Librarian and Steampunk Fan Gwyneth Jones Set to Rock ISTE
RSSBy Lauren Barack
August 1, 2010
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| Gwyneth Jones on ISTE Island in Second Life. |
Teacher librarian Gwyneth Jones is looking to rock the boat a bit. An occasional top-hat wearing, monocle-toting steampunk fan, Jones is the most recent board member of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Her plans include altering how others view school librarians—and, perhaps, how librarians view themselves.
“I want to change what people think of school librarians,” says Jones. “And I can break that ground better at ISTE.”
Lest anyone think Jones ran for ISTE’s board with a subversive message concealed under the multiple layers of hand-stitched wool of her petticoat, she’s always been, well, pretty out there. A devotee of steampunk, the genre blending science fiction and Victorian-era technology, Jones can often be found in Second Life, presenting to her fellow school librarians “in world” decked out in period garb. In her day job at Murray Hill Middle School in Laurel, MD, Jones shows sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, among other things, how to make research fun. Here, too, her enthusiasm is uncontainable, especially when it comes to sharing cool, new technology with her students.
“I like to think I’m always on the cutting edge because I’m obnoxious and fearless and willing to fall on my face and say ‘Oh well, let’s try something else,’” says Jones. “Usually I’ll say ‘Hey, I don’t know everything, but here’s this really cool thing, and let’s try this.’”
No wonder, then that ISTE members helped elect her to a two-year term on the board, where she will serve on the membership committee. “She really is pushing the envelope of a 21st-century librarian and that generates a lot of excitement in ISTE,” says Don Knezek, ISTE’s CEO, who adds that 3,348 of its members expressed a strong interest in the library media specialist field during a recent survey. “We call libraries the laboratories for lifelong learning and no one represents that better than Gwyneth.”
Jones hopes to transform other teacher librarians into ed-tech warriors, who will advocate for the critical role they play in the education community. Recognizing that her field is undergoing one of its rockiest periods, Jones believes her colleagues must make a case for the importance of librarians—becoming not just more visible in what they do, but also more fluent in technology.
“If a teacher librarian doesn’t have a strong Web presence, she’s doing her students and herself an incredible disservice,” says Jones, who blogs as the Daring Librarian, runs her school’s wiki and, needless to say, tweets, too. “You don’t have to do everything, just pick one. Start with a wiki and then get on Twitter. You don’t have to say what you had for breakfast, or even type at all. But you can read 140-character snips at a time.”
“There’s only one person in the whole school there to make an impact on a child’s digital future,” says Jones. “The Internet, YouTube is not going away. We’re creating student experiences for jobs that haven’t been created yet. If someone doesn’t help them learn to swim and create their digital footprint, they’re going to drown. Who else is going to teach them? Not many principals are blogging.”
