Mita.williams

Well, it’s been a long time between posts. Let’s try this on for size then… here’s the text of an article that Mita Williams and I (Lisa) published in  the Summer 2012 issue of Access Magazine, the magazine of the Ontario Library Association. The issue was pulled together by Mike Ridley and the whole thing is devoted to social justice issues.  Our piece is a call to arms, if you will excuse the battle metaphor. I like to think of it instead as a call to join arms. There are days when I am feeling more cynical about things than when we wrote this article – our attachment to commercial software and proprietary information vendors gets discouraging, and our seemingly eager embrace of the neoliberal values of the 21st century academy… but still, on a good day I think we can help change the world.

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Social Justice Librarianship for the 21st Century

In the fall of 2011 when the Occupy Movement invaded our collective consciousness, many of us were a bit taken aback to discover that most of the occupation sites included a self-described “People’s Library.” We were fascinated by this upstart movement and in particular why libraries were so central to it in a time when we seem to be continually told that our “brand” is no longer compelling. One librarian, in response to a tweet by one of the authors of this article, asked a simple question that still lingers in our thoughts. She asked why did Occupy Wall Street need a people’s library when there was a public library around the corner?

The obvious answer is that they needed a library on the occupation site itself and that building libraries is also about building communities. The less obvious and more painful answer is that although our profession is steeped in democratic values, libraries are not always seen as safe places by members of marginalized communities or by radical movements. Our relationships with corporate donors, commercial information vendors, and government can render us suspect to the very communities we wish to engage. At the same time, librarians know we make a difference to communities every day. Public libraries in particular are an important part of social safety net for a city’s most vulnerable residents. It’s not the 1% who use libraries, it’s the 99%. In acknowledging this contradiction in how we are perceived, we recognize that libraries are complex sites representing both the status quo and revolutionary potential.

While this contradiction is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, how might we at least expand upon the social justice potential of librarianship in our work? We recognize the progressive tradition documented in the work of Toni Samek, and think as well about Naomi Klein, who reminded us that librarianship is a revolutionary choice. Klein insists that our core values – which she saw as stewardship of knowledge, sharing, and the need for common space – are the ones most at risk in a globalized society. So how we can become the people’s librarians? To begin, let’s take a look at the work we take for granted but which to others might seem quite radical indeed. Once we’ve reframed librarianship as a subversive act, we can examine what else we might begin to do.

What’s so radical about peace, love and librarianship?

Public and academic libraries loan material for free, offer instruction in various forms of literacy, and bridge the digital divide by making computers and the web accessible to our patrons. We also engage in less obvious forms of social justice work, like our work on privacy and access to information.

Many think that the Internet is rapidly supplanting libraries and that the Internet is essentially a more convenient free alternative. Unfortunately, it takes a considerable understanding of the political and technological structure of the Internet to realize that in many cases what appears free on the internet is simply the extraction of value through other means. The “free” services of Google are provided by the revenue of AdSense, Google’s system of providing advertisements based on the content of your Gmail, your location, and your previous search history. Facebook is worth over $50 billion because it is provides not only an audience for advertising, but the most thorough demographic profiles available: a live census of our relationships and our shared experiences. Free web services are not free: we pay for them by providing the artifacts of our lives, our labour, and our privacy. Those in a position of privilege might think of this exchange of privacy for advertising and profiling as a fair one. There are many, however, who find themselves in a vulnerable position in society – perhaps through sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or political leanings – for whom exposure might threaten their livelihood, personal safety and/or families.

Librarians, on the other hand, are deeply committed to the privacy of our patrons. For instance, libraries already provide a safe haven to those most vulnerable and most coveted by marketers: our children. Unlike entertainment conglomerates and game companies – who both design free apps that make it all too easy for kids to make real purchases of virtual goods – libraries will not sell our children’s interests, their reading habits and their questions to the highest bidder.

Our concern for society’s unfettered access to information is also an increasingly radical notion. The fundamental bedrock of our work is based on the notion that ideas are free. This is not to say that authors or creators should not be compensated – it simply a statement that ideas are not physical objects that are reduced or diminished when shared with others. Indeed, ideas need to be shared across communities and across generations in order to survive. Libraries are slowly but methodically embracing the Open Access and Open Source movements which embody these fundamentals by allowing ideas to be shared by all.

Level Up: Get Involved. Get Visible. Unlock achievement

Once we recognize the ways in which our work often challenges the status quo, it seems logical to reach out to other groups engaged in similar social and political struggles. What else could we do and who should we work with? A recent blog post by Lana Thelen called “Out of the Library and into the Wild” does an excellent job of outlining how librarians can work with community and activist groups and begin to share our expertise and skills outside the walls of the library and in so doing make ourselves more visible and relevant to our communities. She talks about offering street reference, tabling at community events, hosting skillshares, marching under librarian banners at protests and parades, as well as about joining explicitly progressive groups like Radical Reference and the Progressive Librarians Guild.

These groups are important because librarians concerned about social justice need to build new professional networks and figure out how to work collectively. Simultaneously, we need to speak out, in all our diverse platforms, against surveillance technologies, privacy infringements, the commodification of information, and basically anything that locks down space or freedom of expression. At the same time, recognizing the diversity of views amongst us, we don’t want to exhort librarians to speak with one voice. We need to consider intersectionality and coalition building amongst each other, rather than falling deeper into the growing and perilous divide amongst front line librarians, IT professionals, and library administrators. We also need to extend beyond ourselves and build solidarity with citizens in our communities. We need to build relationships with communities, and with other activists – not with elevator pitches about how important we are, but by becoming integral to the social project. We fight with them, they fight for us.

Conclusion

We’d like to end by reminding you of the most obvious and radical thing we do. Libraries provide material for free to reduce financial barriers to information access. Some publishers and authors have taken umbrage at this service. You couldn’t invent libraries now, if they didn’t exist already. But those who work in libraries recognize the short-sightedness of this sort of thinking. We know that we create and support a reading public. We all benefit from literacy: writers, employers, educators, and citizens alike. But even more radically, our very existence provides an alternative vision to society – a vision of sharing rather than buying.

Why social justice librarianship? Here’s the simplest explanation we can think of: in these times of widespread access to information technology and various archival fevers, lots of people can probably do what we do, but we’re the only ones who do it for the reasons we do it. We sit squarely in the social conscience of the information world. We have to ask ourselves, what makes a library? Is it a room full of books? A delivery mechanism for commercial online products? No. It is the way the library workers animate our collections and critique the commercial entities where necessary. It is the attention to literacy and social values that differentiates librarianship from most other kinds of information professions. Dusted off, repolished and reframed for the 21st century, this attentiveness will be our calling card, our hallmark, our badge of honour.

References

Klein, Naomi. (June 24, 2003). Librarianship as a Revolutionary Choice. Address to the American Library Association, Toronto, ON. Accessed March 28th, 2012.

Samek, Toni. (2001). Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Thelen, Lana. (March 21, 2012). “Out of the Library and into the Wild” at In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Accessed March 28th, 2012.

 

Deputy editor at Ars Technica Nate Anderson was curious if he could learn to crack passwords in a day. Although there's definitely a difference between advanced and beginner crackers, openly available software and resources make it easy to get started and do some damage.

After my day-long experiment, I remain unsettled. Password cracking is simply too easy, the tools too sophisticated, the CPUs and GPUs too powerful for me to believe that my own basic attempts at beefing up my passwords are a long-term solution. I've resisted password managers in the past over concerns about storing data in the cloud or about the hassle of syncing with other computers or about accessing passwords from a mobile device or because dropping $50 bucks never felt quite worth it—hacks only happen to other people, right?

But until other forms of authentication take root, the humble password will form a primary defense of our personal information. The time has come for me to find a better solution to generating, storing, and handling them.

I use 1Password.

A good friend of the Loon’s, at a small-college library with an extremely small library staff, tells a story of a certain department trying to shuffle off an overeager, no-longer-competent soon-to-be emeritus professor on the library. “Surely he can just run the archives? Or something?”

The Loon hardly knows where to begin with that. Apparently working in (never mind running) a library or archives takes no specialized knowledge or training; one needn’t even be fully compos mentis, it seems. Or a Ph.D in any discipline is an automatic ticket to competence in librarianship. Or the library exists as a sort of modern-day Works Progress Administration, to soak up the otherwise-unemployable Ph.D; clearly they don’t actually need all that staff or staff budget in order to run a mere library.

(Denizens of the UK among the Loon’s readership may recognize an echo of this way of thinking in the “volunteers can run our public libraries!” policy.)

Obviously foisting an agreed-upon incompetent off on the library is something of an extreme case. It’s not as extreme as all that, however, and the concept of library-as-WPA is alive and well, particularly in “alternative academic” circles. The variation on this theme the Loon constantly stumbles over is “one must have a Ph.D (or less aggressively, graduate training in my discipline) in order to curate My Precious Data!” Which the Loon’s experience, on her own and via her students, suggests is arrant nonsense. (Besides, if graduate disciplinary training were both necessary and sufficient, research data wouldn’t be in the unmitigated mess it’s currently in, would it?)

The difficulty working librarians and library-school instructors have with this isn’t about “virtue,” though the Loon concedes that some of the rhetoric is. Nor does the Loon think “changing the narrative” will make a difference until all sides confront fairly and honestly what the narrative actually is. The said narrative includes:

• The incessant debate over faculty status for librarians, most recently enacted at Virginia. Whichever side of it one falls on, the Loon can’t see how it isn’t in part a worth judgment about librarians. (Not about research. Never about that. The value of research is a given, which biases the argument no end.) Lest one think this question a bagatelle, one should ask oneself: would Edwin Mellen Press have dared to sue Dale Askey if he’d been faculty? Or even if he held a Ph.D? Why is that, do you think? And then one should ponder on how at times one’s livelihood is a larger question than one’s job.
• “New hires [are] unlikely to be librarians” coupled with “New hires [are] likely to be Ph.Ds.” (Yes, Trzeciak ultimately lost his job over this and other things. He has another, in a different library, and his style of boo-librarians rhetoric is pretty clearly evident in various Taiga Forum pronouncements.)
• When Harvard’s library staff hit the skids, the most faculty could apparently find to say amounted to “we have what we want, so why should we care?” Here is a thing librarians know: Ph.Ds defend no one but other Ph.Ds, and not even them always (ask any adjunct).
• Dan Cohen will have Ph.D company at the Digital Public Library of America; a project-manager position insists upon it. MLSes and actual project managers need not apply without it. (ACLS as the modern WPA. Discuss.)

The Loon can’t endorse the Feral Librarian’s happy notion that “libraries are such logical places for a broad range of services and resources that of course we need to hire folks with a broader range of education and skills and talents.” As Wayne Bivens-Tatum notes, the breadth of education, skills, and talents across all of librarianship is quite broad indeed, for one thing; the Loon believes the word “broader” needs significant unpacking, especially in the context of the usual absurdly narrow Ph.D. For another, library staff complements are not growing, but shrinking. Nearly every job reserved for a JD or Ph.D will come at the cost of a job reserved for an MLS. Ph.Ds, aided and abetted by library leaders, are poaching MLS jobs.

That reality may be all right, or it may not—it’s a discussion that needs having—but no one discussing academic librarianship should duck away from confronting it. In the specific case of the DPLA position, the Loon finds herself wondering why the ill-advised decision to spend most of a decade pursuing a Ph.D in hopes of catching a snark vanishing tenure-track position should be rewarded, and the (for now) considerably savvier decision to spend two years on an MLS punished. Surely common sense is a valuable quality in a project manager? (Says the Loon, who herself admits to a regrettable lack of it in her 20s that led to her wasting better than half a decade and much bodily and mental health on Ph.D studies.)

Ah, but the Loon has been dancing about that question, hasn’t she? What, exactly, is the value of an MLS? What, exactly, is the Loon’s own value as a library-school instructor? Where does that value overlap with that of other degrees, other instructors? The Loon has been pondering these questions, and has a tentative answer which she hopes to write about here, but until then: acknowledge and own it, please, Ph.Ds, your presence in academic libraries does come at the expense of MLSes.

Don’t feel too bad about it. Ask most paraprofessionals what they think of the MLS and those who hold it…

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the largest of the public protests preceding the Iraq War: February 15th 2003, when over a million people marched through London, and millions more turned out around the world.

On the date of that anniversary, I and two friends walked the route of the protest, from Gower Street, down Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly, to Hyde Park. We carried a replica placard from the original event.

I remember moments from that day in 2003. I remember the crowds, how slowly we all moved, how the protest seemed to fill the city. I remember passing the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road, where the cast of Les Miserables, in costume, hung from the windows and waved flags and sang revolutionary songs. I remember stamping cold feet as we shuffled through Piccadilly Circus, for what felt like hours. I remember the light rain that began to fall as we finally reached the park, the speeches long finished. That curious protest elation, otherworldly, the city transformed by our passage, our voices hoarse from shouting.

I remember the sense of failure that followed. I remember the invasion, the politicians’ lies, the utter overwhelming sense of helplessness and disgust, the meatgrinder years of war. The feeling of a generation’s psychic hangover; the oppositie of political apathy, a generation—several generations—who spoke out, and were ignored. A legacy of ineffectual, frantic, painful protest that stretches, for me, back to Reclaim The Streets and forward through the campaigns for free higher education, global justice, the environment: campaigns ever more diffuse, ever more unachievable. But still we march.

We didn’t get many comments last week. One man, on a bicycle, said: “Nothing is true. Read the bible.” Another said “Bit late, aren’t you?” Yes. We were too late, then, too. Outside the Wolseley, an elderly Persian lady stopped us but we didn’t understand what she was saying. While she was talking, a young man screeched to a halt in a convertible and pointed to the number-plate: “Y1 RAO”. Why Iraq?

We felt invisible. Cities swallow intent and action in much the same way as history does. Who holds these memories now, memories of things that achieved nothing? Not the written record, not books that seek to rescue it, not books that use it as a backdrop. Only we have the memory, just as only we, all of us, marched. The significance is in the marching, in the memory, because that is all we have.

There is so much more to say about this, but not now. The walk last week was an act of memory, of memorial. A reenactment, indebted to but different from Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, and Sharon Hayes’ In the Near Future. We talked about memories of that day. We talked about the nature of protest; its inefficacy, its necessity, its confusion, its failure. We walked because I did not know what else to do. I still don’t.

“Connected learning is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success, or civic engagement.”
from Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design

For the last month or so, I’ve been dwelling in Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design, a research synthesis report that outlines the research and findings of the Connected Learning Research Network, a group chaired by Dr. Mimi Ito.  In addition to the report, I’ve enjoyed the series of recent webinars centered around the report:

• The Essence of Connected Learning Environments
• Effective Mentorship Through Shared Purpose
• The Realities of Youth and Peer Culture: Balancing Learning Opportunities and Risks
• Connected Learning As Pathway to Equity & Opportunity
• Assessing Connected Learning Outcomes (of all the excellent webinars, this is the one that provided a powerful push in my thinking and resonated most deeply with me)

Supplementary readings have also informed my understanding of this report:

• What’s All the Fuss About Connected Learning, Dr. Henry Jenkins
• Connected Learning and the Unclear Road to Equity, Justin Reich
• Connected Learning: Interdisciplinary Researchers Recommend Core Changes, Dr. Mimi Ito
• Connected Learning: An Agenda for Social Change, Dr. Mimi Ito (an especially powerful primer to the report)
• National Writing Project Connected Learning Inquiry Group
• The Connected Learning Google Plus Community
• Connected Learning videos at the DML Research Hub YouTube Channel

Additional definitions and explanations can be found here; the infographic embedded here is also a helpful visualization.

In “Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Social Change”, Dr. Ito asserts that connected learning:

“…is not about any particular platform, technology, or teaching technique, like blended learning or the flipped classroom or Khan Academy or massive open online courses. It’s agnostic about the method and content area. Instead, it’s about asking what is the optimal experience for each learner and for a high-functioning learning community?”

In the Connected Learning:  An Agenda for Research and Design report, the authors describe connected learning as a design model:

“Our approach draws on sociocultural learning theory in valuing learning that is embedded within meaningful practices and supportive relationships, and that recognizes diverse pathways and forms of knowledge and expertise. Our design model builds on this approach by focusing on supports and mechanisms for building environments that connect learning across the spheres of interests, peer culture, and academic life. We propose a set of design features that help build shared purpose, opportunities for production, and openly networked resources and infrastructure” (5).

I’ve recreated this visualization embedded in the report to provide another way of looking at connected learning and thinking about how this model seeks to “knit” together the contexts of peer-supported, interest powered, and academically oriented for learning (12):

I’m still coding and organizing my notes from the report as I try to pull out the big takeaways for me, but as I review these notes and the ones I took from the webinar on assessing connected learning outcomes last week, I’m thinking about this first wave of big ideas and questions:

• How do libraries develop learning agendas that are aligned with agendas for social change in their community?  How do the two inform each other?
• How can libraries embrace this approach to designing learning environments to help us move from “nice to necessary?”, a question that was posed at ALA Midwinter in 2013, and that I’m attempting to flesh out in my work here as a Learning Strategist at Cleveland Public Library (and that I hope to share with you later this year).
• How do we create learning environments and experiences as well as relationships with those we serve to move beyond the initial “sweet spot” of attachment to building a deeper level of engagement?  How do we as librarians (with the help of our community) design learning environments that provide diverse entry points and access for people to form communities of learning where they can create more nuanced narratives of learning as they create, share, and connect with others?  How do we design learning spaces and experiences that create more “pathways to opportunity” and participation?
• How might libraries of all kinds serve as an “open network” that is a medium and a mentor to helping people connect and move more meaningfully across multiple learning spaces and spheres within their local community as well as a larger and more global community of learners?  Kris Gutierrez’s metaphor of “learning as movement” across many kinds of contexts has spurred this thinking.
• Kris Gutierrez and Bill Penuel discussed concepts of horizontal learning and boundary crossing in their webinar and explored the question of how do we help people leverage the practices, disposition, and expertises honed in one learning space to another to go deeper with that learning and expand the possibilities for action and participation.  How do libraries support communities of learning in engaging in this boundary crossing and engaging in horizontal learning to build greater personal as well as civic capacity?
• Both Gutierrez and Penuel emphasized the need to further contemplate and explore individual and collective assessment of these practices.  In the words of Dr. Gutierrez, “What tools, dispositions, practices, forms of expertises TRAVEL and how do we know it when we see it?”  I’m also thinking about how we frame formative and summative assessments as touchpoints for learning.
• How can librarians help people take deep “vertical knowledge” in a specific content area and apply it across multiple learning contexts and spaces?  This question relates to horizontal learning and boundary crossing.  I like to think of these concepts as cross-pollination of ideas and learning.
• How do more effectively build vocabulary for this kind of learning in our learning communities?
• How do we more effectively thread and address issues of equity across our instructional design and assessment processes?
• How do libraries cultivate deeper and more meaningful partnerships and connections with other institutions of learning in their communities for more strategic impact?
• How do we as librarians facilitate the creation of sustained networks to help people make connections between social, academic, and interest driven learning? ( see page pp.46-47 in the report for more on this question)

As you can see, these learning and design principles as well as the findings and concerns shared in the report have saturated my thinking.  As I make additional readings and passes through my notes from the report, I will continue to take an inquiry stance to further unpack the concepts and language embedded in this work.  I’ll also revisit the case studies included in the report to further develop ideas on what this work could look like in practice in different library settings.  In addition, I will carve out more time to listen as well as contribute to conversations about connected learning in the NWP study group as well as the Connected Learning Google Plus group.

Filed under: Participatory Librarianship and Learning, Research Interests, Teaching and Learning Tagged: Assessment, Connected Learning, Connected Learning Report, design