The new federal ConnectED initiative should bring fast connections to almost all schools and libraries within five years. The project, a combination of enhanced broadband connectivity and teacher development, aims to leverage private-sector innovations to benefit students. President Obama also highlighted the role of libraries as partners in improving digital citizenship. Now it’s up to us. What experiences could we provide to our students and patrons if we had superior broadband?

I have four personal Cs of connectivity: content, creation, community, and concurrency. The benefits of the first two are predictable. But the real power of ConnectED lies in the potential of the last two.

Content is the gift and curse of greater broadband. As bandwidth increases, content grows to fill network capacity. While we might imagine expanded content to mean more enriched ebooks and multimedia-enhanced databases, a huge portion of many school networks is clogged with security camera footage.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But libraries need to understand how network configurations and technologies like traffic shaping can provide better, consistent connectivity for all broadband traffic by throttling select bandwidth-hogging services. Security cameras, for example, could be capped at 30 percent of bandwidth. So streaming video to classrooms could have a guaranteed consistent level of performance.

There’s also the issue of net neutrality, which seeks a position that doesn’t favor content from certain Internet providers, and makes traffic-shaping technologies especially important to understand. Service providers could use these technologies to slow down access to content from competitors.

On to my next C. Increased bandwidth expands the capability to create. Schools and libraries could use new resources to publish student- and teacher-authored materials. Think flipped classrooms. Teacher lectures are being recorded with interactive whiteboards and/or cameras, and being pushed out for students to view outside of school. Libraries might record presentations to share with a broader audience, too.

This idea is inexorably linked to the third C: community. A school or library with gigabit broadband in a community without high-speed access will struggle. So, institutions must tackle community access issues first, perhaps even by becoming local hubs for Internet service delivery. Once things are running smoothly, schools and libraries could support their larger communities by providing high-tech services, content delivery, and the creation or publication of locally important content.

Finally, the “ConnectEDness” that comes with high-speed connectivity holds great potential. Approaching gigabit speeds, interactions start to feel concurrent. One can truly be present in real time, even from a distance, as opposed to experiencing the molasseslike lag of high latency. Imagine what libraries could do with that.

We could build a support network to create richer virtual author visits by providing a space in the local library with high-speed broadband. If every library had a multimedia studio space for creation, speakers could use the same hardware for high-quality virtual presentations that feel like a live experience.

This just scratches the surface of things to do with high-speed broadband. Now’s the time to dream big—and to talk big. Share ideas. Establish the need for bandwidth in libraries before it arrives. Then, cross your fingers and hope that ConnectED will push through the morass of politics.

“Hispanic-Latino families are pioneers in adapting new technologies in their communications practices and approaches to parenting and learning,” Dr. Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, tells School Library Journal. “The new AJC initiative is intended to better understand those research-based practices and policies that will support young families to grow and prosper in a digital age.”

Adds Emily Kirkpatrick, vice president of NCFL, “We are continually working to develop, implement and improve innovative programs to support and accelerate intergenerational learning among families. [AJC] is a great step towards linking research to program development, merging new technologies with vital learning opportunities.”

The origin of AJC was spurred by the Hispanic-Latino Families & Digital Technologies Forum that convened last June in Washington, DC. Present at the event were experts representing organizations like the Pew Hispanic Center, National Council of La Raza, and the National Center for Latino Child & Family Research. AJC released last week a synthesis [PDF] of that discussion, complete with a report reviewing existing research and best practices in the field. Some of the key points examined included the vast differences among Hispanics from various countries of origin, language and education attainment, and immigration and socioeconomic status.

Mark Lopez, the associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, points out that “ownership rates and uses of these new digital technologies vary widely within the Hispanic-Latino population, particularly by education level, generational status of immigration, and dominant language,” while Monica Lozano, impreMedia CEO, emphasizes the transformative influence effective digital media use can have on immigrant communities. She argues that, “while the access gap between social groups is diminishing, an information gap remains, making digital literacy a key concern in today’s society.” Participant interviews from the day are also available to the public on YouTube.

AJC would like to work with libraries in the future as a viable location for research and implementation of the council’s findings, although Levine says that would probably not occur before 2014. In the meantime, several field studies are already underway.

AJC will support field studies directed by Dr. Vikki Katz of Rutgers University examining the roll-out of the national Connect2Compete digital media literacy initiative in California and Arizona. It will also conduct an analysis of a national survey conducted by Ellen Wartella of Northwestern University of media usage by Latino parents and their children ages 0–10.

Levine encourages librarians interested in participating in or serving as a site for future research to contact Lori Takeuchi directly. Librarians should specify how such research would serve their local community as well as libraries and Hispanic families more broadly.

We think of today’s youth as constantly connected. Smartphones serve as extra appendages, and the coolness factor goes up for whoever discovers the latest mobile app first.

More than ever, education is contingent upon Internet access. No problem, because today’s teens are digital natives, right? Wrong. Even if they are, not all have Internet access at home. How are teens who rely on library services being affected by public library budget cuts?

Recent data shows that students are usually compiling bibliographies, outlining papers, and synthesizing research between 8 and 10 p.m. during the school week. In other words, students tend to work when most libraries are closed.

How do they compensate? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, many students are using free WiFi at McDonald’s restaurants to do schoolwork. There are almost as many WiFi access points in McDonald’s (12,000) as there are in public libraries (15,000) in the United States.

This trend is potentially detrimental to students. Obviously, if they have questions, a librarian isn’t available to help. We won’t even discuss the other negative impacts of spending hours at a fast food restaurant.

Defining the gap

We work as information literacy librarians and content developers for EasyBib, an online citation and research tool, and its new platform, ResearchReady. We estimate that our user base represents about 50 percent of the U.S. student population. Our research confirms what news outlets already report: There is a gap between when students need libraries and when libraries are open.

According to a 2010 Pew Internet study, one third of American households with an annual income under $30,000 did not have an Internet broadband connection at home. At the same time, many public libraries facing massive budget cuts reduced their hours when neighborhoods needed them most. Particularly in urban areas, community needs have shifted dramatically since the economic downturn, and more people rely on library resources. Additionally, many rural libraries are often closed before students even get out of school.

The Arkoma Public Library in rural Oklahoma, for example, was the source of over 1,500 visits to EasyBib during the 2011–2012 school year. But the library often closes between the hours of 5 and 7 p.m. By contrast, Seattle Public Library patrons made approximately 1,000 visits to EasyBib during the 2011–2012 school year. During the week of June 10–16, when EasyBib usage was at its peak there, Seattle libraries were in operation until 8 p.m.—pretty decent in terms of open hours. Nonetheless, neither setting could help students during their prime research hours of 8 to 10 p.m.

What are the trade-offs?

One could argue that this issue could be resolved by keeping the library open later. Given the costs of running a library, this is easier said than done. Keeping the lights on, paying staff, and running computers for two more hours every day adds up quickly—but it might be worth it to serve this key constituency better. Libraries face the difficult choice of weighing the costs against the benefits of staying open to serve a small but critical group of patrons. What are the trade-offs?

Finding a way to keep library doors open isn’t always easy. We urge local governments, libraries, and communities to consider all students and their research needs when proposing budgets and closing hours.

Emily Gover and Caity Selleck are information literacy librarians and content developers for EasyBib and its new platform, ResearchReady. Emily received her MSIS from the University at Albany and is a former academic librarian at Berry College in Georgia. Caity received her MLIS from Queens College and has worked at the Queens Public Library and the New York Transit Museum.

The recommendations call for more investment in digital literacy, robust collaborations, and more access to digital literacy programming in educational settings. They also encourage school librarians to “identify opportunities to embed digital literacy skills in curricular and research activities.”

Digital Learn’s search engine tutorial.

Says task force member Wendy Stephens, a librarian at Cullman (AL) High School, ALA councilor-at-large, and YALSA’s blog member manager, the task force’s recommendation list “is a tool that people can use in their own local efforts” to gain support from patrons, parents, and community stakeholders. “We wanted to give librarians the weight of ALA behind them.”

Another goal of the guidelines will be in assisting school librarians in understanding issues such as the filtering requirements that impact K–12 learners, which sometimes hinder their access to literacy programs. “Many school districts filter far more content than the law actually requires,” says task force member Frances Jacobson Harris, librarian at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, IL. “This recommendation gives libraries a precise talking point to use when negotiating filter implementation.”

Digital Learn, meanwhile, consists of two main areas: “Teach” and “Learn.” “Teach” is where librarians can virtually gather, forming groups to share best practices and brainstorm. It is “the idea starter” area on the site, Jamie Hollier, the hub’s project manager, tells School Library Journal.

For school librarians especially, Hollier says Digital Learn hopes that they will visit the site and create groups on programs that they’d like to brainstorm about, such as Digital Learning Day or robotics. The goal is for teachers searching for resource—say, on how to create videos—can join a group on Digital Learn that’s geared to that topic. Or, if it doesn’t exist yet, they can start one and seek feedback.

“We’re creating the framework and you provide the content,” says Hollier. “The whole concept is that it will be crowd sourced.” Hollier also notes that entries in the “Teach” area of the site can be rated by others, which adds to the best practices discussion. “When you rate, we ask you to comment at the same time. If something is poorly rated, we want to know why.”

The “Learn” area of the site offers digital literacy tutorials to library patrons and students. Current features include an introduction to email, tips on performing a basic web search, and instructions on using a PC. Many more lessons are expected to be added, and Digital Learn is even discussing the option of partnering with some organizations for K–12 content, Hollier says.

Richard Kong, digital services manager at the Arlington Heights (IL) Memorial Library, sees a lot of potential for Digital Learn’s tutorials. “Our children’s department is definitely interested in offering more classes not only to kids but parents,” says Kong, a panelist in a June 30 ALA session about the hub.

Kong also says he envisions using the site for “partnering and having discussions with our local school district about what parents need to know and what to offer parents to stay up on technology.” And to supplement instruction offered in his library’s digital media lab, Kong would also like to see tutorials in Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Garageband, and iPad use.

What will make people gather at Digital Learn? “PLA is behind it and there are a lot of libraries it can reach,” says Kong. “It has a lot of potential to bring people together in one online forum.”

Stephens agrees. She notes that the new hub has the potential to become a central place for librarians seeking to build digital literacy in their schools and communities. It’s “like a clearing house,” Stephens says, a way to “connect with other librarians and see what they’re doing.” The site also aims to become, she says, “wonderful tool for library patrons and the people we support.”

Digital Learn is a partnership between ALA’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) and Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, and is instituted by the Public Library Association (PLA) with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLA).

“Digital learning resources are playing a huge role in personalizing instruction and empowering students to develop the critical thinking, collaboration, communication and digital citizenship skills needed today and in the rapidly changing world we live in,” says ISTE CEO Brian Lewis. “But for all students to benefit from the promise of this digital transformation, all students need access. We must accelerate our investment in school bandwidth connectivity.”

If ISTE’s petition reaches 100,000 signatures by May 1, 2013, the White House will respond.

Photo by Smithsonian Institution

I’m just back from FETC—the Florida Educational Technology conference. I was there at the behest of Scholastic to talk about Common Core (CC). (I don’t work for or publish with Scholastic, so I wasn’t there to sell their books. They wheeled me in as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about Common Core.) The week before, I’d been in Alabama meeting with high school teachers and seeing where they are in the great leap forward. I’m writing to give you a report from the CC front.

When it comes to putting the new education guidelines into action, there’s one word for where we’re at as a nation: patchwork. The variance among states is astonishing: Kentucky has already had its first CC assessments, and New York is moving full-speed ahead, training teachers, librarians, and administrators for its CC assessments in May. For those educators in Alabama, this is all a very distant star. But when I say patchwork, the state level is only the beginning: district-to-district, school-to-school, even classroom-to-classroom, there’s been a huge range of responses to CC.

Having just attended FETC, let’s begin with tech readiness. As most of you surely know, it’s mandated that the CC assessments be given digitally. One Florida school has 10 computer labs with 30 desktops whistling clean and ready for use—so 300 students can take the tests simultaneously. A visiting librarian from Atlanta nearly fell over backwards when he heard that—the best he can hope for is one lab per school. There is some wiggle room on when a school or district or state must be ready to deliver digital tests, but there’s absolutely no shared timeline or standard.

Digital brings up the next splintering: in Florida, it’s mandated that 50 percent of school materials must be digital by 2015 and digital tutorials must be available for students. On the convention floor, I saw vendor after vendor with materials to fill that digital space: from math apps to flight simulators that teach physics to global connections that link classrooms to fully online learning programs. But who can afford them? In one Florida district, 100 percent of its students receive free or reduced lunches. Yes, the district qualifies for Title I funding, but its kids are likely to be living with grandparents or even great grandparents, with no digital access at home—while another Florida district is encouraging fifth graders to BYOD, because every kid has so many digital devices.

Technology is just the beginning of the beginning. What I’m seeing in schools is a kind of simmering civil war. On the one hand, teachers who have long believed that “once I close the door, it’s my classroom and I do it the way I know best” are often skeptical about CC, especially since it comes with questionable, but high-stakes, teacher evaluations. And on the other hand, there are teachers who are eager to try new teaching methods and tools. So the patchwork response to CC extends literally from classroom to classroom.

One reason for this piebald landscape is that many districts have invested in expensive programs that, frankly, are directly at odds with CC. (For more on that, see my column “(Mis)Guided Reading”. As a school librarian, what can you do? First, be of good courage: the high-pressure but equally highly mixed response to CC you are doubtlessly experiencing is going on everywhere—we’re all facing this moment of flux. Secondly, use this opportunity to seize the leadership reins. Everyone in your building needs your knowledge of good nonfiction and technology and your ability to scour the Net for best CC practices that other schools have developed. One wonderful Florida district made a careful analysis of which digital device best supports learning. What grabbed the top spot? The humble PC, because of its keyboard. And yet, I heard tell of a teacher in an all-iPad school who midway through the semester reported that she had a big problem: she couldn’t figure out how to turn the device on!

Right now, CC adoption is a crazy quilt. Make sure you’re right in the thick of it, pitching in to sew those pieces into a useful pattern.

Evan Marwell wants to measure your pipes. The self-described serial entrepreneur is founder and CEO of Education SuperHighway, a nonprofit group whose goal is assessing the state of broadband in our nation’s schools. So is there enough juice to support 21st-century learning in most schools? Not by a long shot, says Marwell.

“We have to get the right infrastructure in place, and I realized no one knew what the state of that was,” he says. “In particular, they don’t know the actual experience students and teachers are having in the classroom.”

For Patty Eyer, that experience has been mixed. The media specialist at South Orangetown Middle School in Blauvelt, NY, says there are times of the day when students simply can’t access the Internet.

“The teachers are being asked to integrate tech into their classes,” she says, “and yet we don’t have enough computer labs and laptops. And even if we did, we don’t have the bandwidth. We have Internet, with [Ethernet] drops throughout the school. Are they 100 percent effective and efficient? No.”

That’s a familiar story to Marwell. Three years ago, after joining the board of his daughter’s school, Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco, he questioned why classrooms didn’t have more technology. Marwell realized they simply lacked the necessary infrastructure.

It’s a pervasive problem. Eighty percent of our nation’s schools report that their broadband connections are inadequate to meet their needs, according to ‘The Broadband Imperative,” a May 2012 study by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Schools will need connections of 100 megabytes per second for every 1,000 students and staff by 2014–2015—and one gigabyte per second by 2017–2018, concludes SETDA.

Starting September 10, Marwell hopes to help schools—and, more critically, the U.S. Department of Education—get an accurate read on the situation. That’s the day that Education SuperHighway goes live—enabling students, teachers, administrators, librarians, and other school personnel to log on to the site and have their connection speed analyzed within minutes.

The money is there to upgrade schools’ technology, says Marwell, pointing to the E-rate program, a federal fund that spends $2.25 billion a year to provide telecommunication services to schools and libraries. “We need to refine [E-rate’s] goals, so it’s not just about connecting classrooms, but how they connect,” he says. “E-rate is certainly providing enough investment.”

Schools that plan to have their networks read on Education SuperHighway can also assess their ability to access specific sites, such as YouTube and Wikipedia, which require higher bandwidth. The project, which is funded by private investors and manned by five volunteers, plus Marwell, has a goal for each school in the country to run at least 10 tests—conducted by 10 different people or the same person 10 times—to give Marwell’s crew one million tests to assess.

With that information, Marwell says they’ll be able to inform a larger plan to determine the funding needed to properly wire every school.

“This isn’t a money problem, it’s an information problem,” he says. “We don’t know who has what and what needs to be fixed. But there’s definitely going to be money to do this.”

Surveying 3,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25, the study found that in the last year, 41 percent engaged in some form of digitally-based political activity, such as starting an online political group, writing or passing along a political blog, or sharing political videos. Specifically, 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino, and 36 percent of Asian American youth took part in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months, says “Youth & Participatory Politics.” The report defines participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.”

Unlike prior studies of youth and media, the report says this one includes large numbers of black, Latino, and Asian American respondents, which “allow for unique and powerful statistical comparisons across race with a focus on young people.”

Interestingly, it finds that contrary to reports of a digital divide, large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends, and to pursue interests and hobbies. The study says 96 percent of white, 94 percent of black, 96 percent of Latino, and 98 percent of Asian American youth report having access to an Internet-connected computer. Those youth who engaged in at least one participatory political act also were almost twice as likely to report voting in 2010, as those who didn’t.

Of particular interest to school librarians is the fact that young people tend to get their news through participatory channels but believe they’d benefit from learning how to judge the credibility of what they find online, says the report.

‚ÄúWhen we asked young people if they thought they and their friends would benefit from learning more about how to tell if online information was trustworthy, 84 percent said ‚ÄòYes!,‚Äô says YPP Chair Joseph Kahne, one of the study‚Äôs principal investigators and an education professor at Mills College in Oakland, CA, in a release. ¬†”In massive numbers, youth are saying they need help with digital media literacy.”

In fact, the study showed that youth get news almost as often from social media channels as they do from traditional avenues, with 45 percent saying their information comes at least once a week from Twitter or Facebook feeds through friends or family, compared to 49 percent who say they get their information from newspapers or magazines at least once a week.

With the presidential election heating up, students are turning to online channels to learn about the political environment and to engage in the process, giving educators an opportunity to help kids understand and develop critical thinking skills that they can take with them as they grow into mature digital citizens.

“Participatory politics are an important avenue to provide young people with a level of voice and control not often seen in the realm of institutional politics,” the report concludes. “This is a unique and important moment. If stakeholders at multiple levels provide appropriate supports, participatory politics may provide valuable opportunities to engage young people in the political realm, giving them greater control, voice, and potentially influence over the issues that matter most in their lives.”