I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about the high school/college transition these days and the differences we see among members of the freshman class.

Such thinking leads naturally to a consideration of more profound issues of social justice and equity, issues supported by our Common Beliefs and standards.

Access to an effective school library program is one example of information privilege. The absence of access is one symptom of information poverty.

A study conducted by Keith Curry Lance and Deb Kachel reported that between the 1999/2000 and 2015/16 school years, we saw a 19% loss in full-time school librarian positions nationwide. (See School Librarian, Where Art Thou?)

Beyond access to a robust and effective library program, some students come to school with knapsacks fully packed. Each morning they arrive at school ready to go, relying on the presence of a set of conditions that support their academic success.  For other students, that pack may be empty.

In an SLJ post from way back in 2009, I faced an experience that painfully amplified that chasm on a local level. Visiting honors students, seniors from a Philadelphia school less than a mile away, were faced with a stark realization when they compared their nearly non-existent access to high-quality, paywall-protected information and communication tools to the access afforded, and largely taken for granted, by many of my own students. (Read A Visit to Remember.) In this particular case, for their four years in high school, those students did not have access to resources made freely available to them by our state. No librarian pointed to them.

For librarians, the recognition of information privilege–that one student has clear advantage over another–is a call to action, pointing to our responsibilities to reflect on the disparities in information access present in our own communities, to raise awareness, and to work to close gaps.

Recently, I came across a tweet from a Duke University librarian that framed this social justice issue in powerfully visual way.

Inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. and Char Booth’s important work on Information Privilege, Duke librarian Hannah Rozear created the Information Privilege Knapsack as part of this powerful lesson on Information Privilege in Duke’s Library 101 Toolkit. (Adaptable resources for the Information Privilege lesson are available in this folder.)

The suggested Information Privilege Walk, connected to the knapsack, is an activity that might be thoughtfully shared with older students or for a professional development workshop.

Participants are instructed to either take steps forward or backward in response to the following adaptable questions.  (Warning, this might be too sensitive an activity for young people in some environments.)

• If your local public library was within walking distance of your home, take one step forward.
• If you had internet at home growing up, take one step forward.
• If there were more than 50 books in your home, take one step forward.
• If you had access to your own tablet/computer/laptop at home, one step forward.
• If you have a smartphone with data plan now, take one step forward.
• If you had a smartphone with data plan in high school, take one step forward.
• If your high school had a library, take one step forward.
• If your high school had a librarian/library media specialist, take one step forward.
• If your high school had a library, but it didn’t have a lot of useful/new stuff in it. Take a step backward.
• If you had access to databases (JSTOR, EBSCO etc.) and online journals in high school, take one step forward.
• If you learned about using databases (JSTOR, EBSCO, etc.) in high school, take one step forward.
• If you learned about finding and evaluating sources in high school, take one step forward.
• If your professors encouraged academic freedom, take one step forward.
• If you have hesitated, or decided not to purchase a textbook based on the cost, take one step back.

If I were to remix this set of conditions, I would add a few questions:

• If your parents read to you on a regular basis take a step forward.
• If your high school encouraged inquiry-based projects take a step forward.
• If your high school encouraged you to build an argument based on evidence take a step forward.
• If your high school prepared to to thoughtfully analyze data, news and media resources, take a step forward.
• If your high school prepared you to use digital tools to create media-rich communication and knowledge projects, take a step forward.
• If your high school library had a website that curated resources to support your  learning and workflow, take a step forward.
• If your high school librarian partnered with your classroom teachers in teaching your courses, take a step forward.
• If your high school had a librarian/library media specialist, who did not take an active role in instruction, take a step backward.
• If, in high school, you learned how to identify an academic or peer-reviewed journal, take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned how to identify formats of digital source types and publishing formats–magazine and journal articles, chapters, newspapers, blog posts, etc.-take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned the difference between primary and secondary sources, take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned how to critically read a citation, take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned how to thoughtfully generate and revise search terms, take a step forward.
• If, in middle school and high school, you knew you could freely access databases made available to you by your school, district, state, public library, or other agency, take a step forward.
• If you know how to leverage grammar check, outlining/organization tools, and citation generator applications for your academic work, take a step forward.
• If you learned how to use social media critically to find and share information, take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned about how to respect and ethically use the intellectual property of others, take a step forward.
• If, in high school, you learned about Creative Commons, CC0, Public Domain and Fair Use and the open access movement, take a step forward.

This Information Privilege slideshow would also aid in increasing awareness in high school students.

Hannah invites others to take the image and the lessons and remix them. She shares:

We hope this information privilege graphic will spark conversations among students, teachers and librarians, about how to recognize existing educational and information disparities and work together to improve them.

You may also want to read Char Booth’s powerful post on information privilege. When Booth discussed and diagrammed the paywall system and shared the library’s multi-million dollar budget with her university students, she got the following responses from students who were surprised to see themselves as a privileged few:

Why in the world does it cost so much?”

“It doesn’t make sense!”

“You mean all libraries have to pay like this?”

“Why can’t we use this stuff after we graduate?”

Booth concludes:

If you seek to address structural information inequities, it is essential to develop a professional value system that perceives and opposes injustices not only within our institutions, but beyond them. In this sense information privilege is not just about asking our students to examine themselves and their position behind the paywall, it is about informing the way we collaborate, design, manage, lead, and advocate.

For most of us, this will mean examining our own privilege and how we have been teaching and working in information contexts thus far. We can begin by asking ourselves simple questions – how do I approach access and authority in my practice? Do I broach subjects like inequity or justice? What can I do to develop a more open sense of access?

It’s important to note that the information access problem reaches beyond age and economic circumstance.

Those no longer affiliated with school or university libraries, may have an even clearer sense of what they cannot access, finding themselves locked on the wrong side of information paywalls. Jake Orlowitz, Head of The Wikipedia Library at the Wikimedia Foundation, offers a patchwork of partially suitable options, or hacks, in his very useful Medium post, You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do? 

What questions would you add to the Information Privilege Walk?

It may not be the typical white glove or laboratory experience, but students of history and science can find multiple opportunities to volunteer as citizen archivists or citizen scientists in a few important crowdsourcing efforts.

The Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian offer parts of their collections to be organized and made accessible by employing the services citizen volunteers.

1. The Library of Congress was an early adopter of archival crowdsourcing. In fact, in 2008, the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division began to recruit volunteers to improve the findability of thousands of photographs using its Flickr Commons to identify people, places and additional data. Additional adventures in crowdsourcing include the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s FixIt+ and Library of Congress Labs’ Beyond Words, which invite citizens to transcribe historic radio programs and to identify cartoons and photographs in the historic newspaper collections.

2. The National Archives Citizen Archivists Dashboard shares several Citizens Missions.  Current NARA transcribing and tagging missions involve documents relating to American Expeditionary combat forces in World War I, papers relating to Alger Hiss (accused of participating in a Communist espionage ring), records relating to former and last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Revolutionary War Prize Cases (relating to captured ships), Radium Girls (female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning while painting watch dials with luminescent paint in the early part of the 20th century), and American Scenic Byways (photographs of 150 All American Roads).

NARA’s Mary King recently announced a new social media project. NARA’s Facebook chatbot allows citizen archivists to interact with the Archives’ staff and to improve accessibility.To start interacting with the chatbot, click on the Send Message button on our Facebook page, and say “Hi!”

The National Archives Facebook page not only regularly shares primary source goodies, its chatbot, engages citizens in transcription efforts.

Click and say “hi.” The chatbot will open and give you the option to tag a document or ask a question. When you choose to “tag a document,” you have the option to work with typed, handwritten items, or both. I was assigned a daily appointment sheer for President Truman.

3. The Smithsonian offers a variety of opportunities for engaging in Citizen Science research missions, with opportunities to help sustain species around the globe and even solve mysteries of the planets and stars!

Neighborhood Nestwatch: Launched in 2000, this project invites citizen biologist to share data relating to the survival of bird populations. Each backyard becomes both a research site and an outdoor classroom.

Smithsonian Transcription Center invites citizen botanists, astronomers and those interested in women in science to transcribe data in specimen collection records and to transcribe full-text of field books and other archival text.

eMammal: encourages participants to install community camera traps to assist researchers in answering questions about mammal distribution and abundance.

Leafsnap: This free mobile app is an electronic field guide about tree species that uses visual recognition software to identify tree species from high-resolution photographs of leaves. Participants can automatically share images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who use the data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora.

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL): Created in 2007 to as a field guide to all our planet’s nearly two million species, EOL engages both research organizations and citizen scientists around the globe to share biological data, photos, observations, and questions.

Global Amphibian Bioblitz Citizen observations and photographs help scientists document the distribution and conservation status of every known amphibian species.

For even more citizen volunteer opportunities, check out the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit.

For this generation, news is social, visual, and fast. News is often overwhelming,  and it can be difficult for students to tell what news is true and what is false. While most students think news is important to democracy, they do not define news by traditional standards, nor do they necessarily assign authority based on the platform or authors from which news comes. Students know they need to invest the time and critical thinking to assemble, evaluate, and interpret news as it is delivered in the 21st century, and although many students make this effort, others do not. Sharing news on social networks provides some, but not all, students with a valuable opportunity to interact with their communities, whether sharing breaking news from The New York Times or political memes from Facebook.  How students engage with news (executive summary)

Dr. Alison Head and her Project Information Literacy (PIL) research team recently released the findings of a new national study on college students and how they consume and interact with a vast and deeply polarized news ecosystem. The News Study findings are the result of an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 diverse colleges and universities. The research also included computational analysis of Twitter data associated with respondents, as well as a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people.

In the study’s press release, Dr. Head shared:

News is fast, social, and visual and typically delivered to students in posts, alerts, tweets, and conversations that stream at them throughout the day. And young news consumers are left to assemble and interpret what news means, while many take this evaluative step, others do not.

The goal of this digital project is to present the public with a broad range of historical and cultural audio-visual materials that will enrich education, scholarship and lifelong learning. The National Screening Room is designed to open up the Library’s collections, making otherwise unavailable movies freely accessible to viewers nationwide and around the world.

Ranging from 1890 through 1999, the collection of fiction and nonfiction films are searchable by keyword, format, date range and location. Most of the National Screening Room’s content is in the public domain and fully downloadable. Copyrighted films, included with permissions, are available for streaming.

Among the items in the growing collection are George Gershwin’s home movies featuring celebrities of days past; such landmarks in narrative cinema as The Great Train Robbery; views of San Francisco before and after the 1906 Earthquake and fire;  as well as short films director by D. W. Griffith, including A Corner in Wheat.

You’ll also find a series of 33 mid-century newsreels from All-American News, which were produced for African-American audiences.

There’s young Frank Sinatra lecturing a group of young boys about antisemitism and racial prejudice in a musical short from 1945 featuring the classic song, The House I Live In

You’ll find the controversial 1964 Daisy Girl political advertisement which contributed to Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, considered by many as a turning point in both political and advertising history. 

And there’s The Second Largest Minority, footage of one of the earliest (1968) gay pride parades in Philadelphia,

Academic high school English departments will want to join this celebration. (I remember relying so heavily on our print OED set when our AP Lit students were analyzing Shakespearean soliloquies.)

Check out the terms and conditions and consider registering for access at https://public.oed.com/schools90/

While you are visiting the site, check out the very interesting Youth Words project.

In its effort to record all distinctive words that shape the language, old and new, formal and informal, OED is soliciting help in better understanding how young people are themselves shaping our language.

. . .the terms that are in vogue change so rapidly and newer ephemeral modes of communication (texting, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc.) make it difficult to monitor and record this kind of vocabulary. That’s why we are asking for your help in identifying the language used by children and teenagers today.

You can contribute by using this form to share any distinctive vocabulary you discover used by children and teenagers and you can also join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #youthslangappeal.

Meet OASIS.

The goal of the Openly Available Sources Integrated Search is to facilitate the discovery of OER.

Co-developed at SUNY Geneseo by Ben Rawlins, director of Milne Library, and Bill Jones, digital resources and systems librarian, in consultation with SUNY OER Services Executive Director Alexis Clifton, OASIS currently searches open content from 61 different sources and points to more than 160,000 records,

The Geneseo news release shares:

OASIS offers users worldwide the ability to search a range of OER materials including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics – from anthropology to zoology. OASIS also is the only tool that allows users to limit searches by creative commons licenses or by faculty review.

Users can search across all the aggregated portals or browse by type of material or subject.  An Advanced Search allows users to refine by author, title, specific subject, a growing number of source portals, or to search by link.

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Alert your social studies and ELA teacher friends or dig in on your own.  This past week the Library of Congress launched DBQuest and Case Maker, two new web and mobile apps that join a suite of digital resources introduced back in 2016.

The Library of Congress announcement shared that these new interactive opportunities for middle and high school students will engage learners in interactive civics, asking them to weigh evidence and build arguments.

These new applications transport students through primary sources to some of the most dramatic turning points in U.S. history and immerse them in the related debates.

1. DBQuest (developed by iCivics) DBQuest teaches history and civics through the use of primary source documents and evidence-based learning. It offers a platform, accessible on mobile devices, that reinforces evidence-based reasoning and document-based questioning by teaching students to identify and evaluate evidence, contextualize information and write sound supporting arguments.

In this tool, a Big Question guides students’ deep examination of the text of three selected primary resources–texts, images and videos–through document-based supporting questions.  Teachers’ Guides offer step-by-step instructions, timelines, maps and rich support for meeting all learners’ needs. An online glossary of terms supports students’ contextual understanding. Reports are available to monitor student progress.

The Louisiana Purchase, for instance, poses this investigation:

President Jefferson usually gets the credit for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the young nation. But this ignores one important actor, the U.S. Congress. Nearly every step of the process involved the approval of, and funding from, the Legislative Branch. This DBQuest will walk you through primary sources that show the give and take between the two branches.

Students may attack the prompt in either Freeform Mode, allowing for more creative and independent engagement, or in Guided Mode, best for students new to primary source analysis. Guided Mode offers the scaffolding of pre-selected evidence options and just-in-time feedback.

Students review the three sources by sequentially answering multiple choice questions; analyzing the documents looking for textual evidence; and responding in writing to prompts.

2. Case Maker (developed by Bean Creative) Case Maker is a customizable system for inquiry-based learning for K-12 students using primary sources from the Library of Congress. Modeled after the “observe, reflect, question” framework, developed under the Teaching with Primary Sources program, Case Maker guides students to challenge a question, collect evidence and make a case.

Teachers may choose from among the 20 pre-made challenges listed below or choose to customize a challenge to better meet their own students’ needs.

• ANGER AGAINST IMMIGRANTS: What kinds of evidence can you find to support your opinion that people who are angry about new immigrants often come from families that were once immigrants?

• BECOMING A U.S. CITIZEN: Was it difficult for immigrants to become U.S. citizens in the early 20th century?

• BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION: An earlier Supreme Court ruling allowed separate “white schools” and “black schools,” as long as they both provide an equal education. Is “separate but equal” really equal?

• FEDERALISM AND “JIM CROW” LAWS: How did the “Jim Crow” laws disenfranchise African American citizens?

• FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS IN MODERN DAY AMERICA: Since the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written in the 1700s, how can we expect the people who wrote those documents to know what our world would be like today?

• FREEDOM OF PRESS: What evidence supports the view that you should be free to print even controversial opinions in a school newspaper?

• FREEDOM OF SPEECH: How does freedom of speech affect things that didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written?

• JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT AND CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS: The U.S. government said they were forcing Japanese-Americans to live in these camps to protect them from acts of discrimination by other Americans. What are their rights?

• PRINCIPLES OF MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES: What are the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans when they first began, and how have the two political parties changed over time?

• PROPAGANDA AND “FAKE NEWS”: How can propaganda, information that’s aimed at people’s emotions, impact American policies and laws?

• PROTESTS AND THE MANY SIDES OF PUBLIC OPINION: How have Americans throughout history used protests and expressing one’s opinion to influence political options and decision-making?

• REPRESENTATIVE ELECTIONS AND DEMOCRACY: The Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal,” but it says nothing about women. Who has the right to vote in a representative democracy?

• ROLE OF MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES IN POLITICAL PROCESS: When people express their opinions, does it help create real-world change even if they disagree?

• SCHOOL DESEGREGATION AND THE LITTLE ROCK NINE: What are three facts that you feel are most essential for someone to understand the story of the Little Rock Nine?

• SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS: Would someone from the 1700s have the same feelings for the Second Amendment now as in their time?

• VOTER SUPPRESSION: Certain groups had to fight to win their right to vote, but have they faced voter suppression since then?

• WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF THE PRESIDENT’S POWER?: How much power does the president have, and how must the president work with other parts of the U.S. government?

• WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?: What lessons about democracy can you apply from history to help your Civics Club?

• WHAT MAKES A GREAT POLITICAL SPEECH?: What can you learn from historical speeches – either good or bad – to help you make a better speech today?

• WORKER PROTECTIONS AND THE TRIANGLE: What are three aspects of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire story that might persuade someone to see how things that happened in the past can still matter today?

In Anger Against Immigrants, for instance, students are challenged to use evidence from a selection of primary sources to make a case responding to the following prompt:

The U.S. has an immigration process to select people who can make positive contributions to society, but not all Americans want to accept immigrants. Investigate the primary sources. What kinds of evidence can you find to support your opinion that people who are angry about new immigrants often come from families that were once immigrants? Make your case.

These instructional activities promote critical thinking, analysis and engagement with text. They clearly resonate with today’s headlines. They could easily introduce a lesson in history, inspire engaged civic writing and offer a lovely set of training wheels for AP US History.

You may also be interested in:

• Library of Congress: Using Primary Sources
• Stanford History Education Group: Reading Like a Historian, Beyond the Bubble, and Civic Online Reasoning
• NARA’s Teaching with Documents
• Smithsonian Learning Lab
• Newseum EdTools
• PBS History Detectives

(See my post, Library of Congress introduces three new apps and a reminder of some older goodies and note that Engaging Congress was recognized as an AASL Best App for 2018.)