Tech news: two links to look at

Here are two stories worth looking at that I found over the weekend. The first one is a New York Times story about midsize portable PCs, “Do You Have That Portable in a Midsize?” Intel is calling them “Mobile Internet Devices” or (cleverly) M.I.D.s, because they’re about halfway in size between a laptop PC and a cell phone.

These are the kinds of PCs I predict all kids and teens (and most of us, really) will be carrying around within five to seven years. (Why so long? Read on.) They’re natural extensions of the cell phone, and they’ll bring us everything that we must sit down at a PC - whether desktop or laptop - to access now.

So far there have been a few attempts to create M.I.D.-like PCs, but the technology is only now reaching the point at which they’re becoming almost practical.

I say “almost” because if you read this piece, you’ll learn that the folks at Intel have not yet created a chip small and efficient enough to be able to run a real PC operating system - such as Microsoft Windows XP - on a small device. If you want a peek, however, into what I feel will be the future, take a look at this article. In ten years or less, a library “PC lab” will look about as up-to-date as a table covered with dial telephones.

But the role of libraries will still be critical to provide access to those who can’t afford Web access. But what will Web access look like in 2018? That’s what interests me. It may be, as NY Times writer John Markoff suggests, very possible to use all the cool Web stuff you can imagine on a cell phone-sized screen. Maybe the M.I.D. won’t be necessary at all:

I’ve been struck recently to see that when Web sites like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are redesigned for the iPhone, the user experience is actually better than on a full Web screen. It turns out that a high-resolution, palm-size, three-and-a-half-inch screen is just fine for seeing what your friends are up to, and for reading your e-mail and even your newspaper.

The other tech piece I found that interested me comes from the BBC News site: “Power-hungry IT firms change focus.” Most of us like to think that information technology, which we in libraries have become more and more dependent on, is at least fairly sound ecologically. Well, this story tells us, think again. Information technology - in particularly the huge data centers and server farms that keep the Internet running - use incredible amounts of energy.

Hewlett-Packard, for example used to have 85 data centers around the world consuming huge quantities of electricity for its servers and for air conditioning. Soon it will have only six. The story tells us:

But if data centres gobble up huge amounts of energy, this is only a fraction of the amount the ICT sector is responsible for as a whole, warns Peter Madden, who heads Forum for the Future, a charity focused on sustainability issues.

“There is a huge trail of energy and raw materials used in the supply chain.”

UN data suggests that the manufacture of one computer uses 75 times its weight in raw materials and water.

“And of course, there is the energy used over the lifetime of a computer,” says Mr Madden.

Mr Madden is among those who say there needs to be a change in design so that hardware is easier to dismantle and re-use, in order to reduce the amount going to landfill, whether it is aluminium chips, plastic or copper cables.

So when you’re recycling paper or using recycled magazine covers in your crafts programs, that’s great. But also take a look over at your public and staff PCs and think about how much energy they’re using every day and, in many cases, all night long. And are you recycling your inkjet cartridges and laser-printer toner cartridges, too?

 

More kids’ pay sites on the horizon

A New York Times article this week by kids’ software guru Warren Buckleitner, “When Web Time is Playtime,” will frighten you at least a little with a look into the growing number of big-time companies running children’s pay sites on the Web.

What’s scary about these sites is the way they lure kids into bugging their parents to pay for “deluxe” services after they’ve gotten hooked on the basic look and feel of the sites. Here’s a description of the retooled Barbie Girls site, one of the sites that was expressly designed from the beginning as a moneymaker:

Later this month, BarbieGirls will be retooled in this way. Last year the site required the purchase of a Barbie MP3 player for access to certain content, an idea that has been abandoned. In the new version, children will be able to get in free and chat with others, dress up their on-screen dolls and decorate a room. But a collection of some games and fashion items will be off limits unless they become a V.I.P. player, which requires cash. V.I.P.’s are distinguished from the other Barbies by their sparkling tiaras.

I hoped that not too many girls are lured astray by the site. Even if they’re not, though, the big successes of gaming sites like Worlds of Warcraft for adults is logically leading companies to supply kids’ game-and-fun sites on a by-the-month basis. Both boys and girls will beg Mom and Dad to join.

Will these sites affect how we see kids using the public PCs in libraries? I think there’s a pretty good chance they will, so if you spot any of the sites mentioned in this article on the kids’ screens, you’ll know that there may well be an “I’m better than you because my Mom paid for me to have a tiara” ethic going to work.

 

Did a book traumatize you, once upon a time?

Here’s an interesting piece from the SFGate.com site - “Books that traumatized you as a child,” by Peter Hartlaub, who also wrote about movies that traumatized kids. Hartlaub doesn’t seem to have actually been traumatized by a book (in my experience, books don’t send most kids into terror and anxiety the way that visual and sound media - namely movies and TV shows - do).

But he does write that he doesn’t understand the appeal of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

I think part of the problem was it was introduced to me when I was really young, and had never seen anything more challenging in content than a Richard Scarry book. While I completely respect the artwork and Maurice Sendak’s story, the image of a little boy in his pajama-looking wolf suit wandering around without dinner in a spooky monster-filled woods was too depressing for me to enjoy.

It’s interesting, though, to see the books listed in the comments. Those who wrote in hated, or were frightened by, Bread and Jam for Frances, The Red Pony, and Where the Red Fern Grows. The last one, at least, is completely understandable, but I think that the books (and media) that bother or scare us as kids are often completely peculiar to our own experiences. Once, in a library where I worked years ago, there was a child who attended storytime weekly who was not only scared of insects of any kind, but he couldn’t bear to hear any story or song with bugs in it. If he heard “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,” for example, his eyes grew wide, he’d start whimpering, and his mom had to scoop him up and take him out.

I hope he grew out of it.

Did I book ever traumatize me? I can’t really remember. I thought Where the Wild Things Are was an extremely cool story, myself. For me, it was scary TV shows. There are still a few episodes of Twilight Zone that I remember scared the bejezus out of me when I was eight or nine…

 

Remember “A Nation at Risk”?

Well, I may have been a little late finding this story, but here’s an important anniversary, particularly for those of us who were working with kids and reading in the 80s. I’m willing to bet that a good number of those who remember the Reagan Administration remember A Nation at Risk, a document that - gasp - asserted that our educational system was getting worse, not better. This document was pretty shocking news back then. Here’s a quote from the USA Today news story that noted the document’s 25th anniversary:

On April 26, 1983, in a White House ceremony, Ronald Reagan took possession of “A Nation at Risk.” The product of nearly two years’ work by a blue-ribbon commission, it found poor academic performance at nearly every level and warned that the education system was “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.”

If you’ve been around as long as I have, you probably recall how there were stories on the nightly news, in the papers, and in every magazine with reporters clucking and shaking their heads over the threat of so many of America’s children growing up so marginally literate.

It also fed the appetites of all the right-wing politicians and writers who have always hated paying taxes for public education and who used the report to demonstrate that our public schools, with their liberal, unionized teachers, were doing a lousy job of teaching America’s kids to read.

It was the first plank in the platform that eventually presented President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which to this day has been a thorn in the side of US education, and has justified many layoffs of plenty of school librarians.

Don’t get me wrong; I do feel that we could be doing a better job of teaching kids to read. But it seems to me that the No Child Left Behind way of doing things hasn’t been the right way, either.

 

Two links - one a reminder, one Ewww!

Two links passed me by recently that I must pass on to you. The first one takes us back to this past fall, when I was waiting anxiously for the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass to arrive in theaters. Now that TGC’s been released on DVD, it appears as the lead in a slide show on the Entertainment Weekly site called “Read the Book! 23 Disappointing Movie Adaptations.”

I ended up going to the movies twice (one a free preview, one I paid for) to see The Golden Compass, and in the end I had to admit that although there were a lot of things I liked about the film version (I thought the cast did an excellent job with the abbreviated script), it was still too chopped up and jumbled that to be easy to follow. Plus it had been cut so short that if you hadn’t read the book, there was a lot about Lyra’s alternate world that would be hard to grasp. Its worst sin, as the EW.com caption says, was that the film version “diluted its more sinister, religion-defying Magisterium elements into family-friendly pop soda.”

The other link may gross you out, particularly when you look over at all those public access PCs that all those kids and teens are typing and mousing upon. This Yahoo News article is called “Computer keyboards can be dirtier than a toilet: study.” Here’s a quote that sums up a study done by a UK computer magazine, Which? Computing:

“Most people don’t give much thought to the grime that builds up on their PC, but if you don’t clean your computer, you might as well eat your lunch off the toilet,” said Sarah Kidner, editor of “Which? Computing” in a statement.

Does your library clean the keyboards and mice of its public PCs? If not, all I can say is “eww.” Get those latex gloves out…

 

Pew Internet reports on teens and writing - hey, is this the English of the future?

I know I’m kind of behind on this one - after all, other blogs and the news media reported on it last week - but I did want to mention the newest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. I’ve been following the Pew Internet documents for years, and I think they’re a great way for everyone who’s interested to keep up with how the Internet is changing the way our culture works everywhere you go in the US.

The report is called “Writing, Technology, and Teens.” It considers the amazing fact that writing is important to teens, and is in fact becoming more so because teens now spend so much time communicating via cell phone texting and other electronic media. But is writing text-style damaging writing in English? Here’s a quote:

A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought - the sentence.”

But because few folks had talked with teens about it, few folks realized that teens do take writing seriously, and want to be better writers. The press has gone all ga-ga over the report’s finding that teens are incorporating their electronic prose style (you know - no capitals at the beginnings of sentences, leaving vowels out of words, using numbers in words, etc.) into the writing they do for school.

I actually don’t think that educators have too much to worry about. Teens know that text-speech doesn’t work too well when communicating with folks (like us crotchety elders), who don’t get their abbreviated speech. What I find interesting is the change in the language which may become significant over the next few decades. Do you see, as I see, the possibility that capital letters at the beginning of sentences may go away? I don’t see any reason why they may not. We baby-boomers may become the last generation to insist on caps.

 

Getting Kids and Teens Published

I saw on PUBYAC, the children’s and YA library services newsgroup, that the children’s author Anastasia Suen has posted a page on her site to connect kids and teens who want to be published writers with magazines that publish young people’s work. While it seems that it gets tougher every year for those who want to be published to find places to be taken seriously (hey, how seriously are bloggers taken in an era when everyone can blog - and no one edits them?), these publications have been set up to give young writers a break - with real editors accepting them.

I’ve only heard of a couple of these publications, notably New Moon (Girls only? Hey, no fair!) and Stone Soup - and my experience is that not too many libraries even subscribe to them - so kids who get published here are not exactly breaking into the big time. And here’s Cicada, which mixes adult authors with teen writers. Some of these magazines accept author submissions from ages 12 and under; others are for teens only; one, What If?, accepts Canadians only. But whoever or wherever you are, it’s always good to see your work in print.

 

The invisible (but critical) importance of information literacy

Just about all librarians who work with youth agree that young people have been fairly lazy about doing research since Google got so good at finding pretty exactly whatever they need for an assignment. Kids and teens no longer need to go through the multi-step process of 1) traveling to the library; 2) looking in the catalog for the correct item; 3) going to the shelf, hoping that someone else didn’t get there before you and have checked it out already; and 4) skimming through the book/magazine article and making sure it contains what you need. Young people learned a lot from making those judgments.

Today one can do all this stuff from any spot with a device that connects to the Net, and one never needs to worry that someone got to the book you wanted first. Google piles mounds of everything with even a vague relationship to what you’re looking for in front of you with almost no effort on your part. Not that any of this is bad, but the Google-i-zation of research encourages bad habits.

Thus, young people aren’t working hard - some educators feel they’re barely working at all - to discriminate between good, useful information they find online and flaky, undocumented information. For years, school librarians have made a major effort to train young people in those skills, which are usually defined as “information literacy.”

Middle schoolers I’ve spoken to about the importance of information literacy often roll their eyes. When I spot eye-rolling, I tell them that one day soon they’ll be buying a car and insurance for it. They’ll be choosing a school or a career. They’ll be given documents with gobbeldygook to sign that might deliver big bills to their mailbox. They will need to know how to evaluate information.

But unfortunately many school districts, focused intently on one goal - getting good scores on the statewide standardized math and reading tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law - have given information literacy about as high a priority as most of us do about being good banjo players.

And thus, we have situations like that in Mesa, AZ, School District where all the certified librarians will be eliminated, because of budget cuts. Why? Because - even though no one from the district will admit it - they can, because certified librarians are not required by No Child Left Behind the way high-quality classroom teachers are.

Here’s a quote from the story in American Libraries:

The decision came as a surprise to many librarians, who were notified of the change the second week in April. “They are just reeling,” Ann Ewbank, education liaison librarian at Arizona State University in Phoenix, told AL. “This school district has done this under the radar.” She added that since librarians are considered instructional support staff, cutting their positions is not perceived as cutting classroom dollars. “They will turn libraries and media centers into warehouses. There will be no collaborative lesson planning, no information-literacy standards, and no library media programming at these schools.”

The sad news is that because No Child Left Behind doesn’t require certified librarians and the things certified librarians do for the kids, they’re ripe for the cutting. It’s very difficult to convince anyone - teachers, principals, parents, average taxpayers - in most places that librarians really can make a difference in the age of Google.

If folks need more convincing, here’s an unsettling study from the UK - from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research, at University College London’s centre for publishing. It’s a higher education-level study, but you can be sure that those who reach a university with poor information literacy skills - which is exactly what this study demonstrates - learned those poor skills as kids and teens. Here’s a quote:

The report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, found users [i.e. students] “power-browsing” or skimming material, using “horizontal” (shallow) research. Most spent only a few minutes looking at academic journal articles and few returned to them. “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense,” said the report authors.

Doesn’t that last quote - going “online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” - sound just like what you see from the average child or teen in the average library these days? Let’s get that boring homework done, so we can go play video games.

 

Why boys (and men) read less

Here’s a great Philadelphia Inquirer story I found through LISNews.org - it’s called “Men - in general - are not ones for the books.” The female author, Jen A. Miller, bemoans the fact that the most of the guys she’s known just aren’t book readers, and wonders why that is. She writes:

According to Publishers Weekly, 68 percent of book purchases are made by women (and we suspect they are buying for themselves, not the men in their lives).

And the National Center for Education Studies reported that 71 percent of women, vs. 57 percent of men, have read a book in the last six months.

“If I had to make a huge, sweeping, overgeneralized statement, guys probably read less - and less fiction - than women,” says Jeff Garigliano, a senior editor at Portfolio magazine and the author of Dogface, a “guy” book about a punishing summer camp for kids who’ve been bad.

Well, duh, Jeff. Those of us who make our living trying to get kids (which include boys) and books together have known this for, well, decades maybe?

Garigliano has an interesting - and totally wrong - notion of why guys don’t read as much fiction as girls. He speculates that males “think they should have outgrown the notion of make-believe, so they can’t find as much enjoyment in fiction.”

Large percentages of the boys and men I know love guy fiction, which is almost entirely make-believe. It’s just that very little guy fiction is in novel-style books. It’s in TV shows, movies, and comics. It’s Star Wars, Sandman, Batman, Lost, the Terminator and Predator films, and all the other stuff guys (and more than a few girls, too) look at for fun. How many guys will be going to see the new comics flick Iron Man, and then the new Indiana Jones movie, between now and Memorial Day? You betcha; see you there.

But it is true, as we all know, that guys prefer their books to be nonfiction. And Miller quotes - guess who? - our pal Jon Scieszka, who it’s great to see popping up in so many of these Net and newspaper stories. He tells the truth, so I give him a cheer.

 

“School Talk” is critical for public librarians

Those of us in public libraries need to talk the language of teachers and school librarians. We need to be paying attention to what’s happening with kids in the schools, and we need to be checking in with school folks regularly. It may not seem fair - they don’t need to check in on us at all, but hey, they have the kids most of the day and tell the kids what to do.

Evidently there was a program about public library/school communication at the PLA Conference in Minneapolis, as Angela Reynolds reports in a posting on the ALSC Blog. The (nameless) presenter said (and I agree) that we should talk to the school folks whenever we can - in particular to reading coordinators and reading specialists who can help us massage our own programming and PR in ways that make them more comfortable to the kids and parents we serve. She met with her local reading coordinator and now says:

As a result of my 90-minute meeting, I’ve already made changes. I’ve tweaked some of the wording on our Summer Reading booklet to reflect the terms that teachers are using at the schools. For example—they encourage kids to find books that are “just right” for them—meaning they can read them without too much struggle, but are also encountering new words or ideas. I’ve included this sentence on my SRP booklet: “Have fun, and read lots of books that are just right for you!”. The school also encourages reading aloud—parent to child, child to parent, etc. So I’ve included that on the SRP booklet as well—“Audio books and reading aloud, or listening to someone read to you, counts as well.”

She also encourages us to label our nonfiction in ways that will help kids who have trouble with Dewey to find what they want. Some school librarians teach kids Dewey, but in lots of elementary school libraries there isn’t a trained school librarian and very little in the way of instructions. Even if the kids (or parents) aren’t asking for help, offer it anyway.