Blowing Off Some STEM

Am I the only one feeling a little tired of the obsessive focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) not just in our educational circles, but in American culture overall?

I know these things go in cycles, but I feel like this trend has been dominating the discourse since the Cold War, with only occasional, brief time-outs to swing the other way (or, more often, to provide political cover that essentially changes nothing).  And now the movement has this shiny “STEM” branding that makes us think it’s an original development, when really it’s just the same old.

Yes, of course science and math and engineering and all that are important.  No one would suggest otherwise.  Kids need instruction in and exposure to all appropriate subject areas.

But no one ever suggests that every kid needs to come out of high school a poet.  Why does it feel that, on the contrary, we’re being told that every kid has to come out of high school an engineer?

Newsflash: some—lots of—kids’ brains don’t work well in the STEM area.  Just as we’ve always acknowledged that they don’t all work well in the lit-n-arts area.

You may say it’s not an issue—that I’m bemoaning a conflict without belligerents.

But when, exactly, in the past hundred years, have the STEM subjects  been at risk of disappearing in favor of literature, grammar, foreign languages, and the arts?

It is these latter subjects that are under constant threat of being cut, defunded, excised, and generally overwhelmed by the “hard stuff.”  Sounds like a conflict to me.

And while I appreciate the burgeoning “STEAM” variant that shoe-horns an “A” for “arts” in there, it doesn’t quite cut it for me.  For those who are sincerely trying to push this alternative, it seems like their efforts are still somewhat ghettoized, while when more “venerable” and entrenched education organizations adopt it, it feels like lip service.  It’s hard to take STEAM seriously as a force when STEM is still entrenched in the way the government discusses education and even immigration policy.

It’s explicitly science and technology, after all, that are enjoying a surge in high-visibility promotional campaigns.  I can’t turn on the TV without being reminded that “we’re not popular...but we know how computers work,” meaning that all those brainless bullies “will work for us someday.”  Revenge of the nerds via STEM!  How charming.

Then there are the big gas companies partnering with media conglomerates to turn sports into an opportunity for on-the-fly scientific analysis that would make NASA blush.  (Just once I’d like to see a commercial featuring a high school football player reflecting on the ways his chosen sport reveal the hidden nature of the human condition in the clash of antagonistic forces... )   I guess there’s always a chance that some of the kids Chevron is trying to inculcate here might end up pioneering ways to fight climate change, but that’s probably not high on any curricula they’re interested in designing.

The Connect-a-Million-Minds project is based entirely on this premise that sports and STEM go together.  Maybe I spoke too soon about  that nerd revenge.  Now I’m starting to feel like efforts are underway to cleanse all geeks from America’s shores--replace the STEMmy ones with jocks, reducing every engineering problem to “how to get the ball through the goal,”  and just ignore and defund the artsy ones out of existence.

And thus a great American dream for which the red-blooded nation has been striving since the 1950s will finally be accomplished.

I’m exaggerating, of course.  A little.  The point is, STEM is deeply entrenched in the planning process of American education policy, with curricula shaped to its needs, big-time corporate conglomerates for sponsors, and a propaganda arm as wide and bristly as Stalin’s accursed mustache.  STEM will be here to stay, while the vestigial appendage of the arts continues to wither, one French program and lit magazine and photography club at a time.

So, as in so much else, it should be the librarian’s task to pick up the slack.  Let us not give in to the drumbeat of all-consuming STEM.  Let’s fill our libraries with books, materials, and marketing for all things literary and artistic.  And not just for the kids—for the adults, too…you know, those larger, slightly lumbering things we insist we want to aid with “lifelong learning”?  For that matter, lifelong learning need not be limited to computer training.  That is, obviously, just as important for adults as for kids, if not more so.  But what about creative writing?  What about pottery?  What about poetry?  What about dance?

All kidding aside, the kids—and adults—whose brains work in the STEM mode will be very important to the future of our society.  They will be the computer engineers, the architects, the urban planners, the doctors, and the mathematicians and scientists charting unheard-of new discoveries.

But where will we be if we neglect the kids (and adults!) whose talents and temperaments lie in the arts?  These are the people who will be making the world a beautiful place.  They will be the people helping us laugh in troubled times.  They will be, like Dickens and Steinbeck and Morrison before them, the cartographers charting the moral landscape of our society.

It may be hard to pin a future value to that.  But look around the stacks of your library and tell me you can’t estimate the value they’ve had every day up to now.  Tell me you don’t think we should be fostering those skills and talents and temperaments just as ferociously as the STEMmy kids’.

Because I'm Appy: The Four C's

http://bit.ly/1xHYDc7

This post first appeared in slightly altered form at www.pypl.org.

This week let's talk about the humble app, that newest, potentially most overwhelming of computer thingamajig.  My apologies to anyone who now has that Pharrell Williams song stuck in their heads!   What is an app, exactly?  Well, it’s short for “application”—as in “computer application.”  That just means it’s a computer program, like Microsoft Word.  The trendy, shortened version has come to apply mainly to programs you use on your mobile devices—phones, tablets, brain chip, etc.  (Just kidding about that last one. Or am I?)  Apps tend to be small in computer-space and extremely focused in use—they have very particular applications, you might even say.  (See what I did there?)

I recently attended a great webinar hosted by Nicole Hennig, a real expert in this emerging area of study, called “Apps for Librarians: Digital Literacy with Mobile Apps,” that described a lot of what she calls “core apps” and the ways librarians can use them to enhance services to their patrons.  She’s really knowledgeable and clear, and while I had long intended to discuss apps in this space, her presentation inspired me to organize it slightly differently.  I was going to just jump into some reviews of apps and why you should use them, but Ms. Hennig’s method of categorizing apps into four major types struck me as a better means of approaching this whole, vast topic.   So, how does she split up the world of apps?  She talks about apps for consuming, for curating, for creation and for collaboration.

Consuming apps are pretty straightforward.  They know that there is stuff out there to be read, watched, heard, and so on, and give you ways to do so.  They tend to gather that kind of material up and present it to you in easy-to-digest formats.  E-reading apps like the Kindle app would fall under this category, as would ‘magazine’ and ‘feed’ types like Feedly and Flipboard.

Apps for curation start to give the user a little more power.  In these apps, the content is still out there waiting to be consumed, but they allow you to collect, organize, and present it in your own way.  This can include big names like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, though there are a lot more out there.  You can also curate your own content with apps like Buffer, which allow you to schedule your social media posts throughout the day.  (Because you wouldn’t want your kids and grandkids to go a half an hour without an update from you, right?)

Creation apps—this is where things start to get really interesting.  These guys know that the Force is in you, Luke.  Whatever you want to create—prose, poetry, drawings, photography, even music and 3D models—there’s an app for that.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re a maestro or a rookie, because there are creative apps for every skill level.  Heck, some of the apps used by digital virtuosos are equally accessible to novices.  Some big names here are Adobe Ideas, Diptic, and the very cool music-making app, Thumb Jam.

Finally, we have collaboration apps, which bring it all together.  Whatever you may do on your own in the other three categories, there’s most likely an app that allows you to do it in a group.  Often they’re the very same apps.  (You’ll find that there’s a lot of overlap between these categories.)   Scribble on whiteboards with SyncSpace, share files with Dropbox, and play a game of multidimensional tag over Skype.  (No, I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but it would be fun to figure out.  Laser pointers?)

Ms. Hennig covered a lot of other interesting elements of the app revolution, but the other important one for all of you out there is the concept of content ecosystems—in other words, the idea that the things you create on apps can be synced up across all your devices, allowing you to travel freely between your phone, tablet, and computer(s) without losing anything.

It’s also worth mentioning that apps have incredibly positive implications for accessibility—a lot of them have features built-in to assist people in using them, and there are many that are designed precisely to help people better navigate the world.  There are apps that identify currency for the blind and that help disabled teens learn.  That sounds like a revolution worth supporting, right?

So that’s that for our first foray into the realm of apps.  Check back in the future when I dig into some specific reviews and recommendations. Thanks again to Nicole Hennig for her awesome presentation (you can check out more about her here).  There's a lot more to explore in our appy little realm!