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Series 7 Study Guide

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The Moon and Sixpence Summary

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Attrition Questions

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Graphic-Novel Research Reveals Resistance, Lessons

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> The presence and visibility of graphic novels in curriculum may be on the rise, but what of resistance to these materials? Several new and recent papers use a combination of surveys, literature review, and classroom evidence to examine obstacles to teaching comics in the classroom. Teaching graphic novels can be a heavy lift and a few of the reasons may be surprising.

J. Spencer Clark of Utah State University recently published the results of a teacher trainee survey examining "the value of using nonfiction graphic novels as historical narratives in the social studies curriculum" through the lens of preservice teacher attitudes. Twenty-four students in a social studies methods course were chosen to participate. Over the course of two weeks, the students read and discussed two nonfiction graphic novels—Howard Zinn's A People's History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008) and a second title of their choosing from a list of 12 possibilities. Discussions took place in small groups, in online forums, and in class with all survey participants present. Six students were interviewed in greater detail.

The preservice teachers in Clark's study valued the nonfiction graphic novels most for their multiple perspectives and their ability to introduce concepts like historical empathy, historical agency, and historical inquiry. Common reactions to the project also included initial skepticism and surprise at the level of engagement and absorption experienced through reading graphic novels. It seems there's a reluctant reader in every group, even in a class of teachers-to-be.

The interviews and discussions revealed a shared fear of peer and community reactions to introducing graphic novels in the social studies classroom. More than one student was trepidatious about "graphic novels displaying an un-American connotation"—an alternative characterization of multiple perspectives in the depiction of history. Still others worried that the combination of novice teacher status and teaching with graphic novels could lead colleagues to see them as unprofessional.

Clark's students automatically assumed a defensive stance, anticipating having "to justify their use of graphic novels in their social studies courses." Similarly, Kathryn Strong Hansen's "In Defense of Graphic Novels," published in the November issue of English Journal, assumes widespread resistance to comics in education and sets out to analyze this attitude. She counters a number of related concerns about graphic novels' place in the classroom with support from research literature and classroom experience.

Interestingly, Hansen challenges some of the more popular ways of advocating for graphic novels in the classroom, particularly the term "multiple literacies" and the oft-suggested use of graphic novels to engage "struggling" or "reluctant" readers. She suggests that resistance to graphic novels in the classroom may actually come from students who perceive a kind of stigma associated with comics, especially when reading comics is meant as a substitute for reading other texts. The practice of "adapting" or "modernizing" texts for classroom use is similarly a point of contention.

This raises the question of whether "multiple literacies" is perhaps persistently misunderstood as a term of condescension or a euphemism. Hansen cites a 2010 article by Sean P. Connors that raises this issue. Just as "special education" encompasses gifted students and learning-disabled students alike (many may also fit both descriptions), multiple literacies can literally be understood as a continuum of text- and non-text-based skills or ways of seeing, reading, and understanding. There is no hierarchy inherent in "multiple literacies"—this appears to be at root of the misconception that Connors and Hansen attempt to dispel.

The stigmatization and devaluation of comic books is not the only fallout from treating them as supplemental material. Hansen argues that "thinking of graphic novels as somehow outside the realm of literature denies students a chance to master standards in engaging ways." She's speaking from a teacher's perspective here—let's not assume that standards, common or otherwise, occupy as prominent a position in students' minds. Still, treating graphic novels as non- or less-than-literature may also deny students the opportunity to encounter an important art and literary form on its own terms—to love or hate graphic novels regardless of what they mean in standards and assessment terms.

Last year, I wrote about one high school teacher using a multiple literacies project to great effect in her American history class. In order to avoid negative associations with graphic novels, teachers may find it helpful to contextualize them as one of many different kinds of communication.

Making and encouraging explicit connections between graphic novels and other media is one way to do this. In a November 2012 English Journal paper, titled, "Exploring the Connection between Graphic Novel and Film," Ashley Dallacqua draws attention to links between movies and comics, from shared storylines—see especially cliffhangers of the 1930s and 40s, and contemporary blockbuster remakes of popular comics—to how students experience the reading of them. Hansen resists directly likening graphic novels to another literary form, apprehensive that such comparisons limit the popular understanding of graphic novels' separateness as a medium. Dallacqua, by contrast, is encouraged by her students' recognition of the link—perhaps this understanding opens their minds to new ways of reading and watching.

Graphic novels are often touted as a genre particularly accessible to young people, but they're a literary genre as diverse as any other. While some teenagers may be obsessed with sweeping epics like Frank Miller's 300 (Dark Horse Comics, 1998) or Alan Moore's Watchmen (DC Comics, collected 1987), others may find golden-age DC and Marvel comics to be more to their taste. Still others will prefer Lilli Carré's Nine Ways to Disappear (Little Otsu, 2009) or Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011) and webcomic, or take their chances rifling through the comics at their local zine repository. There are cartoonist-journalists like Joe Sacco and Susie Cagle, who use drawing as an integral part of their reporting on current events like Middle East conflicts and the Occupy movement. And then there are comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes, The Boondocks, Doonesbury...

Many of us have read and hated certain books in school, only to rediscover and learn to appreciate them later in life. Likewise, not every student is bound to fall in love with comics in the classroom, or with the specific comics used in instruction. Teachers considering the integration of graphic novels into curriculum may find it helpful to present such titles on an equal footing with other books and textbooks and to be prepared for a wide range of student responses to the medium. Searching out a knowledgeable resource—like a librarian versant in comics or, as Hansen suggests, employees of local comics shops—can help teachers introduce students to the vast variety of comics in the world, even while selecting a primary text or two for in-depth study.

]]> - Amy Wickner

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Cyber Bullying Survey

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Apple, a Socially Responsible Corporation

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After Persepolis: Graphic Novels Challenged in the Classroom

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> Graphic novels have been in the news lately thanks to the Chicago Public Schools' restriction of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's graphic coming-of-age memoir which takes place against the back drop of the 1978 Iranian Revolution (Pantheon Books, 2003). In a series of moves surrounding the book challenge, CPS announced that the book would be banned from schools, then altered course to declare that the title would remain on library shelves but would be removed from middle and high school curriculum. CPS tweeted a screenshot of CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett's letter to principals regarding the book, which was said to be too graphic for 7th graders. The district position is that until further training and teacher resources are available, teachers are not equipped to handle student responses to the book.

The unfolding of events prompted reaction from publishers and comics cognoscenti—see this post at Truthout—and from CPS students, who staged a sit-in Monday to protest the book's removal from required reading lists. Marjane Satrapi, in a phone interview with DNAinfo.com, dismissed plans for additional teacher training, saying, "If you have to take a course to teach a book, you pick another book. It's a big insult to the teachers. It's insulting their intelligence, their integrity." The Atlantic published an opinion piece by Noah Berlatsky, in which he suggests that the oppressive regime depicted in Persepolis may have uncomfortable echoes in the current debate.

Persepolis is part of the Chicago district's official common-core curriculum and may be the first such title to be challenged. The common standards suggestbroadening the scope of students' reading through greater exposure to informational texts and through encounters with nontraditional texts. As with many banned and challenged books, content, not context, is what proves objectionable to the plaintive party. (For more context on challenges to comic books, legal and otherwise, see The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's 2012 roundup, "The Year in Censorship," as well as Marc Greenberg's case study of the CBLD itself.)

Still, resistance to graphic novels themselves is by no means uncommon, even as the common standards seem to solidify their place in the cultivation of multiple literacies. A Chicago Tribune story profiled classrooms where graphic novels have been successfully introduced. While comics haven't exactly been a rare presence in schools, research on their place in curriculum is just beginning to enter the consciousness of the general public, with mixed results. In my next post, I'll discuss several new and recent papers examining obstacles to teaching with graphic novels.

]]> - Amy Wickner

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College Students Today

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Ibm Sap Implementation

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Friday Roundup: Scholastic, FirstBook, and the National Archives

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> • Publishing giant Scholastic announced today that they have entered into an agreement with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers to offer a selection of titles ranging from picture books to young adult novels via their e-reading app, Storia. The new additions will expand the e-book titles available to teachers and students at Scholastic's book fairs and book clubs, and include such award-winning titles and authors as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes; Printz Award-winning author of Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi; Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life by James Patterson; and Hug Time and The Gift of Nothing by New York Times-bestselling Patrick McDonnell.

• FirstBook, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting literacy for children in low-income communities, announced this week that they have committed to purchasing $1 million in books, split between two publishers: HarperCollins and Lee & Low Books. The books will feature minorities, characters of color, and other voices that are rarely represented in children's literature but which resonate with the communities that the organization serves—including special needs and LGBT communities—according to FirstBook. "With these major purchases, First Book is continuing to harness market forces to create social change," writes the organization's President and CEO Kyle Zimmer. "By aggregating the untapped demand for books and resources in thousands of low-income communities, we're helping to create a new market for the publishing industry."

Reading Room, Library of Congress, ca. 190-: Photograph shows several people seated at tables looking at books or albums, with card catalogs and magazine racks behind them, in the second floor southeast pavilion of what is now called the Thomas Jefferson Building. Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-37240

• Have you heard? A new national digital library is in development. David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, announced this week that the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA, will soon launch its first pilot project. Several content providers, including the National Archives and Harvard University, are sharing digitized content from their online catalogs as part of the Digital Hubs Pilot Project, which will aggregate onlin digital collections into one "hub." If you are in, or near, Boston, the festivities surrounding the launch of the pilot program will take place on April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library's central location.

The National Archives will provide a whopping 1.2 million digital copies from its catalog for the DPLA project. For those of you who might not already be aware (I counted myself as part of that crowd up until this week), the DPLA is a "large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries, and archives to build a digital library platform to make America's cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point." Which is wonderful news, for sure. But I, for one, will miss old-school reading rooms once they are gone for good.]]> - Catherine A. Cardno

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Friday Roundup: World Book Day, Teaching American Authors, and More

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> Hello All!

Here are some of this week's top stories that we thought you might want to read about now that the week is winding down:

World Book Day was yesterday, March 7, and the big question on everyone's mind: What are *you* reading? World Book Day also has an online presence, complete with website, Twitter feed, Facebook page, etc., that includes material and videos useful for the classroom. Teaching your students how to craft the best possible stories can only help them become better consumers of fiction and non-fiction, right? The 2013 program for World Book Day—which included a number of video presentations, including one on how to develop your characters by famed Charlie and Lola creator Lauren Child—becomes available on-demand today, March 8. For the purists among you, UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day is officially celebrated on April 23 each year, but the United Kingdom celebrates the day on the first Thursday in March. (CAC)

Image of Emily Dickinson, compliments of the Library of Congress.

ASCD's e-books are now available through Kobo, the publisher announced this week. The Toronto, Canada-based e-reading service offers reading applications for the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows, and their own line of e-reading devices. More than 80 of ASCD's professional development e-books are now available via the website, including Charlotte Danielson's Enhancing Professional Practice, 2nd Edition; Eric Jensen's Teaching with Poverty in Mind; and Carol Ann Tomlinson's How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, 2nd Edition. (CAC)

BookMarks' favorite Washington-based federal library, the Library of Congress, has put together a primary-source set on 19th-century American authors for teachers. The collection showcases public images and other material related to five major writers: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe. The library has also included a guide for historical context, teaching suggestions, and links to online resources in its page. (CAC)

Looking for something a little bit silly and a lot book-ish to enjoy on a Friday afternoon? Look no further than these 30 book-inspired cakes, compliments of flavorwire.com. Some are more CakeWrecks than masterpieces, to be sure, but check out the mini-library. It's a sight to behold.

Writers and artists continue to bring exciting book projects to Kickstarter. One new project that may appeal to educators across subjects is Mind Afire, a comic-book biography of inventor Nikola Tesla, aimed at a teen and adult audience. Tesla, a prolific and creative engineer and physicist, has gained popular attention recently as an under-appreciated genius whose inventions were co-opted by others. See, for example, this edition of the web comic Hark! A Vagrant for a capsule version of Tesla's career.

The scope of Tesla's work and imagination appealed to editor Abigail Samoun and Elizabeth Haidle, the women behind the project. Haidle's delicate but vibrant illustrations could each be standalone artworks—Mind Afire can thus resemble a picture book more than a graphic novel. Visit the Kickstarter page to learn more about the book, which will be published in paperback and also made available as a PDF e-book. For a list of more than 100 reader-rated and -reviewed books about or related to Nikola Tesla, visit the Nikola Tesla Book Database, hosted by Tesla Universe. And for more about how writers and illustrators are using Kickstarter, see Crowdfunding Kickstarts Book Projects (BookMarks, Dec. 4, 2012). (ADW)

]]> - Catherine A. Cardno

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Books by Students, With More on the Way

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> Enough advice from adults on how to be successful: Eighth-grader Marrae Kimball has just published her third book of survival tips for middle school students, drawing upon her own experience and input from friends.

Kimball, who attends Oxford Hills Middle School in Paris, Maine, has previously written books for her peers promising Guaranteed Success for Kindergarten: 50 Easy Things You Can Do Today! and Guaranteed Success for Grade School: 50 Easy Things You Can Do Today!. Kimball joins a host of other very young writers whose work is making it into print today thanks to avenues such as self-publishing, community partnerships, and national media organizations.

Kimball's new book is titled The Secret Combination to Middle School: Real Advice from Real Kids, Ideas for Success, and Much More! and is distributed by Find Your Way Publishing, which is owned by Melissa Eshleman, Kimball's mother. Find Your Way's other offerings include Prank and Pray You Get Away!, a primer on practical jokes and sibling rivalry penned by William Eshleman and Paige Kimball, Marrae Kimball's brother and sister.

Kimball explained her motivation for the new book in an interview with the Oxford Hills Sun Journal:

"I know what it's like to start your first day in middle school, including the combination of excitement and nervousness," she said. "I want kids to know that this doesn't have to be a frightening time, but rather a chance to become more mature and make new friends that may last your entire lifetime."

The Kimball and Eshleman siblings aren't the only kids seeing their writing between covers lately. Nikhil Goyal is a high school senior and the recently published author of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School. A manifesto of sorts on infusing creativity into public education, his book has garnered national media attention. Goyal will appear this March as a distinguished speaker at SXSWedu 2013, the education arm of the annual South by Southwest festival.

Several nonprofit education programs produce printed and bound volumes of student work as milestones or culminating projects. 826, a literacy foundation established in San Francisco in 2002 that has since expanded to eight chapters nationwide, has published several compilations of student writing from each of its tutoring programs. The anthologies tend to focus on advice-giving and -receiving, whether the peer-to-peer advice featured in Be Honest: And Other Advice from Students Across the Country (The New Press, 2011), or student letters to President and Mrs. Obama, collected in Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country (McSweeney's, 2009) and I Live Real Close to Where You Used to Live (McSweeney's, 2010), respectively.

826DC, formerly the Capitol Letters Writing Center and now the Washington branch of 826, has released four collections of student writing through the 826 Young Authors' Book Project and is currently at work on a fifth. 826DC operates a variety of creative writing programs for youth's in the nation's capital, including after-school tutoring, in-school mentoring, field trips, and weekend workshops with titles like "Brain Spelunking" and "Why'd the Chicken Cross the Lesson Plan?" Student writing for each book is gleaned from programs in Washington public schools.

In an announcement soliciting volunteers for the project, Program Coordinator Dillon Babington explained that the new book "will include all three genres (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), and a CD of a student-made podcast discussing their poetry." Students from each of three participating schools will contribute material to the book, working with volunteer in-school tutors and weekend editors from 826DC.

As with past titles in the series, the new volume will likely reflect students' experiences of living and learning in the District. The Way We See It: Complete Coverage of the Nation's Capital From the Inside Out (2009) collected work that "switched back and forth between essay, ode, even experimental cut-up poem" while remaining thematically consistent. Get Used to the Seats: A Complete Survival Guide for Freshmen (2010) was written by seniors at two local high schools. The most recent offering, Dear Brain (2012) is a collection of poetry. 826's emphasis on student writing as personal, creative testimonial remains consistent throughout student publications from all chapters of the organization.

In Syracuse, N.Y., students participating in Say Yes to Education's Young Authors Series collaborate with Syracuse University illustration majors on themed books that are ultimately printed, bound, and distributed to all participants, though not made available for sale. A press release timed to National Novel Writing Month estimated that 100 Syracuse public school students would participate over the current school year. Recently produced books include Has Anyone Seen Harry?, I Don't Feel So Hot, and After-School Adventures. Research for the latter title involved a farm field trip, organized by the school district, for students to see sustainable urban farming in practice.

Say Yes to Education Syracuse aims to improve college- and career-readiness for Syracuse students, as Say Yes and district leaders explained in a November 2011 Education Week webinar. The college-school book collaboration is just one of several community partnerships through which Say Yes Syracuse aims to meet its goals.

And then there's Things Don't Have To Be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World(TED Books, 2012), an ebook compilation of evocative fragments and sentences assembled by Larry Smith, a founder of storytelling-focused media company SMITH and a fixture at TED and other conferences involving short, change-the-world talks. Several illustrated pages from the new book may be seen at the blog Brain Pickings. So far nine books have been published in the Six-Word Memoirs series, many of them garnering submissions through online contests. SMITH Teen, the company's young-adult-focused suite of projects, is currently accepting submissions for a Valentine's Day contest all about heartbreak.

While creative writing can range far afield regardless of age or experience, a great deal of published student work seems to emphasize personal essays, stories, or poems. It's hard to say whether personal testimonials geared to an audience of peers resonate most with young writers, or whether it's a genre of writing perceived as particularly beneficial, and therefore popular with teachers and other literacy advocates.

The experience of collaborating with mentors to produce and edit written work can be empowering as well. As writing teacher Greg Graham concludes in an Education Week Teacher essay this week, memoir-writing in particular can be a way for students and teachers to "address the 'whole person'" in a way otherwise unattainable through curriculum or classroom instruction. Writing can be the most effective—and sometimes the only—means of self-expression, exploration, and communication available to some students. As options for publishing student-written books continue to expand there may be even more opportunities to recognize and encourage young authors on the way.

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Caldecott, Newbery Winners Announced

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misspelled Newbery.

Among numerous awards recognizing excellent work in writing, illustrating, and publishing for children and young adults, the Caldecott and Newbery Medals are by far the most anticipated. The American Library Association's annual Youth Media Awards were held yesterday in conjunction with the association's midwinter meeting. Awards ceremony attendees—even those listening in by livestream, as I did—will have remarked the palpable anticipation as Carolyn Brodie, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, announced the Caldecott and Newbery winners.

The Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children has been awarded annually since 1938; this is its 75th anniversary. The John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature was inaugurated in 1922. Past winners of each award are listed on the website of the ALSC, a division of the American Library Association and the organizer of the Youth Media Awards.

Award committees for each Medal name honor books in addition to the Medal winner. The Honor books for this year's Caldecott Medal are as follows:

Creepy Carrots!, illustrated by Peter Brown and written by Aaron Reynolds (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers). Watch an interview with Brown on the inspiration for his illustrations.

Extra Yarn, illustrated by Jon Klassen and written by Mac Barnett (Balzer + Bray). There is no official trailer for Extra Yarn; Barnett and Klassen held a yarn-related bookstore contest to promote the book instead.

Green, illustrated and written by Laura Vaccaro Seeger (Neal Porter Books).

One Cool Friend, illustrated by David Small and written by Toni Buzzeo (Dial Books for Young Readers). Buzzeo offers several downloadable resources related to this title, including a curriculum guide, reader's theater script, and activity kit.

Sleep Like a Tiger, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski and written by Mary Logue (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children). Not to be confused with another recently published bedtime title.

The winner of the 2013 Caldecott Medal is This Is Not My Hat, illustrated and written by Jon Klassen (Candlewick Press)

Official book trailer via Candlewick Press

Three Newbery Honor books were named:

Splendors and Glooms, by Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick Press). Schlitz, a Baltimore librarian, is a two-time Newbery honoree.

Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin (Flash Point). Sheinkin recorded a 2-minute introduction to his book for TeachingBooks.net.

Three Times Lucky, by Sheila Turnage (Dial Books for Young Readers).

The winner of the 2013 John Newbery Medal is The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate (HarperCollins Children's Books).

Official book trailer via The One and Only Ivan YouTube channel

This may be the first year in which a significant number of Medal winners and Honor books were promoted via book trailer, although video trailers have beenproduced for several recent winners and honorees after the fact. Most publishers provided "graphic excerpts," sample pages, or Google Previews for their award contenders. HarperCollins offers a complete "preview" of Extra Yarn.

This liberality with the visual content of children's books makes lots of sense considering that publishers are marketing to librarians and booksellers more than to parents, teachers, or children themselves. A recent survey of children's reading habits by Scholastic suggested that children value the social aspects of books like reading with parents and trading books with friends. This is particularly true for print books, less so for e-books, that study concluded. Extensive previews, while practically unthinkable for many "adult" publishers, make no significant inroads into this kind of social reading among youth.

Nearly all titles recognized in this year's Youth Media Awards are issued by major publishers or their imprints. As with the rest of K-12 publishing, the picture book and youth media businesses continue to consolidate; this year's Newbery and Caldecott winners reflect this pattern through their provenance, and may serve to perpetuate it as they rocket to the top of library -acquisitions and -sales lists.

]]> - Amy Wickner

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Toward Reader Participation in Book Discovery

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> As I recently wrote in a post about the changing role of reference books, discovery plays a major role in how students use libraries, even when it comes to research. Popularly and more recently, however, "discovery" has come to refer to the experience or process of coming across new things online, a vague but easily marketable description. Beginning with social bookmarking tool del.icio.us (now delicious.com) and browser plugin StumbleUpon, countless Internet entrepreneurs and creators have tilted at the windmill of the ultimate discovery engine built on user feedback—tagging, in some cases, and a simple thumbs up or down in others. Could such tools for exploring the worlds of digital and print books be useful resources for teaching and learning?

A number of sites and start-ups have, over the past several years, thrown their hats in the ring to be the next big book discovery tool. The level of input capability available to users of these tools may have implications for their success and for new directions in book discovery. The ease with which students, teachers, and librarians—in addition to other key user groups—are able to navigate and personalize each discovery system will determine whether the system catches on in K-12 settings. Two in particular offer examples of how book discovery sites can capitalize on user buy-in to both build critical audience mass and continually improve their offerings. Creative use of each site can help educators muster leverage for teaching- and learning-specific features.

Social Cataloging For Books

Social cataloging web applications for books have been popular since the mid-2000s, when sites like LibraryThing, Goodreads and Shelfari launched. Users of each site add, tag, rate, and review books of interest to them, and share this information with other users (generally referred to as "friends"). Relying on user-generated content means patterns emerging from these sites can be unpredictable. User-contributed metadata can be full of idiosyncrasies—one term often used for this kind of cataloging is "folksonomy," in contrast to the formally designed "taxonomy"—but can also create unexpected opportunities for discovery.

Think of trending topics on Twitter: Certain hashtags rise to the top from day to day. Many of these topics reflect major news stories of the day (or hour); in plenty of instances, however, they're the result of memes that, through their humor or absurdity, can create strange and surprising connections across social networks. The folksonomies produced through social cataloging applications can have similar cross-cutting impacts.

Goodreads: Owning the Discovery Process

While the recommending algorithm for Goodreads—the company acquired book recommendation engine Discovereads in 2011—is still a work in progress, Goodreads staff have begun experimenting with existing metrics to see what the current, basic cataloging tools have to say about how discovery works on the site.

Otis Chandler, Kyusik Chung, and Patrick Brown of Goodreads used site activity surrounding The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (a title mentioned several times on BookMarks) to illustrate how internal site promotions and external media coverage can combine to cause jumps in interest among readers. Their metric of choice—People who added book to "to-read", a shelf in Goodreads—is meant to approximate discovery by combining awareness of and acknowledged interest in a title.

As with any list of goals, the To-Read shelf can be purely aspirational; the Goodreads presentation does not suggest that a majority of the users tracked here will ever crack the spine on The Power of Habit. Still, simply knowing when the book sparked users' interest and where said users were on the Goodreads site when they marked the book "to-read" (follow the colored bands across each graph to see this information) may bolster an argument for Goodreads as an effective and versatile tool for discovery.

Goodreads' ease of use means students and teachers can create themed personal shelves and connect with other users reading or interested in the same books and themes. There are book trivia quizzes designed by Goodreads and users both; groups for discussing particular genres or titles; author interviews (goodreads voice); and a regularly refreshed list of recommendations for each user. In addition to cataloging books by shelf, readers can create lists both individually and in collaboration; highlights from this user content appear on a page called listopia.

While cataloging and discovery features abound, teachers may find the book reviewing feature to be just as valuable for encouraging students to respond to what they read. Goodreads users assign one to five stars to books and can write reviews of up to 20,000 characters. HTML tips and special markup formats are provided so reviewers can embed links to other books and authors. A student's body of work on Goodreads—from clear and creative cataloging to rich use of reviewing, linking capabilities—could result in an assessable portfolio and extendible learning opportunity. For more ways in which Goodreads can find a place in classrooms and school libraries, see Travis Jonker's helpful primer at The Digital Shift (a School Library Journal blog).

Having built a site around readers, added an official author program for writers wishing to expand their online presences, and even created a Librarian function with its own forum dedicated to correcting cataloging errors, Goodreads now appears to be turning its attention to publishers and literary agents. Informal blog "book tours" are already popular, and Goodreads may use its author Q&A feature to formalize this model and establish itself as a key stop on any online book tour, the 92nd Street Y of internet book promotion.

Small Demons: Building A Database

While the Goodreads community thrives on sharing reviews and personalized cataloging, Small Demons has a different objective: to build a database to "connect all the details of books." The idea for Small Demons began with founder Valla Vakili's curiosity about the geographic settings and cultural hallmarks in a novel set in Marseilles, France. As Vakili told the Sacramento Bee, his curiosity led to a week-long immersion in Marseillaise culture, then to the conviction that "many of the best experiences we can find are within books. And that if we could gather them all up and put them in one place, we could unlock a world of pretty incredible discovery."

The result of this brainstorm, a literary database whose goal is "a complete cataloging of all things in all books," connects titles, characters, places, and other information from books to facilitate the kind of down-the-rabbit-hole experience that many love about books, libraries, and (admit it!) Wikipedia.

Literary, scholarly, and pop-culture references are included as well. One frequently cited example is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: The many songs and albums mentioned in the novel are linked to the book. Curious about how a reference-heavy novel like A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale might look? Every reference to a philosopher or historical figure, from Empedocles to Jacques Lacan, is connected to the book and appears on its profile page. Hover over the image of each figure, and a pop-up window quotes text from the book where references occur.

There is no indication, as yet, of how the site might handle quotations of fictional writers—in a book like Byatt's own novel Possession, for example—or stylistic, rather than explicit references. Distinguishing between metaphoric and literal language, standard and nonstandard Englishes, and explicit and implicit arguments are all key elements in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (See CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.4 and CCRA.R.5). Still, there's a world of nested narratives, unreliable narrators, and retellings (of fairy tales, history, and so on) that may push the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading to their limit, and a site like Small Demons may not be prepared to handle them either.

The classification system can already be awkward and funny. A search for The Hobbit, for example, brings up a page on Hobbits, in the category "Ethnic Group."

The site's current catalog can make complex literature accessible for maturing readers, although it's not specifically intended for youth. Joyce Valenza at School Library Journal has more details of Small Demons' forthcoming YA-friendly features, which include a dramatic expansion of indexed books by adding the back catalogs of major publishers and independent imprints alike. A Jan. 15 press release announced that Small Demons would sign a deal with Penguin to add that publisher's titles to its catalog. Simon & Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette are the other major publishing houses currently working with the site.

The cooperation of publishers is necessary to the viability of Small Demons, as issues of copyright and fair use are broadly and dramatically misunderstood. Small Demons avoids the challenges faced by other databases like Google Books and Hathi Trust by working directly with publishers. It's likely that the prominent Buy button on every book profile helps the cause as well.

Participatory options for students and teachers don't stop at getting lost in the site. Frequent users can create accounts and start building collections by adding books to sets of personalized shelves. Each book page offers Share options for connecting Small Demons to Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other social media. Finally, users can contribute to the site by submitting corrections and additional references, a crowdsourcing process that Small Demons appears to be in the process of gamifying. While it's unclear what bar users must clear to begin editing the database, they'll earn points for every contribution once they received permission to get involved. In theory, contributors must work toward expertise or consistency in order to achieve successive levels of authority on Small Demons.

It can be difficult to strike the right balance between personal organizing and site-wide cataloging on Small Demons, since any changes to book data must be approved by moderators. Unlike other social cataloging tools, Small Demons users don't review the books they work on. Still, teachers and students may find the sharing and collection-building features sufficient for exploring books and topics in curriculum, particularly when it comes to following the Common Core's close reading requirements in creative ways.

Is Reader Participation Make-or-Break?

While Small Demons has gathered a considerable following, a few more recent forays into book discovery platforms leave something to be desired according to reviewers. Laura Hazard Owen at paidContent.org wrote a tongue-in-cheek (and mostly dismissive) review of BookScout, a new Facebook app from Random House. She found the app's suggestions wildly off the mark, the connections it made between titles and authors laughable. Still, there may be hope for BookScout as a social cataloging tool: Its algorithm mines Facebook's Open Graph search but will also absorb ratings and sharing data, among other user input. If BookScout achieves sufficient user buy-in, its recommendations may begin to make more sense.

Briana Boyington of Education Week Commentary, who guest blogs here at BookMarks, found the Twitter-based book recommendation app BookRX to be not quite ready for the spotlight either. BookRX is a recommender algorithm. Visitors enter their Twitter handles and the algorithm returns lists of thematically organized titles based on frequently recurring keywords in the account's archive of tweets. As Boyington found, not only did BookRX appear not to grasp the essence of several user names tested, but the connections between suggested titles and highlighted keywords was obscure. So far BookRX offers no avenue for users to respond and tweak what the app produces; unless plans are made for user feedback, it may be doomed to remain a curiosity, or a one-trick pony.

With so many options for book discovery available to readers today, the long-term viability of online and mobile tools may depend not on the specific technology used, but on each tool or site's ability to generate and maintain user buy-in. Easy access to book information and editing capabilities may draw many to Small Demons, but site quality may suffer if the process of collective editing isn't appropriately managed. And users contributing content may not be enough to keep a site going: Without publisher or retailer tie-ins to leverage and expand its user base, Goodreads may not survive in the long-term.

The lack of educator- or student-specific programming on each site leaves these audiences to find their own way. Small Demons and Goodreads have been free to use so far, and look to be so for the foreseeable future. If teachers and librarians are to ask more of either site, they may push for easier (secure) connectivity to learning management systems—the way Goodreads Connect currently works with e-commerce sites—common core-specific resources, and curriculum guides.

That said, it's currently possible to shape new resources from existing features, and to share pages and shelves created within Goodreads and Small Demons with an audience of non-users. For the more intrepid and code-savvy, Goodreads also offers options for building a variety of web applications with its API. Teachers, students, and librarians who take advantage of these developer tools can create custom discovery and cataloging engines while helping improve the overall Goodreads project—crowdsourcing again, in a different form.

Ultimately, it seems that managing a successful discovery system is about much more than the simple act of discovery. Shared discovery is what best helps online book communities thrive.

]]> - Amy Wickner

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Busting Cages, Not Heads, for Better School Leadership

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> In Cage-Busting Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2013), Rick Hess aims to rework the language of leadership and reframe thinking in the educational context. Hess, a popular opinion blogger on edweek.org, has compiled observations and lessons from years of working with school and district leaders into this compendium of practical advice for educators. Hess' term "cage-busting leadership," in opposition to "cage-dwelling" passivity, describes the powerful leadership style he feels is underused but within reach. Drawing on diverse examples, he defines the concept not only by what is, but also by what it is not. He exhorts leaders to recognize that they "have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed."

According to Hess, many of the difficulties educational leaders experience stem from their misuse of language. He argues that popular concepts in the field—terms like collaboration, consensus, capacity, coaching, and culture—are little understood. To effect change, he says, educators must exercise control over education leadership language in every context. Hess spends a chapter on the need for precise word choice and sentence structures for getting to the root of what's going wrong and what could be better. The umbrella of "better language" covers everything from avoiding the word "can't," to asking the right questions, to reading research and contracts carefully and without over-simplification.

Hess runs into a bit of trouble juggling analogies to gambling, Zen Buddhism, barfights, and The Art of War. In fact, Cage-Busting Leadership frequently breaks its own rules about language clarity. Each chapter is so full of oblique examples that it can be easy to lose sight of the main thread. The stories can be stem-winding and repetitive or out of context and only loosely connected to the point at hand.

Hess emphasizes that educators should know the letter of the law (or collective-bargaining agreement), investigate the specifics of problems, and set concrete objectives. He also points out that opportunities abound for bending, breaking, skirting, or ignoring rules that don't make sense. For example, he argues that federal regulations cause schools to maintain funding and staffing silos, and recommends creative ways to move employees and money around. Whether or not you agree that regulation is to blame, it's possible to make the case—as Hess does not—that keeping departments siloed has a detrimental effect on school culture, professional learning communities, and all of those other leadership concepts that Hess finds squishy or overused. The more staff are grouped homogeneously, the fewer opportunities they have to learn from each other, develop horizontal loyalty, and build a host of similar connections and relationships that are commonly understood to be good for business and good for the workplace.

Hess returns repeatedly to his frustration with the widespread resistance among educators to closer involvement with the private sector. Interestingly, while he has previously advised entrepreneurs to treat education as an unusual field by marketing themselves as "thought leaders," he spends large portions of Cage-Busting Leadership telling a presumed audience of educators that they are not exceptional. In fact, one of the main prongs of Hess' argument is that conceiving of education as an "exceptional field" holds many back from fully capitalizing on opportunities and resources that could help them lead effectively.

Of course, this approach is not guaranteed to work—Hess makes it abundantly clear that he's offering ideas and rules of thumb, not a blueprint for leadership success. Anyone sitting down to read Cage-Busting Leadership would do well to keep this in mind, and to think of the book as a snapshot of work in progress. This volume is intended not as a recipe for results, but as a conversation-starting handbook for figuring out what works.

Cage-Busting Leadership was released Feb. 12, and the American Enterprise Institute hosted a live-streamed launch event. Interested readers can preview the book and watch related video interviews at theAEI and Harvard Education Press websites. Hess will read from the book at SXSWedu in March. Additional previews of material covered in the book are available in an article penned for a recent AEI Outlook, recent blog posts on Rick Hess Straight Up, and in a forthcoming commentary in Education Next.

]]> - Amy Wickner

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It's the Return of the Friday Roundup!

type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/bookmarks/"> There are so many stories during the week that tend to fall through the cracks, we decided it would be fun to gather four or five of the best each week and get them up on the blog.

March 2 is Dr. Seuss' birthday! I know a lot of schools may have celebrated today, but you can celebrate all month with your elementary, middle, or high school students. Scholastic has pulled together extension activities for pre-K-2 classrooms that include mystery words, skill-building displays, character guessing games, story maps, and a picture dictionary. Middle and high school students might be interested in discussing some of the alternate works Theodor Seuss Geisel created, such as his World War II political cartoons, which are available online from the University of California, San Diego. (CAC)

Women in military combat roles is a new development, right? Actually, it isn't. I came across a Library of Congress collection of documents this week that I think would be perfect for the classroom, particularly for a generation of kids familiar with Disney's Mulan and who have witnessed the historic U.S. decision to lift the military ban on women in combat. The library has created a collection of primary documents focused on female soldiers who served in the Civil War, including specific questions that you can use to lead classroom discussions. The first post focuses on a general history of women who served, while the second post focuses on the experiences of particular individuals. (CAC)

What makes a tweet poetic? Inspired by the response to the first-ever Twitter fiction festival, the New York Public Library has launched a 10-day Twitter poetry festival. To enter the National Poetry Context on Twitter, which will run from March 1 to 10, tweeters must submit one entry consisting of three "poetic Tweets" in English directed to @NYPL, the library's Twitter handle. Contest rules also specify that at least one of the three tweets must be about libraries, books, reading, or New York City. A panel of poets and librarians will review the submissions, and winners will be republished across social-media channels and in a NYPL Poetry eBook. Library Journal spoke with a representative of NYPL and has more details here.

Teachers and students participating or following along with the contest might puzzle over the following: What makes a tweet a poem? Twitter users are familiar with the aphoristic, the absurd, and the accidental poems endemic to the medium; it will be interesting to see whether and how submissions manage to capture that spirit. The Twitter Fiction Festival was rife with genre-bending experiments. It seems the challenge this time will be finding a form of poetry that's a natural fit for the format. Let's hope, for the judges' sake, that bad haikus are kept to a minimum. Are Patience and Fortitude acceptable topics for poems? Will the judges deem such works relevant to libraries and/or New York City?

As noted in the Official Rules: "Entries will not be returned." Think carefully before you tweet. (ADW)

Makers plus libraries makes Cory Doctorow happy. Taking up one of our favorite topics here at BookMarks, author and journalist Cory Doctorow recently wrote about libraries and makerspaces in conjunction with Freedom to Read Week, an annual Canadian event celebrating intellectual freedom. Doctorow argues that a shared talent for information literacy can bring makers and librarians together for a common purpose. Doctorow would like to see the definition of information literacy expanded to encompass deeper understanding of how we access information; this would include learning more about the physical apparatus allowing the flow of information. Makers' physical building skills and knowledge-sharing abilities may thus complement the digital literacy and search skills of librarians.

Doctorow loves traditional public libraries and credits them with encouraging his youthful curiosity. To proponents of bookless libraries, he ripostes, "Damn right libraries shouldn't be book-lined Internet cafes." Doctorow has a huge following—including teenage fans of his young-adult novels—and his article may prove influential with a new-to-makerspaces audience of teachers, students, and school librarians. (ADW)

]]> - Catherine A. Cardno

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