Brain Candy: My Top Five TED Talks

Recently, I was speaking with my parents and said something about TED Talks.  You can imagine my surprise that they had never heard of TED.  Wow, I said, you guys are in for something very special.

TED Talks are like candy for my brain.  There are many evenings when friends will come over and we will kick back to watch each other's favorite TED Talks.  There are many lunch breaks when I will reboot by watching TED.  By far, TED has become arguably my most important resource for inspiration, creativity, and learning.

So, Mom and Dad, as an introduction to this incredible library and compendium of ideas and ways of thinking, here are my top five TED talks.

1.  Sir Ken Robinson's Do Schools Kill Creativity.  It's hard to pick which one of Sir Ken's talks to show.  I love his most recent TED talk and I love the visualization video that gives a history of current education paradigms and how they need to change.  This seems particularly apropos to a conversation my father and I had over dinner where my dad pointed out that one facet to America's problems is that our vision of the future is based on the past (don't you love solving the world's problems over dinner?)  This video demonstrates how true that is in education.

2.  Barry Schwartz's talk on the Paradox of Choice is certainly one of my favorites.  It is particularly important, in my view, to librarians' understanding of search habits and information overload.  This talk is funny while challenging what has become a fundamental principle of our culture.  Great stuff.

3.  Daniel Pink's talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation.  Again, I love how funny Pink is while challenging our traditional notions of motivation.  Especially as I think about the kind of leader and manager I want to be, this talk is on the top layer of my tool box.

4.  Simon Sinek's talk on How Great Leaders Inspire Action.  Again, perhaps because I am focusing on leadership but this talk is wonderful.   This is a talk that is vital to teachers.  For today's students, we must give them the WHY.  

5.  Benjamin Zander's talk on Music and Passion.  I know this will be my parents' favorite talk because of their deep love of classical music (which I share).  But I love this talk because it inspires me as a librarian, teacher, thinker, and parent.  I have used Zander's process of coming home as an instructional design model (very successfully) and I deeply appreciate his passion for teaching and connecting with us.  Marvelous.

Selecting my top five TEDs was actually quite difficult.  I have been watching this video by Michael Wesch a lot lately and I think this talk by Sheryl Sandberg is inspiriting, especially as a Smithie.

So, give it a go: what are your favorite TED talks?  Which ones would you share to someone just meeting TED for the first time?

Nicholas Carr on Stephen Colbert

Fantastic. It's awesome to see Nicholas Carr hold his own with Stephen Colbert, who is WONDERFUL here. The idea that we become like the tools we use, and Colbert's question of whether our creation takes us over, is always one my students find challenging when we talk about technology. I can't wait to share this with them!

At a Faculty Conference, thinking a little differently about Info Lit

I have been in North Carolina this week for the Association of General and Liberal Studies Conference. Cyndi Brandenburg, Kelly Thomas, and I gave our presentation "Too Much Information: Helping Students Deal Effectively with Information Overload." You can see our slides here or check out our wiki here. The presentation went really well. It was a tiny room but we filled it up. While the presentation was fun, it was the conversation that followed that was truly the highlight of the conversation. These faculty were very excited by what we are doing with information literacy in both library sessions and in classrooms. Many of them expressed interest in embedding IL into their own courses or curriculum! YAHOO!!!

It was really interesting to talk about information literacy at a faculty conference rather than a library one. The issues and concerns that these faculty members expressed are not far from those I've heard on library blogs or in the literature. The difference I think is that faculty are surprised to hear that the library would think about information literacy in any way other than as a ploy for using the library. The group of faculty that I sat down with seemed to be wondering how to cope themselves with not information overload among their students but knowledge deficiency. Students, these faculty decried, don't come into college with the general knowledge that they should have. They fear that we are purporting what some of them see as a crutch: the ability to look things up but not to LEARN. Not to KNOW.

That's worth thinking about. It aligns well with a book I have checked out from the library called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. It's by Farhad Manjoo, the technology/media/politics writer for Salon.com. Essentially, Manjoo argues that it doesn't matter what is real, true, or fact. What matters is whether it does what we want it to do: answer our question, support our point of view, "prove" someone else wrong. The book is fascinating, challenging, aggravating and important, especially for those of us that are designing and teaching programs that we say will help our students find, select, evaluate and manage information. If we focus our programs and instruction on what the Library has to offer, how are we preparing our students for the world they will live in when they graduate and don't have an academic library to draw on? In essence, what are we doing to prepare them for the digital world, the knowledge society, the information age?

These are the questions we grappled with for our 75 minutes of glory. We had to push people out of the room at the end. Needless to say, I loved it. And it gave me a lot of ideas for posts that I hope to hash out over the next few days.

On the more personal side, a few things about the trip itself:
1. Asheville was a really pretty town with the friendliest people I have met in quite some time. It was refreshing.
2. I ate some darn good fried chicken at the Moose Cafe and felt my arteries clogging up as I did it. Fantastic and worth every calorie.
3. I experienced the gas shortage first hand. Every gas station in the area was out of gas and it was a little nerve wracking driving the two hours back to Charlotte. I am thinking of the people dealing with that.
4. I went to an AMAZING book store, Malaprops, and found my motto.  Living it and smiling.

If Wikipedia really wanted to be innovative, they would...

Have you seen this article about Wikipedia in the Economist? I have to say, it brought up a lot of questions for me about Wikipedia, about authority, about usability, about bureaucracy, about our understanding of knowledge.

The article also coincides with the announcement of Google's Knol and Citizendium, a wiki based encyclopedia written in a scholarly fashion by experts. Here is a fascinating manifesto about how Citizendium proposes to be better. In looking at this information, I can't help but feel like I need a few research days to read these policies and devise some activities with students to discuss tone, authority, and scope. But perhaps that will be a future post.

For now, let's talk about that Economist article. It's interesting how it brings us full circle in the early debates about Wikipedia and "real" encyclopedias. What has been so fascinating about watching Wikipedia, and the many arguments related to it, develop is that what has made Wikipedia so deliciously democratic and difficult for the academic community to swallow is exactly what has come back to haunt them. Everyone can contribute about anything. Let's look at the example from the article: Pokemon characters versus Polish solidarity fighters. Is there something so wrong, the article asks, in including all the Pokemon characters while there are so few, if any, articles on the Polish unionists?

I think this is asking the wrong question. Asking whether there is something "wrong" or "harmful" is asking us to impart a judgement call on the content of the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That's not the point. Part of what has made Wikipedia so successful is not that everyone can edit it; it's that everyone is recognized as a possible contributor. We all have knowledge to contribute to the greater understanding, the greater good. Frankly, that's a beatiful, awe-inspiring thought. The real issue at hand, to my mind, is whether we need to keep track of something so inconsequential as Pokeman figures when we aren't validating the important work of Polish Unionists. The problem that I see is trying to know now what might be important later. Or that a 1000 people can discern what is valuable for a few million.

The question that the deletionists seem to be posing is how can we be serious if we treat everything seriosly? I think the real issue is not about the content but about the way in which we deal with content. I support having entries on as many topics as possible in large part because, and as any research librarian will tell you, you never know just what might be of interest to someone else! That is what made Melvil Dewey's system so remarkable: he knew there were things left to be discovered.

That is where Wikipedia can truly become something extraordinary. By not reigning in its content to what is "scholarly" or "acceptable", they can leave the door open for exploration and scholarship within the encyclopedia. It becomes the place where knowledge is created, not just recorded. THAT is exciting. THAT is innovative. THAT is experimental. THAT is the future of information.

As I've said previously, Wikipedia has developed by leaps and bounds in the last few years. And it will continue to do so. But there seem to be more constructive rather than reductive ways to deal with Wikipedia's struggle towards credibility. As I've said in an earlier post, incorporating citations from the Open Library into Wikipedia entries would be far more compelling than deleting entries because they don't yet have enough Google hits to be significant.

But that's just the Sheck's thoughts on it.

A World We Can Live In: a poem

My good friend Megan Cannella, who teaches ESL to refugees through the Vermont Refugee Resettlment Program, sent this poem to me today. It reminded me of the days when you could pick someone up at the airport--at the gate. It reminded me of the mother of a Smithie pulling over to make sure I was okay when my car broke down on the West River Drive and she saw the Smith sticker on my car. But it is better than that because it is so simple, so human, so generous. It is a connection that is more general but also more intimate. It is wonderful. Thanks Megan.

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal
- Naomi Shihab Ny

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any
Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own
gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor,
wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her.
What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four
hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway,
min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew -- however
poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical
treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get
there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on
the plane and
Would ride next to her -- southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call
some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took
up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her
life. Answering Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies --
little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts --
out of her bag --
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It
was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler
from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered
with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better
cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from
huge coolers --
Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our
flight, one African
American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving
us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar
too.

And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were
holding hands --
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some
medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling
tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones
and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of
confusion stopped
-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other
women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Synthesis: 2.0

Finally time to review some thoughts from ACRL. I think an appropriate name for conference would have been "Web 2.0 and the Academic Librarian: To Be or Not to Be." Every session I went to touched on the proliferation of social networking software and the interactivity of information: great things to think about in a variety of contexts. One thing that I appreciated most about David Silver's talk (and let me shout out to David for his enthusiasm, encouragement, and for finding my blog!) was his reminding the library community that while this is an exciting time in librarianship, technology and information, it is not intrinsically revolutionary but rather an evolution. As he calls it: AEIOU (Already Existing Information Optimally Uploaded). I love the acronym. But his point is an important one for librarians to remember: technology is changing but the effort is the same as it has always been. We are here, still, to help our users find information. But that's the easy part. The hard part is the part we are still hashing out: how do we contextualize that information and actually help our users expand their knowledge. Ah, ontologies. What is information and what is knowledge? I feel like my former professor and guru brain teaser, Allen Renear, would smile at me.

What I mean is that we can choose to use and incorporate the newest technologies, otherwise known as the technology our students use. But the hard part is then helping our students see the value of those technologies, and their limitations. For example: tag clouds. While these are incredibly interesting to look at, they seem to continue to encourage students to read for breadth and not depth. Does knowing how many times a word has been used in a speech really help a student understand the context in which it was used? Does the ability to rate websites mean that you don't have to think about the bias of the reviewer or assign your own set of values to the site? Finally, does the collaborative nature of a wiki mean that you can cast aside any efforts at accountability since what you wrote will be changed anyway?

I don't know. I am thinking about, right here and at my desk and in my living room and in my classroom. These are tough questions. These are fun questions.

The Library, to remain truly germane to our students, and to maintain its viability in the soul of education, needs to expand our role. We can't stop at showing databases. We need to help our students evaluate websites but also evaluate how they now interact with them.

ACRL reminded me how many threads there are to creating a dynamic but sustainable role for the library. And I think that some people find it intimidating. But the idea of the internet was intimidating once, and look at us now. The idea of open stacks was scary once and now closed stacks are almost extinct.

To be or not to be: that is the question. And it might not be as simple as a yes or no. But it certainly is a lot of fun to think about.