This is the fourth post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning.

Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

There are a number of opportunities for connected learning to grow in libraries. Here I’ll discuss some of them, beginning with the one most relevant to my current work.

Research-Practice Partnerships Research-Practice Partnerships allow library professionals to develop connected learning environments and programs in collaboration with researchers of learning and information sciences. The project I’m working on, Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (TS4EDI) is one such partnership. Myself and other researchers at the Connected Learning Lab, including PI Vera Michalchik and Research Manager Amanda Wortman, are working with state librarians in Rhode Island and Washington first to identify barriers and challenges to libraries creating CL environments and programs and then to develop resources to help library professionals overcome those barriers and challenges. The state librarians will recruit local public librarians in their state to be part of this partnership, and those public librarians will recruit youth to participate, as well. Other examples include the ConnectedLib project and the Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries project.

Brokering Youth Opportunities in Libraries Connected learning research over the past 10 years has highlighted the importance of caring adults or peers as brokers or sponsors for youth as they build their networks surrounding an interest. These brokers/sponsors can connect youth with other people and resources to help them expand their network and identify opportunities for learning and achievement related to their interest. Current research literature doesn’t explicitly offer guidance on brokering as a distinct activity, investigate the extent to which librarians currently act as brokers, or illuminate how youth may serve as peer brokers in the library setting. Research-practice partnerships and library professional-led professional development could address these questions.

Bringing Connected Learning to School and Academic Libraries So far, connected learning has been documented mostly in informal settings. A few studies have looked at connected learning in formal settings, but those tend to be individual classrooms rather than school or academic libraries. One area that offers potential for CL in these settings is the connection between interests and information literacy. This was the focus of my dissertation, in which I examined the information literacy practices of cosplayers. Cosplayers engage in connected learning as they learn about their interest, build relationships with each other, and find opportunities to contribute to the cosplay community or even become professional cosplayers. Throughout these elements of connected learning, cosplayers engage in information literacy, identifying resources, evaluating them, and even creating new resources. Because school and academic libraries are the primary center for information literacy education in their institutions and because they are not tied to a specific academic discipline, they have the potential to create opportunities for connected learning as learners build their information literacy practices.

That’s all for this series of blog posts, but I expect to write a lot more about connected learning through the course of my work at the Connected Learning Lab, so if you find this interesting, stay tuned!

This is the third post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

While libraries are poised to be environments conducive to connected learning, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. This involves a number of considerations:

Resources. Library professionals must consider not only physical and digital resources, but human resources as well - using “resource” to describe a person the same way we might use it to describe a book or a website. Library professionals can serve as a point of connection between learners, mentors, and other people in the environment beyond the specific context of the connected learning activities.

Technology and space. Current library policies may need to be updated to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online.

Evaluation. Libraries have traditionally focused on quantitative measures of impact, such as how many people attended a particular program. These measures may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning. Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings beyond spaces controlled by the library; identifying specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program. Qualitative data such as interviews or open-ended survey questions may capture this impact better than or alongside quantitative measures.

Role of library professionals. Library professionals must learn to consider themselves as sponsors and brokers of youth learning rather than mentors or authority figures. This means helping youth find other people and communities to support their learning and focusing on enhancing learning rather than enforcing behavior-based policies.

Program design. To create programming that fosters connected learning, library professionals may need to co-design with youth rather than deciding programming in advance and offering it to youth without their early input.

Competencies. The creators of the ConnectedLib project identified the following necessary competencies for library professionals to support youth’s connected learning:

1. …they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator…
2. …[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media…
3. …they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities…
4. …they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

Professional development. Library professionals often will not have been trained in these competencies during their education, so they may need to continue their own learning via in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience In-Service Training is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

I identified these potential shifts to library practices in response to a number of challenges libraries face in developing and implementing connected learning programming, including:

Attracting teens to skill-building programming. For some advanced interest-based experiences, youth need a foundational set of knowledge. For example, to create a sophisticated video game, a teen would first need a foundational understanding of game design and computer programming. It is a challenge to attract novice learners to this kind of programming.

Working with technology. Library professionals may lack the digital tools they need due to library policy, may know how to design or facilitate technology-focused or -infused programming, or may not feel comfortable acting as effective digital media mentors.

Unfamiliarity with the Connected Learning model. Library professionals may struggle with integrating all the different spheres and elements of the model. They may not have the knowledge, skills, or training they need to successfully implement the model.

Culture clashes. Teen culture may sometimes clash with library culture, requiring library professionals to negotiate these conflicting cultures to create programming that has a strong impact in teens’ lives.

The next and, I think, final post in this series will address future directions for connected learning in libraries.

This is the second post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support the exploration of personal interests in both their collections and their programming. The second element is relationships. Libraries are intergenerational spaces that can be (but aren’t always) inclusive of people from nondominant groups. Libraries can serve as a bridge that connects formal and informal learning. Libraries are increasingly spaces where youth can have shared experiences creating new knowledge. They are third places, neither school nor home, where youth can gather, connect around their shared interests, and meet adult mentors and sponsors who can help them leverage a variety of resources in pursuing those interests.

A note about third places in the time of COVID-19: For many of us (the luckiest among us, I would argue), there is only one place: home, which is also work, which is sometimes also school, which is also where we do whatever social activity we do. This is certainly true for me. That said, online library programming can act as a virtual third space, a place to go for something that isn’t all about home or work responsibilities. I’ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for “‘third places’ COVID” on Google Scholar demonstrates that scholars are already thinking about this, including in the specific context of public libraries. I am exercising extreme restraint to not jump down a rabbit hole of exploring that research right now.

There are some examples of connected learning happening in both public and school library spaces. If you’d like to explore them, here are some links:

• YOUmedia Chicago
• Young Urban Scholars book club
• An afterschool program for inner city, middle school students to imagine STEM’s relevance in their lives
• Hack the Evening
• Publications from ConnectedLib

The next post in this series will discuss some of the challenges of creating connected learning experiences in libraries and some shifts libraries may need to undergo to provide more connected learning experiences.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of people in the Micro.blog community discuss the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The hold list on this at my library is inordinately long; if I put a hold on it now I might get to read it in 3 - 5 months. So I decided to read the sample of it, to help me decide I’d like to buy it.

As I was reading the introduction, I kept thinking about how my 4000 weeks have a different shape than many other people’s 4000 weeks, different than healthy people’s 4000 weeks. I kept thinking of the concept of “crip time,” which I’d heard but didn’t really understand beyond the concept that time seems to move differently when you’re disabled. This thinking was distracting me from actually reading the book, so I turned to the web to help me get a firmer understanding of “crip time.”

It led me to Ellen Samuels’s essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, which was exactly what I needed. Samuels quotes Alison Kafer, who says

rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

I have been trying to bend my body and mind to meet the clock in preparation for starting my postdoc, but I think everyone will be happier if instead I bend the clock to me. My body sometimes needs to be awake at night and asleep during the day. Instead of lying awake in pain trying to fall back asleep while listening to an episode of Star Trek because this is the time when people sleep, I can give myself permission to rearrange my time so the parts of my work that can be done asynchronously (basically everything but meetings, I think) can be done in brief chunks of time in the middle of the night.

This is a positive effect of coming to recognize crip time. (This felt like the right time to stop using quotation marks. I don’t know why.) But Samuels points out the negative elements, which will impact more people than ever before in the wake of COVID. Samuels does this so well that I’m reluctant to attempt to summarize. If you’re interested, I highly recommend reading the essay. For now, I’ll pull out just the bit that inspired this post’s title:

…crip time is vampire time. It’s the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us like a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight. Like Buffy’s Angel and True Blood’s Bill, we live out of time, watching others’ lives continue like clockwork while we lurk in the shadows. And like them, we can look deceptively, painfully young even while we age, weary to our bones.

I start working remotely for the Connected Learning Lab tomorrow and while a lot of people are excited for me, most of them don’t actually understand what I’m going to be doing. So I’m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If you’ve read my comps chapter on Connected Learning or seen my Connected Learning and the IndieWeb talk, some of this will be familiar.

Connected learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived framework for describing that type of experience, and as a research and design agenda aimed at expanding access to that type of learning experience. My brother-in-law, P., is actually a phenomenal example of a Connected Learner.

In high school and college, P. was interested in playing guitar. He started hanging out at a local guitar shop, connecting with a community there of peers and mentors. Through the connections he made, he was offered the opportunity to be lead guitarist for a tribute band, and that job took him all over the world. He has since embarked on a different but related career, working in media law. This area of law might not have been of interest to him if he hadn’t had experience working in the music industry.

That’s an example of a spontaneously occurring connected learning experience. From experiences like this, scholars have created a model to describe connected learning. This model includes three elements of connected learning: interests, relationships, and opportunities. P. was interested in music, built relationships at the guitar shop, and it led him to opportunities to perform as part of a working band and become a lawyer.

Image Source: The Connected Learning Alliance

This type of experience is easier to access with more financial and temporal support; the research and design agenda surrounding connected learning is an equity agenda that aims to broaden the availability of this kind of experience, making it possible for nondominant youth who might require additional support to access connected learning. One way to do that is to bring this kind of experience into public spaces serving nondominant youth - public spaces like libraries.

The work I’m doing with the Connected Learning Lab is part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services examining key needs for teen services in libraries:

(1) the challenges library staff face in designing and implementing CL programming for underserved teens and the means for overcoming these challenges, (2) ways library staff can use evaluative approaches to understand youth needs in CL programming, and (3) the means of demonstrating the value of CL programs and building stakeholder support for increasing their scope and scale, particularly to serve equity goals.

The products of this research will include

training modules, guidebooks, mentoring supports, case studies, videos, practice briefs, topical papers, and blogs.

These are some of my favorite kinds of things to create, so I’m extra excited.

My next post in this series will talk about how Connected Learning is already happening in libraries, with some examples from actual libraries.

I don’t want to write a full review of Truly Devious but I want to share a couple things.

First: it goes back and forth between details of a cold case from 1936 and the present. I love the way it weaves these two related stories together.

Second: it ends on a cliffhanger, which left me wanting to scream “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” and also simultaneously flail with delight, so well done Maureen Johnson, I guess.

Recommended if you like mysteries, especially dark academia.

Here are a couple of earlier year-in-review posts:

• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

This one’s going to be a little different. I will write up my catalogue of great stuff that happened but I want to give some space to the hard stuff first.

My family has definitely been playing the pandemic on easy mode, as it were, but I have hit a wall of not hopelessness exactly, but grim resignation. Resignation specifically to the fact that things will keep shifting, that it will probably get worse before it gets better, that making plans based on timing of perceived lowered risk (for example, When-My-Kid-Is-Vaccinated) is more likely to lead to disappointment than not. Resignation to the extreme unknown.

Anticipating a year of shifts, the only goal I set was for the first quarter off 2021: to complete and defend my dissertation. I did it! Goal achieved! Setting such a straightforward goal means I can feel good about how I spent my time this year.

I only set a word for the first quarter, which was PLAY and I have no idea how I did with that.

I did some great stuff in addition to defending my dissertation this year:

• I made extensive use of the public library. My kid actually bumped up against the checkout limit.
• I got vaccinated and boosted.
• I got my thyroid managed and hit my target lab results for the first time in the 10 years since my Hashimoto’s diagnosis.
• I consulted for Quirkos and developed content for their blog.
• I organized a FanLIS panel for the Fan Studies Network North America conference.
• I got and swam in a mermaid tail.
• I had a pool party for my 40th birthday.
• I presented at MIRA, Micro Camp, ALISE, and World View.
• I took M to swim lessons.
• I embraced my Trekkie nature.
• I applied for, was offered, and accepted my dream postdoc.

I couldn’t have done these things without immense help:

• from my advisor & committee.
• from W’s mom, who provided me with time for both work and rest.
• from W, who provided for my basic material needs, kept the house clean, continued to be an awesome dad, and made me feel good about myself.

If there was a theme for this year, it was Star Trek. The Next Generation was a balm in the weeks after my grandmother’s death. Lower Decks, Discovery, and Prodigy revitalized my love of Trek. Discovery, in particular, helped me remain hopeful and trust in my values as a guide for living.

(My core values, by the way, are curiosity, creativity, and care.)

I’m doing a New Year New Moon retreat with Katy Peplin on January 2nd, so I will probably dig into my dreams and plans for 2022 then.

For now, I’ll say my word of the year for 2022 is MEND. My goal is to keep going.

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.

I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.

But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.

All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.

I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my finished books list.

My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book.

None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good.

I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn’t tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my Links category.

I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year.

What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?

I don’t think I’m going to write up my annotations for the first chapter/week of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Safety,” for perosnal reasons but I thought I would share the outcome of my first artist date! I searched Google for “junk shop,” found this eBay seller, and created a Pinterest board where I stuck a bunch of items they’re selling that I thought were interesting.

It’s got some big grandma energy, doesn’t it? That’s 50% what junkshops are about and 50% where my head is at. The sweaters are more 10-year-old Kimberly energy. (It was 1991-1992, okay?)

What does this board make you think of?