When the pandemic suddenly forced many public libraries to close their doors or limit patron access, library staff redoubled their efforts to serve their communities in every way possible. Demonstrating their resilience by quickly pivoting to new modes of service, public libraries are continuing to offer innovative yet practical ways to connect patrons to the information and services they need and enjoy. Offering real-life examples of what it means to be a 24/7 library, this collection from the Public Library Association (PLA) and ALA Editions shares how several libraries transitioned to virtual and socially-distanced services. No matter your library’s current situation or outlook for the future, you’ll be inspired to adapt their ideas to suit the needs of your own organization. Among the initiatives and topics explored are homebound delivery; citizen science programs; virtual reference advice; services to small businesses; remote readers' advisory and book chats; early literacy storytimes; health services outreach; tech guidance for patrons; wifi hotspot lending; and tips for social media and marketing.

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.

Lead through the crisis and prepare for recovery. As the Covid-19 pandemic is exacting its toll on the global economy, forward-looking organizations are moving past crisis management and positioning themselves to leap ahead when the worst is over. What should you and your organization be doing now to address today's unprecedented challenges while laying the foundation needed to emerge stronger? Coronavirus: Leadership and Recovery provides you with essential thinking about managing your company through the pandemic, keeping your employees (and yourself) healthy and productive, and spurring your business to continue innovating and reinventing itself ahead of the recovery. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

Educational technology adoption is more widespread than ever in the wake of COVID-19, as corporations have commodified student engagement in makeshift packages marketed as gamification. This book seeks to create a space for playful learning in higher education, asserting the need for a pedagogy of care and engagement as well as collaboration with students to help us reimagine education outside of prescriptive educational technology. Virtual learning has turned the course management system into the classroom, and business platforms for streaming video have become awkward substitutions for lecture and discussion. Gaming, once heralded as a potential tool for rethinking our relationship with educational technology, is now inextricably linked in our collective understanding to challenges of misogyny, white supremacy, and the circulation of misinformation. The initial promise of games-based learning seems to linger only as gamification, a form of structuring that creates mechanisms and incentives but limits opportunity for play. As higher education teeters on the brink of unprecedented crisis, this book proclaims the urgent need to find a space for playful learning and to find new inspiration in the platforms and interventions of personal gaming, and in turn restructure the corporatized, surveilling classroom of a gamified world. Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities presented by pandemic pedagogy, this book reveals the conditions that led to the widespread failure of adoption of games-based learning and offers a model of hope for a future driven by new tools and platforms for personal, experimental game-making as intellectual inquiry.

Online instruction is rapidly expanding the way administrators and educators think about and plan instruction. In addition, due to a pandemic, online instructional practices and learning in a virtual environment are being implemented with very little training or support. Educators are learning new tools and strategies at a quick pace, and often on their own, even through resistance. It is important to explore lessons learned through the pandemic but also of importance is sharing the virtual classroom options and instruction that align to best practices when transitioning to online instruction. Sharing these will allow educators to understand and learn that virtual instruction can benefit all, even when not used out of need, and can enhance face-to-face courses in many ways. The Handbook of Research on Lessons Learned From Transitioning to Virtual Classrooms During a Pandemic is a critical reference that presents lessons instructors have learned throughout the COVID-19 pandemic including what programs and tools were found to be the most impactful and useful and how to effectively embed virtual teaching into face-to-face teaching. With difficult choices to be made and implemented, this topic and collection of writings demonstrates the learning curve in a state of survival and also lessons and resources learned that will be useful when moving back to face-to-face instruction as a tool to continue to use. Highlighted topics include the frustrations faced during the transition, lessons learned from a variety of viewpoints, resources found and used to support instruction, online learner perspectives and thoughts, online course content, and best practices in transitioning to online instruction. This book is ideal for teachers, principals, school leaders, instructional designers, curriculum developers, higher education professors, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, practitioners, researchers, and anyone interested in developing more effective virtual and in-classroom teaching methods.

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate? Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

This book explores the innovations, disruptions and changes that are required to adapt in a fast-evolving landscape due to the extraordinary circumstances triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognized experts from around the world share their research and professional experience on how the working environment, as well as the world around them, have changed due to the pandemic. Chapters consider how different fields across technology and business have been affected by this new, dramatic scenario and the drastic consequences that the pandemic had on them. With diverse contributions stemming from public health, technology strategies, urban planning and sociology to sustainable management, this volume is articulated into four distinct but complementary sections of People, Process, Planet, and Prosperity influencing the post-COVID world. This book will be of great interest to those in the fields of computer science and information technology, as well as those studying the impact and effects that COVID-19 is having on society.