future so am reading Biblio-Tech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google by John Palfrey. He gets at the essential conundrum of libraries in a digital age:

Libraries are in danger because they are caught between two ideas that are not easily reconciled: on the one hand, the public sentiment that the digital era has made libraries less relevant, and on the other, the growing number of expectations we have for libraries, stemming in no small part for the very digitalization that the public assumes is making them obsolete. These two ideas cannot be right.

I think the latter idea is the one on which we should focus. I live in a town in which the library plays an important role in many ways beyond just books including free computer and Internet access for people who otherwise could not afford it.

For those of us who do have access and devices, they have invested heavily in digital resources. When I stopped in last week, the librarian was eager to show me their magazine database. Lots of excellent titles. I really like being able to browse magazines that I otherwise would not buy and I discovered you can easily print select pages so I can save particular articles and recipes for later use.

EdTech has an interesting take on libraries as well, describing the dystopian future as one in which books either don’t play a role at all or are banned and burned. Defending libraries is also about defending our rights as citizens to the free flow of information.

 

When Email is Your Friend

reading, thinking out loud, Uncategorized

I wrote earlier this year about letting email drift a bit as it could be a productivity killer. But, this morning, as I looked through my email inbox, I realized it could also be my friend. Late last year, I spent time culling: unsubscribing from some old lists and vendor emails. What is left are a handful of informative and interesting subscriptions with links to news and commentary both in the field of education and technology as well as the wider world. I found myself spending time in my inbox exploring rather than replying, and it was a reminder that, managed well, email can be your friend.

One newsletter I particularly enjoy is How We Get to Next with Steven Johnson. The writing is fresh; the topics are fascinating. This month, their guest curator is Florence Okoye, founder of AfroFutures_UK, a British-based collective that focuses on how Afrofuturism envisions the future. I wasn’t familiar with the term and am eager to explore Okoye’s reading list.

I understand that I could access these materials without email by using my Feedly account, but by getting the newsletter, I am reminded to do so. I use Feedly for everything; I use email for the really important stuff.

Should We Kick Shakespeare Out of the High School Curriculum?

reading

As a former English teacher who taught Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar to 9th and 10th graders and who, in my master’s thesis, made an argument against making everyone read Shakespeare, I found this week’s dialog around reading Shakespeare to be fascinating. It was kicked off by Lauren, a high school senior who is blogging about her reading of 18 Shakespeare plays over the course of the school year as part of an independent study.

Lauren responded vehemently to Dana Dusbiber, an English teacher who argued against continuing to include Shakespeare as part of the common core. Dusbiber suggested that it was time to open students to more diverse and relevant literature rather than forcing them to struggle with an archaic language written by a long dead white guy. She concludes:

Let’s let Shakespeare rest in peace, and start a new discussion about middle and high school right-of-passage reading and literature study.

It was basically the same argument I made nearly 25 years ago. Like Dusbiber, I was working in a pretty tough inner city school, and no matter what I tried, I felt like a foreign language teacher when we came to the Shakespeare unit. I was more interested in getting my students personally engaged in the act of reading rather than forcing the canon upon them.

But, Lauren’s argument is convincing in its intensity. Shakespeare has stuck around because he speaks of eternal truths in very human ways. The themes are universal and new interpretations are demonstrating how they can be recreated in diverse and contemporary ways even while preserving the beauty of the language. Lauren includes wonderfully wide ranging examples in her post.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for me gets at the heart of public education: this is the one place where we all assemble and the one opportunity we have to introduce students to a wide variety of literature.  Washington Post commentator Valerie Strauss, who published Dusbiber’s post, followed up with one of the many rebuttals she received. High school English teacher Matthew Truesdale gets at the universalism of Shakespeare but goes on to suggest powerfully that rejecting any literature that doesn’t speak to the student’s exact experience eliminates lots of literature from the high school syllabus. He wants to help students look through the window of human experience rather than always gazing in a mirror. He also has good ideas for how to integrate Shakespeare with more diverse and contemporary literature.

When I taught high school English, it seemed as though the curriculum was designed for future English majors, and we followed a timeline of literature that didn’t get much past the early 20th century. Truesdale’s idea of a more expansive reading list would help put Shakespeare in context for contemporary readers.

Getting Serious About Goals in 2016

adult learning, blogging, books, reading

I feel like I drifted a bit professionally through 2015. Was it because I didn’t have any written resolutions about blogging, reading or being more active in social media? I think they were my hazy goals last year but without making any kind of action plan, they fell a bit by the wayside. I was a pleasantly surprised to count up 33 blog posts on this blog although fall 2015 has been a dry season.

Blogging more consistently is a major goal for 2016: at least twice a week here and once a week on my reading blog at In One Place. The action plan for finding blog fodder includes more professional reading and sharing. I encourage my students to establish routines around reading and sharing and am challenging myself to do that this year.

I’ve been loving reading other writers’ reflections on their year and their ideas for the coming year. I’m glad to know from Martin Weller that blogging isn’t dead. I want to move further out of my comfort zone along with Tamara Letter, work through Jen Orr’s list of her open tabs, and “do something” with Pernille Ripp.  The first thing I’m doing is joining in Pernille’s Passionate Learners Book Club. I know I am not the main audience for her book but I think it’s essential that those of us who work with educators model the kinds of ideas she writes about. For instance, my “non grading” practice has opened some really important discussions with the teachers I work with and I really enjoyed the conversation I had with other professors during VCU’s #ALTFest.

It wasn’t like I didn’t accomplish a few things, mostly around my areas of work. I developed and taught two new courses for University of Richmond and rediscovered the joy of working and learning face to face after several years of teaching exclusively online. I helped VSTE expand its offerings and its audience so it is now truly a year round professional development provider. I read 97 books, 22 more than my initial goal of 75. Admittedly, many of them were fluff, but I had fun with some old and new authors.  I’m going to set a goal of 75 books again this year, making sure to include professional books. I bought three new ones during Dean Shareski‘s keynote at the conference (The Wondering Brain, Writing on the Wall, and A New Culture of Learning.) I’ll write about this reading here while I muse on my personal reading over at In One Place. If you’re interested, I’ve written my top five books of 2015 post to kick off 2016.

One last new routine: I love looking at Tom Woodward’s weekly web harvest that gets posted via Diigo. I’ve had it set up for awhile but never seem to remember to use the tag that would kick off the blog post. I’ve got it ready to go for this week: I tagged the various sites I used for this blog post as well as a few others about blogging in general. I think the post should happen on Sundays.

The Messiness of Contemporary Media

books, Media, reading

A fancy title for something that I suspect has been going on for awhile but only really hit home with me today.

I get an email from the Chester County Book Company about books and today’s edition included a link to this amazing book trailer for Mosquitoland:

The description shows the blending of words, music and images: “Book and music written and produced by David Arnold.” No longer does a writer just put words on a page; he is able to create his own imagery as well. I was struck by the power of the video to make me want to read the book. I suspect it would be even more powerful for the young adult audience for which this book is really written.

Video book trailers is not a new idea for educators: they’ve been making them with kids since video became readily accessible. But they seem to have also found their way into mainstream in a pervasive way.

And, for me, it is a reminder of one of the ways I tend to seem old in this very new world. In the old world, books were books, movies were movies, created by different people and often not the same story in the end. What happens when authors “produce” the whole range of their work from written word to soundtrack to video. In this short clip, we get a visual of the main character, something we would normally have to create on our own out of the words themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I am also reminded of the wealth of media resources out there around books from interviews to recitations. This review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book is a great example as it mixes words, images, audio and video into one page. Wonderful and yet, again, I’m not sure how I feel about it. I want to engage with the author at the level of the work he has created. I don’t want to hear too many interviews that ask him to explain it or too many reviews that try to explain it. I’ll check all this out afterwards, but for now, I just want to sit with the book itself.

NB: This is a cross post with my personal blog, In One Place.