I took a few hours away from weeding in the garden yesterday to attend the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, which will be heavily blogged, Flickred, and Twittered. (See Michelle Boule’s notes at Wandering Eyre.) Opening keynoter Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT’s Interactive Media Comparative Studies Program, spoke about games, media literacy, and participative culture.

Jenkins shared ideas that are in a MacArthur Foundation White Paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” He made the point that young “digital natives,” who we might regard as advance and adept beyond our help, in fact, badly need the guidance of adults—parents, teachers, librarians—in social skills and cultural competencies. Students need help with research and critical thinking skills, particularly those with least access to computers. If you only have 20 minutes on the computer in the library for your homework assignments, you’re more likely to take the top hits. Also, students need a nudge to transfer the knowledge or skills from a gaming environment to real life. Finally, young people need help developing ethics in their participative environments.

ALA Editions author Joyce Valenza has been exploring these issues for some time. I recall her concern years ago that students weren’t nearly as good with Google as they thought. Now social software raises new issues. For ideas on guiding digital natives, listen to the podcast of Joyce’s 2007 National Educational Computing Conference presentation with English teacher Ken Rodoff “Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0” (courtesy of the Apple Distinguished Educators series.) Joyce posted an accompanying wiki pathfinder here.

Jenkins mentioned a couple interesting projects for educators. Icue, a collaboration with NBC News, will use blogs, social networks, and games to connect kids to events in U.S. history. As an example of creative mixing, he described a theatrical adaptation of the Moby Dick story created by teens in Rhode Island. See more in the blog post here. Jenkins is looking for partner libraries who would explore new ways of teaching Moby Dick.

See the Project NML website for more ideas on new media literacies.

I always enjoy buying the local paper when I travel. I especially like reading the Washington Post for its political coverage. At ALA conferences, I look for coverage of the library field. I didn’t get a chance to read the paper much at this conference, though I remember a headline in the “Style” section. But Tuesday night, on the plane ride home, I stumbled upon a bigger story than librarian makeovers.

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote about District Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s presentation Saturday morning, calling it “an unusually open discussion” of his work as chief judge of a special court that supervises applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Lamberth was the court’s chief judge from 1995 to 2002. Pincus called the presentation “probably the most revealing discussion to date of actions by the FISA court, which since 1978 has approved wiretaps and other secret surveillance activities involving foreign intelligence and terrorism cases.” Lamberth descirbed being awaken at 3 a.m. on August 8, 1998, after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to approve five wiretaps, including one of Osama bin Laden’s former secretary in Texas.

You can view a video of the presentation on the Washington Office’s Web site.

At last year’s ALA Annual Conference, I caught the end of Chris Anderson’s presentation on his “long tail” concept. His book The Long Tail had just been published. I slipped out the door as questions began and bought a copy, reading it in the week after conference. It’s fair to say it rattled my world. For a while, I was bringing it in our editorial meeting so often it created a sort of comfortable, predictable rhythm to our discussions (right, Jenni?). After all, the concept seemed to suggest that what I’ve been doing the past 15 years or so, finding and publishing the experts, wasn’t important. Around the same time, the Economist published a special section on participative publishing. Words like revolutionary carry heft in a publication not given to hype. And it was their business they were covering. I continue to think hard about the new place of ALA Publishing in a time of participative publishing.

The value of authority is also a concern of the academy. Barbara Fister at the ACRL blog pointed out a Chronicle of Higher Education article on scholarly communication and Web 2.0.

As we work on the “reference canon” Guide to Reference, we consider authority and community is a big issue in our Guide to Reference project, as do other reference publishers. Bob Kieft, our general editor will lead a panel discussion Monday morning at Annual Conference, “Reference Works: From Authority to Community: A Discussion Forum on the New ALA Guide to Reference.” Along with fellow panelists John Dove of Xrefer, Alan Poole of Birds of North America Online, and publishing consultant Judy Luther, he will explore ways in which professionally published reference works can take advantage of social networking to strengthen their appeal and usefulness to librarians and library users. The discussion will be in the Washington Convention Center (WCC) 204C, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm.

If you’ve been part of the Chicago publishing scene as long as I have, you’ve seen your fair share of convention centers. Oh, the groups that walk through the doors on any given day. This week it might be dentists. Next week it could be power tool executives. A friend of a friend told me about a surprisingly wild convention he attended for funeral directors in Las Vegas. I think it would be fun to weasel my way into the big restaurant and hospitality convention that convenes in Chicago each year.

Anyway, the groups mentioned in the subject line were commingling at the ACRL conference in Baltimore this past week. It was pretty easy to tell who was with which group. (Though, did you know that Mary Kay reps now wear black rather than pink?…much hipper than in the 80s).

I’m not a big fan of convention center spaces…conventions, yes. It’s very energizing gathering and talking shop with like-minded folks. But the spaces themselves? Not so much. They’re functional, I suppose. But, they’re pretty much all the same. Miles of gray carpet decorated with bright orange or maroon or red or blue designs (leftovers from airport terminals?). A lone Starbucks appearing like an oasis in some far-flung area of the building. Humongous numbers designating the meeting rooms. Tables with coffee urns long drained of their precious fluid, surrounded by crumbled up napkins and spilled packets of powder “coffee whitener.”

Who designs these places, I ask myself. They are functional, sure. And, they conveniently contain throngs of people, yes. But, must they be so heartless?

Contrast the space with the conversations swirling around at the ACRL conference. The underlying theme, it seemed to me, was how can we make academic libraries anything BUT heartless. So many discussions on understanding the users…be they faculty, grads or undergrads, and finding ways to meet their needs. I popped in on a panel discussion, which included ALA Editions authors Steven Bell and John Shank (Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to the Tools and Techniques).( Here we are at a reception that evening, by the way. I’m the one with the beer. What can I say? An editor’s life is tough!)
Sean Cordes, of the Iowa State University was describing multimedia stations his library had developed, which included sophisticated technology and assistance with the multimedia projects students were increasingly being asked to do. Understand what students were being asked to do, and ask yourself how the library can support that. Right on! Technology on its own is cool, but, as Steven Bell pointed out, “Pedagogy before technology.”

Later in conference I had lunch with ALA Editions author Brian Mathews of “The Ubiquitous Librarian” fame. Ubiquitous indeed. Brian has gained some notoriety for his work using Facebook and MySpace to find out what assignments students are working on and providing suggestions on how the library can help with the research. He has developed one-on-one relationships with campus leaders…presidents of student associations, resident advisors, athletes to find out how the libraries can help their various members (and to help evangelize library services). He was telling me that he’ll occasionally walk through the library, striking up conversations with students. He’ll skillfully get around to asking them things like, “Why did you choose to sit in this space? What sorts of spaces or services would you like to see in the library?”

Can you imagine a convention center designer doing that??

Academic libraries these days are truly about being more than “functional.”

I’ve been happily buried under lately, reading some interesting manuscripts (which I hope to find time to blog about later). But, this afternoon, I realized that I’d better start getting my schedule together for the ACRL conference, which is just weeks away(!).

I am looking forward to seeing some of our authors there, and, in general, just soaking in the buzz. There are many, many challenges in academic librarianship, but also some interesting ideas floating around. One focus of mine in the past year or so has been to build into our list some practical titles that offer solutions to some of these challenges. A couple of days ago, I gave you a taste of the Susan Gibbons book coming out on the Net Gen student.

Recently, I put into production another manuscript I’m excited about: Steven Bell and John Shank’s Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to the Tools and Techniques. You may have heard Bell and Shank speaking about their vision of the new role for the librarian: the blended librarian. This idea reflects the authors’ conviction that, to thrive, academic librarians must be better integrated into the teaching and learning processes at their institutions. In addition to library skills, the blended librarian brings in information technology and instructional design skills. The book is organized around “design thinking”, which affects everything librarians do, from collaborating with others on campus, having a presence on course management systems, helping faculty save time, and creating digital learning materials. As they talked about instructional design, this section jumped out at me.

Academic librarians, at the core of the profession, are educators. Whether they work in public or technical service areas, the work of academic librarians is directed to helping students and faculty achieve academic success. Instructional design is a set of skills that are used by many educators to create products that enable people to learn more effectively. We think instructional design has the potential to help us make that success possible, and that is owing to the improvements it can bring to how we approach the construct and implementation of new services and resources. Along the way another powerful influence in the development of our ideas and practices is design thinking….

To tell you the truth, I don’t even want to know how these two authors pulled off getting the manuscript to me on time. Both are impressively busy. Steven Bell, as you probably know, is nothing if not prolific, with a number of blogs, journal articles, etc., to his name. I have never asked him this, but I suspect he’s one of those who can get by on four hours of sleep. They have started a new blog, Designing Better Libraries, that expands on some of the “design thinking” ideas that are behind the book.

Recent other additions to our list that will be especially interesting to the academic library crowd:

Creating the One-Shot Library Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jerilyn Veldof. The one-shot lesson continues to be the vehicle by which many academic librarians provide information literacy and bibliographic instruction. I’m a sucker for practicality, and this book is a gem in its step-by-step approach. And, it shows how to deliver the information so it sticks in those undergraduate (and graduate) minds.

Information Literacy Assessment: Standards-Based Tools and Assignments by Teresa Neely. Again, very practical. Neely frames the book in the context of the ACRL standards and, using best practices from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, provides assessment examples to see how well students are developing their information literacy skills and assignments designed to sharpen those skills.