Blog

At the beginning of March, my coworker Vanessa, the library’s graphic designer, and I went to Austin, Texas, to present a session at SXSWedu, the education part of the South by Southwest conference and festival. Our session focused on the topic of collaborations between libraries and schools—namely, how to use design thinking strategies to facilitate and strengthen these partnerships. We’ve had great successes in this area at Skokie Public Library, with particular initiatives ranging from library card registration for 95% of elementary students in Skokie, to partnering with local schools to help more parents become involved in their children’s educations, and most recently with the creation of the BOOMbox.

Vanessa and I also were invited to participate in a live-streamed, salon-style conversation about STEAM spaces in libraries while in Austin. We chatted with Texas school library media specialist Leah Mann and Rachel Frick of the Digital Public Library of America about the BOOMbox and other STEAM programs and services in libraries, and we were even able to work in some of our framework for transformative collaborations. Watch the full video.

And if you’re curious about some other takeaways from SXSWedu? Fear not; I’m happy to share some of my favorites:

• The crowd is changing how we do educational initiatives. Charles Best, founder of donorschoose.org, gave the opening keynote for the conference, where he talked about how crowd-funding platforms—including Donors Choose, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter—are allowing great ideas to get the funding they need without the obstacle of obstructive gatekeepers. Have you helped to fund a classroom project on Donors Choose, or an idea or product on Indiegogo or Kickstarter? If you have, you’re helping to make sure that great ideas have traction.
• Doodling isn’t a waste of time or an idle activity. Sunni Brown, who considers herself Infodoodler-in-Chief, talked about how doodling—using visual language—helps people to better process and remember information. So next time you find yourself feeling inspired to doodle through a lecture or a presentation, let yourself do it. The process of doodling helps you to retain and apply the information you’re hearing better than just listening alone.
• Hip hop music can be a terrific entryway into studying literature. Brian Moseley and Sage Salvo of Words Liive shared the basis for their language arts curriculum: using the popular hip hop their students were already familiar with as a starting point for deep study of literature. The pair took examples from modern hip hop and helped students to identify literary devices in the lyrics—things like metaphors, allusions, etc. Students were happy to find these concepts in the music they love, and they found that they learned the concepts quite well in a medium they cared about.

I’m going to be thinking about my takeaways from SXSWedu for a while, in particular about how I can apply what I learned to the library context. Attending and presenting at the conference confirmed for me that there is so much to learn, from so many avenues, in this life. What, I wonder, am I going to learn today?