If it's History You Want -

I like to see everything through a historian's eyes. This, in my opinion, is the best place on the earth to study study the history of technology - The British Museum in London. I spent a very hot day in June seeing treasures I'd read about all my life. I stood transfixed, despite the 90 degree temperatures inside, studying a letter written two thousand years ago by a Roman soldier to the folks back home. He was homesick and asked about his family. In many ways, nothing changes

What Do You Think...

For this week's second post, I'd like to ask a basic question. Since my concern is the effective operation of school media centers, let me ask anyone who'd like to comment: What is the single most important element present in a media center that contributes to student learning? I have my own answer, and I'll post it later in the week.

Saturday..It's time to post my reveal, as they say on H&G TV. My answer: a helpful and dedicate media center staff. I believe that we should treat our students and teachers as customers. That's about it.

Blog Rally

As I add more entries, I feel that I'm creating this blog in reverse, or from the middle in both directions. In any case, this title includes a link to a fine blog for media center people and other concerned educators - the Georgia Library Media Association. In fact, after a search through a dozen or so other state library blogs, I'd would say that Georgia's blog is among the best. The blog includes a number of useful links, articles, and technology hints, just as a good media center blog hopefully would.

Tekhnologia

I like to look at the origins of words as a way to understand what they actually mean. Teknologia, a word from Attican Greek, means simply a "systematic treatment of an art or craft." (Definition of Technology, n.d.)Thats what we're dealing with now - teknologia, but we know the word now means a great deal more than the first definition. I'll bet the word meant a great deal more even to the Greeks of 400B.C.
Technology - our word - also, I believe, ask us to think about how our view of things in the world changes as technology expands ( I don't think tekhnologia has ever contracted for very long). That's what this single page definition does. Read an insightful account of how technology has expanded our view of an ordinary tree.

Definition of Technology. (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2007, from http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/techdef.htm.

The M.C. and the T.I.

The media center and technology integration: I would like to describe what I think might be several of the new roles that the media center will undertake as the technology integration center for the school.
Our role as the faculty members who keep abreast of new technologies, acquire them for the media center and use them within the media center are, in my opinion, well established. The media center serves as our classroom, learning lab and as our collaborative space. Our tools for that role include technologies that were developed during the previous thirty years. The OPAC, automated circulation systems, VCR players, and cable TV are several such tools; a second wave of technologies, including the Internet, high-speed computer connections, search engines, video streaming, LCD projectors and laptop computers came along in the last ten years. However, all these technologies, I believe, are devices that are used and maintained most often within the media center.
Technology Integration, by my definition, differs from our previous roles in its creative dimension. Blogging, podcasting, laptop-ready media, along with editing software – and the ability to share projects through high-speed cable – mark a vital expansion of self-expression for students and faculty. That potential might mark how the media specialist fills a critical need in the near future. Classroom teachers, pressed for instructional time, will rely on media specialist to select, filter, learn, disseminate, teach, advise, and build a collaborative framework that will, hopefully, translate specific technologies into important learning.

4Teachers Tools

Web site of the Month: 4Teacher Tools. This site's simple home page conceals the rich collection behind each of the links feature on this web site." Teach with Technology", the site which interest us most here, provides access to dozens of very useful and current links.

Everything is Somewhere: A Look at Geography and the Media Center

Keith Murray and Duncan Shiell , two cartographers who help run the national mapping services in the U.K., propose in their article, A Framework for Geographic Information in Great Britain, a system for disseminating the huge amount of data their agency collects to people, public and private, who need it.
In the article's preface, Murray and Shiell describe a situation common to media centers as well - that technology is developing more quickly than we can assimilate it, and that technology has improved data collection more in a decade than during the entire hundred years before. The authors even offer definitions for information ( simple facts), knowledge ( analyzed information) and wisdom ( knowledge which might better humankind) (p. 123). The body of the article, in a description of how data might be directed to flow upward in steadily more useful forms, uses terms common to media centers, including the phrase "reference information" (Murray & Shiell, 2004, p. 127).
By reading this article, I gained insight into dynamics common to another organization which, like media centers, operates from and for the information economy.

Murray, K. & Shiell, D. (2004). A Framework for Geographic Information in Great Britain. The Cartographic Journal, 41(2), 123-129.

Definition: Technology Integration

I believe that technology integration is difficult to define due to the sheer depth and breadth that the idea implies. I'll start by giving my own very general definition of education: the transmission of culture. Here's my definition of technology: any method that expedites the operation of a concept or an idea. Integration might mean the process of creating a new concept or operation from two previously unrelated factors. For me, anyway, technology integration describes any process that materially assist in the transmission of culture. How and what will be changed in our time as a particular technologies operates on all the world's cultures is, I think, the big question.

Super- Evolution and the Media Center: Outdoing the Dinosaurs

For my initial post on this blog, I would like to comment on my experience as a public librarian ( which I was for 23 years) and as a school media specialist (2008- 2009 will be my eighth year). When I began working in a small public library, disco was king and Elvis was recently deceased. My first task was to help throw away the old card catalog and bring in the new microfiche machines. Eventually, we added microfiche readers for newspaper research. In the mid 1990's we added our first true OPAC catalog and, soon after, Internet connections. We added collections of video tapes and books on tape along the way. The Internet, more than any other technology, changed how our public library operated and how with served our patrons . We had become, without a change of name, a media center.
School libraries had already adopted the name change to media centers by the time I shifted careers in 2000. With a focused goal of serving a very specific purpose - the school curriculum - school libraries tended, I believe, to adopt to change rather quickly. The first species of media center, to use an evolutionary metaphor, might be called media center papyrii, or the media center of the printed page. The media center evolved into a new species just as disco died in the early 1980's. Call that media center the media center divisii, the media center of diversity, with an ability to incorporate print, film, and electronic formats into its collection. With the deep, and rapid spread of newest technologies - of which this blog is an example - the media center is approaching its third transformation within a single generation. The newest species might be called the media center collaboratus, the media center for collaboration and creation , with a focus on providing direction and leadership on how to cause technology integration to truly happen in each school. I like to believe that each previous species is not dead. We add function rather than detract it. We still offer books and printed material; we still keep many other forms of media and we will create a niche for ourselves as T.I. collaborators as well.