ALA Midwinter 2018 (Denver): Rethinking, Re-viewing, and Walking Through a Magical Forest

A colleague (Puck Malamud) here in Denver for the American Library Association (ALA) 2018 Midwinter Meeting, which formally begins later today (Friday, February 9, 2018), accurately observed during our brunch yesterday that librarians and other trainer-teacher-learner-doers—what Jonathan Nalder calls “edunauts”—are completely “meta.” We love to look at the thing behind the thing: if we’re immersed in learning, we love exploring how learners learn; if we’re writers, we love exploring the writing process itself; and if we’re thinking about the myriad possible futures for libraries and other critically important learning organizations, we’re going to be talking about, re-viewing, and rethinking the very processes we use to help nurture the future(s) of our dreams.

Sitting with University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science Director R. David Lankes for dinner shortly after I arrived late Wednesday afternoon, I found the meta and rethinking flowing freely very early during a conversation about how we are rethinking the roles of libraries and library staff within the communities we serve. Responding to a question I asked him about his latest projects, he described how he and his faculty colleagues are exploring the very terminology they use to describe the sort of organization they are continuing to nurture at the university. Where we have seen “library “ schools evolve into “information” schools, Dave and his colleagues are taking it an additional step and “placing a stake in the ground” to promote the development of a “school of knowledge”—a place where the focus is not on the library or the information, but on the impact that the university’s graduates will have on the communities they serve throughout their careers through thoughtful application of the knowledge they have gained—and continue to gain as lifelong learners.

It’s a theme Dave has been developing and exploring with colleagues all over the world for the past few years—a natural extension of ideas he proposed in The Atlas of New Librarianship and other books he has written; has developed through presentations and conversations with his peers—what Jonathan would call his fellow edunauts; and will further clarify through a monograph he and University of South Carolina faculty are currently preparing for publication. And the conversation remains open to all of us through writing he has done and presentations he continues to share, including the archived recording of and slide deck (with speaker notes) for “The Opportunities and Obligations of the Knowledge School.” Although the clear and obvious target audience for that wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking “Opportunities” presentation was a group of school librarians, it would be a shame if it didn’t reach the larger audience of edunauts engaged in training-teaching-learning-doing endeavors. All of us contributing to our wonderfully dynamic onsite-online (blended learning) environment through K-12, higher education, vocational schools, museums, libraries, and workplace learning programs need to be looking for and taking concrete actions that produce positive results. That’s what Dave and his colleagues and many others are attempting to do:

The flow of meta and rethinking continued, for me, the following night in what felt like part of one continuing and ever-expanding conversation as I had dinner with Denver-based colleagues/friends/sources of inspiration Pat Wagner and Leif Smith. The conversation, toward the end of the evening, turned to a discussion about the process of rethinking how to conduct interviews for a book in progress. I mentioned to Leif that I was capturing interviewees’ comments though the use of Google Docs for the interviews themselves. (The interviewees have access to a unique document for each interview. I post questions. They respond in real time, which means I see their thoughts taking shape on the page word by word, and I can actually be formulating and entering new questions that help clarify their response while they are still in the middle of crafting their answers. The completed document, after light editing for style and typographic errors, becomes the accurate transcript from which I draw material for inclusion in the book.) This process produces richly evocative passages in each interviewee’s own voice—often conversational, but also refined in-the-moment through that typed-chat format—and obviously contains more content than I’ll ever be able to use in the book (Change the World Using Social Media). So I have been taking some of the more focused interviews and running them, in their entirety, as separate articles on my blog along with excerpts from the manuscript-in-progress as a way of obtaining early peer review that will help shape the final content.

Leif, fascinated by what was for him a new approach to interviewing, provided one of those amazing observations that just spring full-blown from him as if poetic phrasing and inspiring thought grows on the trees in his head: “A book is like the footprints of a creature that has walked through a magical forest, and if you follow those footprints, something like the spirit of the forest enters into you. That’s what happens if the book is really good.

I later joked with friends who often gather for evening coffee and dessert at the end of the day at conferences, that I never did get around to ordering dessert after that dinner with Pat and Leif. But, I added, that lovely passage really wasn’t, after all, dessert; it was a second main course, expertly prepared by one of the great thought-chefs in my life, and a reminder that our experiences at conferences along the lines of ALA’s Midwinter Meeting extend far beyond the walls of the rooms where the formal presentations and discussions are occurring.

Naming Opportunities: Reflections on Library and Non-library Learning Spaces

We used to have wonderful, clearly-defined words like “library,” “librarian,” “classroom,” and “teacher.” And some of you may still have crystal-clear visions of what those words mean. But reading two very thoughtful pieces today makes me wonder, once again, whether our nomenclature is failing to reflect the evolving world of educational technology and learning resources in which we work, play, and live—the world so well-explored and documented by New Media Consortium Horizon Project reports.

YOUmedia Center, Chicago Public Library

Reading—and equally importantly, looking at the great set of photographs included in—Buffy Hamilton’s “A Visit to Discovery High School: Rethinking Learning Spaces and Learner Experiences” on her “Unquiet Librarian” blog this evening initially made me think about many of the fabulously creative learning spaces I’ve been lucky enough to visit, photograph, and describe in presentations this year. I see them in libraries. I see them in academic settings. I see them in corporate buildings and “training centers” where management, staff, and learners are committed to (as the Association for Talent Development so aptly puts it) creating “a world that works better.” And seeing them so explicitly displayed in Buffy’s article makes me see how similar those spaces are becoming—and have become. Which raises a question I posted in response to Buffy’s thoughts:

When does a library become interchangeable with other learning spaces rather than being unique?

The knee-jerk reaction to that question, for many of us, is “when it no longer has books.” But that ignores the changing—and very-much changed—nature of libraries and, in particular, library collections, as Rick Anderson writes in “The Death of the Collection and the Necessity of Library-Publisher Collaboration: Young Librarians on the Future of Libraries,” which he posted earlier today on the “Scholarly Kitchen” blog. Among the many very thoughtful points he makes is that a review of a group of young librarians’ work strongly suggests that “…the library collection, as traditionally understood, is dead.

“It’s worth noting,” he continues, “that these writers weren’t saying the print collection is dead, but rather that the very concept of a librarian-built, prediction-based collection, in whatever format, is moribund. Furthermore, none of them seemed to be particularly upset about this; on the contrary, they generally mentioned it more or less in passing and as if it were a self-evident reality and nothing to get worked up about.”

Library Media Lab, University of Texas at Austin

Let’s be clear about one thing at this point: neither writer is suggesting that libraries are dead or in danger of extinction. Their writing is very much grounded in documenting the positive, exciting evolution of libraries, librarianship, and learning. Buffy implicitly sees what so many of us are seeing: physical changes within libraries that reflect the increasingly strong roles libraries are playing in lifelong learning (including providing onsite and online formal and informal learning opportunities for the increasingly extended communities they serve). Rick’s article focuses more on how the mindset of the young librarians he is discussing affects the organizations in which they work—a mindset that means the change has already occurred in some libraries and will continue to expand as these young librarians replace more and more of their predecessors who had different visions of what the words “library” and “librarianship” implied.

And to carry this more explicitly to my question about when a library becomes interchangeable with other learning spaces, let’s acknowledge something I’ve maintained for several years now: librarians increasingly are trainer-teacher-learners (or, to use more common terminology, “learning facilitators”). But not all trainer-teacher-learners are librarians—a distinction that, up to now, has provided us with a way to clearly differentiate between the two groups. But as more libraries evolve to include those wide-open spaces that Buffy so wonderfully documents through the photographs in her article, and as more libraries take an entirely different approach to what a collection is, and as more first-rate trainer-teacher-learners become better at information management and the sort of educational technology that is increasingly common to libraries and other learning spaces, will we see library spaces (onsite as well as online) remain easily differentiated from other learning spaces, or are we beginning to see a merging of learning and librarianship that will bring us all closer together and provide exciting new opportunities for everyone willing to collaborate in this potential endeavor?

Very much an admirer of R. David Lankes’ work (including Expect More and The Atlas of New Librarianship), I have always been intrigued by his suggestion that “a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library” (Atlas, p. 16); he also has some wonderfully nuanced thoughts on the nature of collections within libraries. His ideas help us, at least in part, to define libraries by the presence of librarians; by extension, they also help us recognize how much we define classrooms by the presence of teachers/instructors/trainers. But the equation frays a little at the edges when we see increasing numbers of great librarians doing what other great trainer-teacher-learners do, in ways that don’t clearly differentiate them from those other trainer-teacher-learners. It frays much further when we see the library spaces in which they weave their magic becoming increasingly similar to non-library learning spaces (and vice versa) , as some of those spaces documented via Buffy’s photographs confirm.

These are learning spaces with lots of open space as opposed to spaces dominated by print collections. These are learning spaces that are learner-centric—spaces featuring moveable furniture and moveable (including bring-your-own-device) technology that can quickly be reset to meet varying learning needs that can come up even within a single learning session. These are spaces where short-term as well as lifelong learning is supported. And, increasingly, these are spaces that look the same in a variety of settings—Buffy includes photographs of a corporate learning center—something we clearly have not yet addressed with the language we use to describe our libraries and other learning spaces, and something that, as we address it, may lead us to even more exciting learning possibilities and collaborations than we’ve have ever seen or imagined.

ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting: Radical Meeting, Learning, and Collaboration

You didn’t have to be in Chicago from Friday, January 30 to Tuesday, February 3 to avoid being left behind. American Library Association (ALA) staff, members, and presenters, during the Association’s 2015 Midwinter Meeting, displayed an amazing, noteworthy commitment to bringing colleagues together regardless of geographic, economic, and temporal barriers—and, in the process, provided an example every trainer-teacher-learner can benefit from exploring.

Association staff began the process, in the days before the conference began, by reaching out to members with a set of tips on how to be part of the conference whether onsite or offsite; they also carried the popular ALA Youth Media Awards ceremony to offsite members through a live webcast of the event. This is clearly not an association that cares only for those paying registration fees and booking rooms in conference hotels.

Onsite individual Association members helped augment these efforts connecting offsite colleagues to the conference in a variety of ways, including the use of a Google Hangout and an extremely active Twitter feed that fostered plenty of back and forth. The Hangout, designed to serve as an episode of Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training podcast series for those involved in training-teaching-learning within libraries, was a successful experiment in creating a gathering that, through the discussion of “bringing offsite colleagues into the room,” engaged colleagues in the moment and produced a 30-minute archived recording demonstrating how Hangouts work (and, in their weaker moments, don’t work) to extend live conversations beyond the barriers of physical rooms and to further extend them beyond their initial synchronous interactions. And the multi-day #alamw15 flow of tweets from onsite and offsite Association members was so heavy during the ALA Youth Media Awards ceremony Monday morning (February 2) that it completely overwhelmed the feed from the social media tool (Twubs) I was using to monitor the exchanges; new tweets appeared to pop up at one-second intervals, and a notification at the top of the Twubs page confirmed, at one point, that more than 480 tweets were waiting to move from a queue into the actual Twubs feed I was observing on my mobile device—which means the feed was, at that point, a full eight minutes behind what all of us were producing. The fast, steady pulse of tweets flowing into the feed made me feel as if I were watching a heart monitor somehow attached to an Olympic athlete engaged in a sprint.

It seemed that the ALA community’s commitment to inclusivity never faltered. When Atlas of New Librarianship author R. David Lankes began setting up for his hour-long “Radical Conversations on New Librarianship” session Monday morning, for example, he obviously was fully immersed in extending the conversation (and the size of his room) through the same efforts others had pursued. Using Adobe Connect to reach out to offsite participants and using a projector to display the chat feed so those of us inside the physical space at McCormick Place in Chicago could see what our offsite colleagues were saying, Lankes made it possible for us to at least be aware of both sides (onsite and offsite) of an ongoing, intriguing conversation about how librarianship is continuing to evolve to the benefit of all whom it serves. It was clear—as was the case with that Google Hangout Sunday afternoon—that the conversation would continue after the formal session ended: several entry portals to the conversation remain on Lankes’ blog, and the book that will come out of those conversations is sure to inspire additional exchanges long after the ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting begins fading in our memories.

Another extended no-one-left-behind conversation that was easy to join during the conference was the Association’s current efforts to update its strategic plan. We often hear, from ALA staff, that “the conversation starts here” at the Midwinter Meeting and the Annual (summer) Conference, but the current strategic planning process shows the conversations are also continuous—beginning before we arrive onsite, continuing (rather than starting) while we are face to face, and extending far beyond the few days we have together during those meetings and conferences. Three town hall meetings had been held online from November through December 2014, and archived recordings remain available for those who don’t want to be left behind; several 90-minute onsite “kitchen table conversation” sessions facilitated by Association members during the 2015 Midwinter Conference were open to anyone interested in helping shape the strategic planning process and, by extension, the near-term future of the Association itself. Conversations are scheduled to continue as the planning process proceeds, and anyone paying attention knows that this is yet another example of an association keenly aware of a foundational tenet: without membership engagement, there is no real association in any sense of that word.

Those of us involved in training-teaching-learning—and nearly everyone in libraries falls into that category at some time during day-to-day library work—are far from unfamiliar with what was on display at the Midwinter Conference. The nurturing of community that took place there (as well as before and after the event) is what we strive to nurture as we develop and maintain the valuable communities of learning that provide meaningful experiences for those we serve. It’s what connects conferences. Workshops. Webinars. Courses. And every other learning opportunity part of our overall dynamic learning landscape. And I, for one, am glad to be part of associations that do more than understand that idea—they transform the concept from idea to reality in ways that make a difference to everyone they/we touch.

R. David Lankes, Learning, and Working Overtime

Listening to a recording of R. David Lankes’s “The Faithful and the Radicals” over the weekend felt like going to church. It’s inspirational. Transformative. And steeped in a sense of the divine. It is the sort of plea for community, collaboration, and action that runs consistently from the earliest seminal public presentations of our history through a continuum that includes more recent efforts including Jon Stewart’s speech at the end of his Rally to Restore Sanity in October 2010.

Although “Faithful and Radicals” is ostensibly about school librarians, libraries, and the society-shaping roles they play and need to play in the extended communities they serve, it’s really far much more than that. If we are at all interested in the present and future of our communities—and who among us can afford not to be?—Lankes’s thoughts can’t help but touch and move us.

He is, as always, funny. (Who else would jokingly threaten to slash the tires on our cars if we spend more time creating booklists and pages full of links to online resources that soon will be broken than fulfilling our potential to contribute to the success of our communities?) Engaging. (The positive reactions to what he says are audible throughout the recording.) Radical (in the complex, multifaceted way that the word “radical” in its varying definitions implies: foundational, rooted, fundamental, and cool as well as extreme). Visionary. (His proposed mission statement for librarians—“The Mission of Librarians is to Improve Society through Facilitating Knowledge Creation in their Communities”—flows right off the pages of The Atlas of New Librarianship into “The Faithful and the Radical.”) Poignant. And humble. (He actually pokes fun at his own title for the presentation, commenting on how it could serve equally well as the name of a PBS production or a soap opera.) Above all, he’s obviously an incredibly talented teacher-trainer-learner—as I learned while participating in his New Librarianship Master Class (a massive open online course) and writing extensively about it last year. And all of those attributes combine to make him the sort of mover and shaker who keeps the world alive, vibrant, dynamic, thinking, and smiling—which is, in itself, a point worth lingering over momentarily, for it wasn’t at all clear a year ago that he would still be with us. He has openly, painfully, and beautifully, via his blog, chronicled his experiences with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and he begins “Faithful and Radicals” by noting that it’s his first major public presentation since undergoing stem cell transplants.

But that’s just the backdrop to much of what he accomplishes with “Faithful and Radicals.” His starting point is something every one of us needs to remember: that all of us—regardless of profession, interests, values, and experiences—has moments in which our faith is severely tested and doubts can become overwhelming. With that in mind, he recalls a recent, personal crisis of faith in which he asked himself why he continues to remain part of the group fighting to assure that libraries—and, more importantly—librarians (which, as I’ve written many times before, are our close allies in training-teaching-learning, and vice versa) are supported and that they are active participants in shaping their communities.

When all is said and done, the answer was quite simple. He decided that the strong role librarians play in serving communities—similar to the role I see any great trainer-teacher-learner playing—is so overwhelming powerful that he was “unwilling to be part of those who stood by and destroyed something I loved. Ultimately, the decision was, ‘I have a limited time on this Earth, and I’m going to use it to build up and be part of what I believe in because I have faith…that this stuff works. I have faith that we improve people’s lives. I have faith in you.”

It’s far more than the oft-quoted mission to support reading, he noted, adding that he actually hates the pervasive libraries-support-reading promotions because libraries and librarians promote so much more that is essential to learning, community-building, and creativity.

“Working with kids on an interest of theirs to develop an interest of theirs…this gets a big big big happy smiley face,” he reminds us as he moves us into a deeper, richer exploration of what it means to play leadership roles in our communities through libraries or any other significant learning organization. “It’s about using resources to learn, to improve, to build knowledge,” and to help prepare learners for their roles as “stewards of this world.”

The current movement to support the creation and growth of makerspaces within libraries, he suggests, is only part of the story—far from rooted in questions about whether to purchase a 3D printer or any other form of technology to create that makerspace: “If your library is not already a makerspace, you’re doing it wrong.”

Nearing the end of his presentation, he doubles back to overtly address his decision to undergo all the brutally awful treatment he has endured. Reflects on what it means to choose between giving up or fighting against a life-threatening disease through potentially lethal treatments. And acknowledge that surrender would have deprived him of the opportunity to be with us long enough to share “The Faithful and the Radical” with us.

From “Virtual Dave…Real Blog”

“I have been at the edge of certain death. When I got my stem cell transplant…I had to go through terrible chemo, chemo that ripped sores in my tongue, chemo that tore out all my intestinal tract, chemo that took my hair, took my energy, took my ability to walk up a flight of stairs, and it even killed the very marrow in my bones. I voluntarily took a lethal injection. Why? Because I had faith. I had faith in my doctors. I had faith in my nurses, and I had faith in my caretaker and my wife and my family and myself that I was going to get there, that I was going to face down certain death and that I was going to move ahead, and I’m here without a hair in my head to show for it. But I’m here…

“Faith can be hard. Radical can be hard. Moving out of your comfort zone and seeing yourself as larger than you think you are can be hard. But it is essential. I have been through my crisis of faith, You have seen your crisis of faith. We will live through it, and we will use it to become even stronger radicals. We will use it to take that faith message to those who don’t really have it…”

Reaching the end of that recording, I was left rethinking long-held beliefs about what decision I might make if/when faced with the sort of life-threatening situation Lankes has struggled; I have to admit that what he says and what he does has, in the most significant of ways, served the purpose of great learning facilitation: he made me do some serious rethinking about personal comfort and preferences as opposed to the greater responsibilities each of us has.

Lankes could have opted to forego the fight. In a sense, however, he decided to work beyond the shift life had apparently decided to assign him and do some overtime by staying with us. It’s the sort of overtime for which there can be no adequate payment. But perhaps we can do our part in rewarding him by listening. Taking action. Thinking about the need to transcend our own comfort zones to take actions for the greater good of the people, the communities, and the societies that support us. And continuing to stand with those we love and admire through the best and worst of times in the hope that the best remains ahead of us.

New Librarianship MOOC: Connecting Trainer-Teacher-Learners and Communities Through the Salzburg Curriculum

New Media Consortium Horizon Reports, meet the Salzburg Curriculum; Salzburg Curriculum, meet the Horizon Reports. And while we’re at it, let’s be sure to invite the trainer-teacher-learners in the American Library Association (ALA), the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), and our academic colleagues into the conversations that are currently being inspired through R. David Lankes’s “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and his book The Atlas of New Librarianship.

Even the most concise introduction to the Salzburg Curriculum, a proposal for a unified approach to preparing librarians and museum professionals for the work they will do within their organizations and the extended communities they will serve, suggests that we’re at the intersection of a number of wonderfully overlapping theories and communities of practice. Those of us who were engaged in #etmooc (the Educational Technology & Media MOOC developed and facilitated by Alec Courous and his wonderful gang of “conspirators” earlier this year) can see the underpinnings of connectivist learning theory and practice and how it serves communities. Those of us in Lankes’s New Librarianship Master Class, where the Salzburg Curriculum was reviewed extensively in Week 2 materials within the four-week course, can see Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory in action. Those of us who read Horizon Reports or have an opportunity to serve on Horizon Report advisory boards can see an extension of the conversations on the topic of technology in learning that the New Media Consortium is fostering between trainer-teacher-learners in school, community and technical college, university, museum, and library settings. And anyone involved in any sort of community-based project—whether face to face or online—can see tremendous foundations, within the core values behind the curriculum, for all we do:

• Openness and transparency
• Self-reflection
• Collaboration
• Service
• Empathy and respect
• Continuous learning/striving for excellence
• Creativity and imagination

Coming out of discussions conducted at the Salzburg Global Seminar on Libraries and Museums in a Participatory Age in 2011, the curriculum strongly parallels the work Lankes promotes in his master class and The Atlas—which is not at all surprising since he was a key player at the Salzburg Global Seminar. Topics addressed in the curriculum include “Transformative Social Engagement,” “Technology,” “Management for Participation,” “Asset Management,” “Cultural Skills,” and “Knowledge, Learning, and Innovation”—topics obviously important for anyone involved in libraries, museums, and other organizations with clear roles to play in training-teaching-learning.

We’re in an era of participatory culture, Lankes maintains, so our educational and our day-to-day workplace efforts can benefit from what was codified within the framing statement for the curriculum: “The mission of librarians and museum professionals is to foster conversations that improve society through knowledge exchange and social action”—a statement that closely parallel’s Lankes’s mission statement for New Librarianship. It’s a framing statement that leads us into a variety of areas familiar to trainer-teacher learners: facilitating conflict-management in ways that “create a civic and civil environment”; taking a proactive view about service rather than a passive view about what service means; taking a lifelong approach to learning rather than acting as if any single formal academic program can prepare us for everything we face within learning organizations; and using technology “to reach out to a community to the community’s benefit” in ways that “bring the community closer in conversation and learning.”

And, as has been consistently promoted through the New Librarianship Master Class and The Atlas, there are considerations of providing the maximum benefits to the communities who rely on libraries, museums, and other organizations to make valuable assets accessible, in meaningful ways, to the communities they serve rather than merely seeing those assets as “stuff” to be preserved for the sake of preservation.

The Salzburg Curriculum also proposes to help learners master communication skills and intercultural skills, and to develop an appreciation for and attentiveness to languages and terminology in ways that serve communities. But above all, as Lankes suggests in one of his online lectures on the topic, we “must be out in the community, learning from the community, working with the community to build, which means [we] must understand the community at a much deeper level than their [community members’] demographics.” If we, in our trainer-teacher-learner roles, can contribute to the development of this sort of dynamic curriculum with an eye toward serving communities as active participants, we may actually see far fewer articles or hear far fewer conversations, about the impending death of libraries and other organizations that strengthen our communities.

N.B.: This is the eighth in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

New Librarianship MOOC: Contributing to Our Communities Through Leadership and Innovation

Connections between librarianship, training-teaching-learning, innovation, and leadership continue to become increasingly obvious as we move further into R. David Lankes’s “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and further into his book The Atlas of New Librarianship.

It’s that huge theme that Lori Reed and I explored in our ALA Editions book Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers, in which we proposed that all trainer-teacher-learners need to be taking leadership roles in the organizations and communities they serve. It’s a theme that colleagues and I continue to explore when we have face-to-face and online conversations. And it’s a theme that provides stronger foundations for the suggestion that library staff and others working in training-teaching-learning might even more effectively contribute to strengthening the communities we serve if we find ways to collaborate more regularly regardless of the type of organization we serve.

Lankes, in his course lecture on improving society though innovation and leadership, addresses his target audience—librarians—with words that are a call to action for anyone involved in training-teaching-learning: “Innovation and leadership are fundamental values [for us]…You are to be an innovator….You are to be a leader…It comes from this: We must model the positive change we want to see within our communities.”

He reminds us that the places in which we work, those places we provide (onsite and online libraries for libraries, any learning space in my extended view of what Lankes so aptly documents), “are places of constant learning and therefore constant change….Learning is change…[so] we must be constantly changing.” And leadership, he maintains, is part of the equation.

This is far from a utopian cry for ill-defined results. In connecting these assertions to a broader goal of “improving society,” Lankes helps us see that if we are focused and successful with our efforts, we are contributing to meeting an essential need within the individual communities and larger society we serve: facilitating the conversations and other learning opportunities that strengthen communities. It comes back to a theme running through the course and the book: we can make substantial positive contributions if we are part of the conversations taking place and affecting our communities, and if we are helping to facilitate positive change through implementation of the mission statement Lankes consistently promotes: “The Mission of Librarians is to Improve Society through Facilitating Knowledge Creation in their Communities”—a mission statement that can equally be applied to any trainer-teacher-learners and, again, that begs for collaborations between anyone involved in those endeavors within or outside of libraries.

Lankes does a wonderful job at emphasizing the importance of what we do collectively: “We can’t have one person in charge of innovation. Everyone must be in charge of it,” he reminds us, and I would extend that statement to say the same of leadership, of training-teaching-learning, and of the social media tools that so many of us are using to facilitate the conversations Lankes is promoting.

“Librarians are radical positive change agents,” he reminds us, just as any trainer-teacher-learner is a radical change agent—and the best are the ones who are not rolling out the same lesson plans year after year, or avoiding opportunities for innovation not only at the large-scale level that generally comes to mind when we talk about innovation, but also at the small, personal levels that each of us has the possibility of pursuing—if we view ourselves as potential positive change agents who must assume leadership roles whenever we can.

“We need to evangelize our profession,” Lankes adds near the end of his lecture on innovation and leadership. “We need to take every opportunity to tell people that we are here for them. And we’re not simply here waiting for them. We are here to make their world better, and we’re going to do it in an active way.”

And if all of us take the time to read The Atlas or view some of those wonderful lectures that will remain online long after the current course formally ends, we might be inspired to make magnificent strides for our communities, the organizations and clients we serve, our learners, and ourselves simply by reaching across the aisle and embracing collaborative opportunities with other trainer-teacher-learners with whom we haven’t yet collaborated.

N.B.: This is the sixth in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

New Librarianship MOOC: Learning and Community Engagement

Members of library staff (and many others involved in training-teaching-learning) need to facilitate conversations and engage in them as well as part of our efforts to nurture and be part of the communities we serve, we are reminded through R. David Lankes’s “Community: The Pressure for Participation” lecture posted online in his “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and in his book The Atlas of New Librarianship.

“Participation in a system, however minimal, exerts pressure on that system,” he explains, and that thought reminds us that whether we’re facilitating learning in physical and virtual library settings or in any other environment, we must be actively engaged with our learners if we want to understand and effectively meet their needs.

I suspect that many of us connected with learning efforts in or through libraries understand, viscerally, the importance and the rewards of being integrally involved in our communities; if we’ve read the Urban Library Council’s Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development (2007) report or been following Maureen Sullivan’s American Library Association (ALA) presidential initiative “Promise of Libraries Transforming Communities,” we have very strong reminders of how important involvement and activism within a community is. I am not, on the other hand, at all convinced that trainer-teacher-learners across the board have that same sense of how far-reaching our efforts are within the communities we serve; responding to employers’/clients’ needs with our (in the best of situations) finely honed learner-centric endeavors, we don’t often enough take into consideration the importance of evaluating the results of those endeavors where they most matter: among the customers and clients who ultimately benefit from how learners apply what they have absorbed—or suffer from those learners’ inability to successfully apply what has been offered.

Lankes, obviously focusing on the world of librarianship and libraries, continues throughout his course and book to offer guidance, inspiration, and provocative ideas not only for that target audience of library staff, but to anyone involved in training-teaching-learning. He encourages us to think about how we can open up our systems to those who are ultimately affected by our resources, our offerings, and our actions. He reminds us that “people will go where they can have an influence. People will go to where their voice is respected or listened to”—a confirmation that if we want to be effective in facilitating learning, we need to act in ways that demonstrate our willingness to partner with our learners, listen to what they say, and respect what we are hearing from them.

He takes us even further in his discussions of community through his online lecture “Communities: Environments” and sections of The Atlas (pp. 97-101) where he documents efforts by staff at the Free Library of Philadelphia to renovate and expand the main library in ways that serve the community rather than in ways that solely reflect library staff’s perceptions of community needs. Discussions with community members led staff to focus on proposals for an Entrepreneurium that would support community entrepreneurs at their greatest moment of need; a writing center that would provide writers with the salon opportunities and publication opportunities that were most important to them and their community; and a music center that would meet musicians’ needs for performance spaces and newly-written compositions that have been performed. Having that level of exchanges with our learners and those affected by the ways those learners apply what we provide could have magnificent impacts on how we dream about, design, deliver, and evaluate the learning opportunities we offer face to face and online. And the payoff for the communities we serve could be incredible.

In the third of his three lectures on community—“Communities: Assessment”—there is a concluding line that ought to be pasted on our learning walls: the reminder that we are stronger if we avoid fragmentation and seek inclusiveness in our efforts. Rather than think of ourselves in terms of “public librarians” or “academic librarians” or any other sub-category of the larger field of librarianship, he encourages course participants to simply think of ourselves as “librarians.” And the same, I believe, can be said of learning facilitators regardless of the venue(s) in which we work: we should be far less concerned with whether we refer to ourselves as “teachers” or “instructors” or “trainers,” or whether we work primarily in face-to-face or online or synchronous or asynchronous learning situations, and much more concerned with the fact that we are involved in learning—as facilitators and as learners, regardless of whether we work in libraries or in schools or colleges or universities or in other workplace learning and performance (staff training) settings.

The foundation that keeps us productive and essential members of our communities is a dedication to learning—and that’s where we need to maintain the focus that comes from one of Lankes’s final questions in his presentations and writing on community: “What are people talking about? What do they want to learn?”

N.B.: This is the fifth in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

New Librarianship MOOC: Partnerships in Creativity, Innovation, and Learning

The further we move into R. David Lankes’s “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and his book The Atlas of New Librarianship, the more obvious the overlap between librarianship and the entire field of training-teaching-learning becomes—which makes me wonder why I don’t see more interactions and sustainable collaborations between colleagues in the American Library Association (ALA)  and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) and others involved in the professions those two associations represent.

“All of New Librarianship is about knowledge and training,” Lankes reminds us in his online lecture on the role facilitation plays in knowledge and training and throughout his book. “Everything we do is about helping people develop their own knowledge.”

But it is his follow-up comment in the lecture that particularly resonates for those of us who work both with library colleagues and with colleagues in other organizations where learning is facilitated: “I think a lot of instruction in libraries should be about things within the community and not about the library itself”—an idea I’ve supported consistently through a “Rethinking Library Instruction” course for ALA Editions.

In the same way that learning facilitated within libraries ultimately is at least as much about serving community members’ needs as much as it is about making library services and resources accessible, the learning facilitated in other organizations is at least as much about customers and clients served as it is about the learners who are employed by those organizations. If trainer-teacher-learners are reading, hearing about, and talking about anything these days, it is about how we are fostering a learner-centric approach to our efforts. That learner-centric approach can be most productive when it helps learners themselves make connections between what they are learning and how it helps them serve others. So as we bring that back into the context of librarians and other members of library staff who are offering learning opportunities that move far beyond a focus on bibliographic instruction and explicitly address libraries and their staff as partners within the communities they serve, we have yet another reminder that there is plenty of room for, and much to be gained by, greater collaboration between the trainer-teacher-learners in libraries (i.e., almost every member of library staff who interacts with those relying on libraries and librarians as trusted resources) and the trainer-teacher-learners who serve other organizations and constituents without ever realizing that partnerships with library staff can expand the successes of what all of us are attempting to facilitate.

And it goes beyond that, beyond the learning process: It is, Lankes suggests, “about bringing people to action”—a theme he explores extensively in the course and in The Atlas: It is about being outside of our organizations, being visible within the communities we serve, and being part of the conversations that shape the directions our communities take.

Our role as facilitators—librarians as facilitators, in the context under discussion by Lankes, and trainer-teacher-learners as facilitators in the broader context I’m pursuing here—is critically important. And this role provides another example of the common ground we share: Librarians, Lankes says, are constantly learning and “need to be constantly learning”—a statement that is equally true for anyone involved in helping others learn.

That necessity to continually engage in learning reveals another challenge that is, at the same time, an attraction for many of us: The requirement that we provide stimulating environments for learning and innovation while, at the same time, being willing to learn alongside those whose learning we are expected—and have offered—to facilitate. We don’t necessarily have to know about everything that is going to take place in a learning environment such as the makerspaces that are becoming increasingly prevalent in libraries, he suggests, but we do have to be willing to learn with the learners who are working within those spaces: “This idea of creating a safe place for experimentation, for innovation, is part of what librarians need to do,” he adds in a lecture on facilitation and environment, and the same applies to trainer-teacher-learners outside of physical and virtual library (and other learning) spaces.

“What we need to think about,” he continues, “is our physical spaces and our digital spaces: ‘How can we create inspiration? How can we create an environment where people instantly walk in and feel smarter, or feel part of something great, and know that they are part of something great, and not [be] intimidated?”

The ultimate payoff for libraries and librarians, he concludes, is that “Libraries are safe places, but they are a safe place to come up with dangerous ideas. They are a safe place to come up with revolutionary ideas. They are a safe place in which we can plot the future greatness of a community that may need to overthrow the norms of community.”

And that, for me, is as fine a description of what any great training-teaching-learning endeavor I’ve ever seen or helped facilitate can offer. And produce.

N.B.: This is the fourth in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

New Librarianship MOOC: Information, Knowledge, and the Conversations in Our Heads

Trainer-teacher-learners, including those working in libraries, need not worry or shy away from those conversations we have with ourselves within our own heads, if R. David Lankes is to be believed.

Those conversations, he suggests in his “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and his book The Atlas of New Librarianship, are part of our learning process and support our efforts to transform information into knowledge.

Building upon the Conversation Theory work initiated by cyberneticist Gordon Pask in the 1970s, Lankes takes us through a fascinating exploration of how knowledge is created through conversation. Then, bringing us full circle through that exploration of knowledge and conversation rooted in the cyberneticists’ fascination with studying systems, he leads us through a summary of how the various levels of language we use—ranging from basic non-contextual language to subject-specific jargon—affects the systems we develop for those we ostensibly serve. (Lankes uses library online catalogs as an example of one less-than-elegant system for his learners in the New Librarianship Master Class; we could just as easily look for examples among the systems used to deliver massive open online courses—MOOCS—along the lines of the online master class that is inspiring this series of reflections.)

There is a depth and richness to all of this that is, quite frankly, inspiring comments from course participants about how opaque the entire field of Conversation Theory is. But none of it is completely foreign to anyone involved in training-teaching-learning—as so many people working in libraries increasingly are. Lankes notes that New Librarianship promotes a shift in focus from information to knowledge, and there clearly is a similar shift, in some ways, within the larger field of learning that so obviously is part of what library staff pursue daily with library members. He also helps us to understand that the internalized conversations we have as we engage in learning—asking ourselves questions along the lines of “Do I really agree with what I just read?” or “Does what I just heard from that instructor make sense?”—are an integral part of the process of transforming information we have obtained into knowledge that we can apply as we attempt to attain a state of wisdom.

In the course of his explorations, he brings us back to the libraries and librarians who are at the center of the master class and The Atlas: “The quiet room within the library for quiet reflection is not quiet to prevent conversation. It is to enable individuals to converse with themselves more readily,” he says in his “Knowledge and Conversation” lecture online.

He also, in an effort to set an even broader context for library staff and others involved in facilitating the learning process, reminds us through an “Introduction to Knowledge” lecture online, that “We need to move away from the whole idea of information and think that we are in the knowledge business, that librarianship is very much about helping people learn…We need to focus on how people learn…how data is used….We also have to be in the conversation business…if we’re seeking to help people learn, we have to facilitate conversations” both overtly in our communal learning settings and through those wonderfully productive conversations in our heads that too few of us take the time to think about, nurture, and utilize to our own benefit and to the benefit of those we serve in our day-to-day work as learning facilitators.

N.B.: This is the third in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.

New Librarianship MOOC: The Importance of Worldview and Mission

A consistently appealing aspect of R. David Lankes’s “New Librarianship Master Class”—a massive open online course (MOOC) under the auspices of the University of Syracuse School of Information Studies— and his book The Atlas of New Librarianship is how much further they reach beyond the obvious target audience of librarians.

Given that so many members of library staff are involved in facilitating learning within the onsite and online communities they serve, it’s no surprise that Lankes’s expressed hope “that members and communities beyond libraries find value in the Atlas” (p. 11) does, in fact, match the potential to appeal to many involved in training-teaching-learning regardless of whether our work takes place in public, academic, or special libraries; in (other) academic settings; or in the workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs served by my colleagues in the American Society for Training & Development.

At the heart of this expansive approach within the course and book is worldview, a topic nicely addressed in Lankes’s Week 1 taped lecture “The Importance of Worldview”; a second taped lecture—“The Mission of Librarians”—adds even more context to any discussion we have.

Lankes begins by reminding us that worldview helps shape the very questions we ask (e.g., “What is the future of Libraries?”) and, therefore, shapes the ideas we consider and the actions we take as a result of our explorations. In a particularly fruitful example of how questions and worldview affect the world we help create, he takes us through variations that product distinctly different responses and results:

• “What is the future of libraries?” becomes
• “What should be the future of libraries?”—a less deterministic view in that is doesn’t assume there is one already clearly-defined future to consider—then becomes
• “What should be the future of libraries and librarians?”—which then becomes
• “What should be the future of libraries and librarians in a democracy?”

And that’s where an astute reader makes the leap that Lankes facilitates without directly adding it to his agenda: applying that style of employing a series of evolving questions to challenge and reshape our worldview can have a positive impact within any profession—particularly the field of teaching-training-learning. This, for me, is another confirmation of my own long-held belief that librarianship is in significant ways part of the larger playing field of training-teaching-learning rather than being a field completely unto itself.

“Worldviews matter,” Lankes says in his lecture. “Worldviews help us shape policy. They really do shape our thinking.”

Furthermore—in defining the mission of librarianship as “to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities”—he tells us in his “Mission” lecture that “Journalists can see themselves with this mission statement. Teachers can see that. Publishers. Authors. Lots of folks can see that mission, so the mission statement is not enough to define librarianship.” But it is enough to remind us that we have colleagues and potential partners across the aisle, and that tremendous collaborations that serve our overlapping communities of interest are possible if we’re willing to step away from our traditional desks and workspaces to engage with those potential collaborators.

Lankes also, in that lecture on mission, explicitly confirms that “in new librarianship, we focus primarily on how people learn….Learning theory becomes a fundamental part of the worldview of librarianship, of new librarianship.”

If we are astute enough to pursue this line of inquiry and action, all of us involved in teaching-training-learning—whether within or outside of libraries—will be closer to playing the transformative role that Lankes documents in his book and course, and that our profession-vocation inspires.

N.B.: This is the second in a series of posts inspired by the New Librarianship MOOC.