Burnham’s “Let’s fly” is probably the best captain catchphrase but Dal’s “Go fast” might be a close second. 🖖🏻

I am immensely pleased to be getting so much new Star Trek in the next few months. 🖖🏻

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.

Closing out the year with a couple of runs in Hades 🎮 followed by some Star Trek: The Next Generation 🖖🏻. Here’s to staying on-brand in 2022.

I just finished the midseason finale of #StarTrekDiscovery and I thought it was beautifully done. Space family talking through problems is my fave. This is SOCIAL science fiction. ❤️ Replies may contain spoilers. 📺🖖🏻

Me, watching STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and seeing a newborn in a glass bassinet in sickbay with the birthing parent nowhere in sight: “What, in the 24th century there’s no rooming in?” (Rooming in wasn’t common in 1990 but it was a thing by 1994.) 📺🖖🏻

I just watched the SHORT TREKS episode “Q & A” and it has me really excited for STRANGE NEW WORLDS. 📺💻🖖🏻

I thought you should know that this Jean-Luc Picard cover of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (feat. Q) is my new Christmas bop. 🖖🏻🎄

How much do we know about the instructors at Starfleet Academy and their pedagogy? 🖖🏻📺

Anybody else get a little Billy-Crystal-as-Miracle-Max vibe from Brent Spiner’s performance as very-old Dr. Noonian Soong? 🖖🏻📺