So many applications for this in the classroom – and excellent for a giggle!

School is driven by timetables – what lessons do I have today? What’s on this week? When are the staff meetings/ sports days/ reports/ interviews this term? Write up a program, tick off skills and outcomes, demonstrate that something is happening in the classroom.

The same sense of minutes rushing past is felt in the library -

Just keeping on top of everyday tasks is enough to keep me more than fairly well occupied! But reading a paper today from Sharon Markless reminded me of some of the ideas that were presented in the masters’ course I completed a few short years ago – it is not enough to just ‘do your job’ – if you want to do anything significant, if you want to position the library as THE information centre, if you want to market yourself as a leader in using digital information tools and sources, as an innovator, as an experienced leader who can develop and run professional development activities for staff that are both practical and pertinent to the work in the classroom – well then, you have to THINK about it FIRST.

Ms Markless’ paper is called Developing Information Literacy in School: Being Strategic. It draws heavily on the work of researchers into educational change processes such as Michael Fullan (whose books I really did enjoy reading!), and as such much of it was for me a reminder of things I had already heard of. This is not to say that it was irrelevant – I find it much easier to apply a new idea or technique on the second or third read-through – and now that I have been in my current position for a year the message is very timely – I am ready to roll my sleeves up and reshape my library to reflect contemporary best practice for school libraries.

There are two points from this presentation which I am going to follow up:

1. Carry out a school library evaluation to describe the kinds of teaching and learning that are happening in and through the library (and me)
2. Think strategically – sort through my ideas about school libraries and our school curriculum and school culture and services and resources and work out what my vision for the future is, plan out where I want to be in five years’ time and how I’m going to get there. This is a big deal; I need to do a lot of personal reflection, then start talking to other staff in the library team, then go further out to talk to staff and students about what they think of/ want in/need from the library.

Somehow I think that two things is more than enough….

My apologies for not blogging more regularly. Motherhood took over life for the past week with two of three children sick with a virus, which did not leave much time for conferencing or reflection.

Today I caught up on a couple of presentations, and there are a couple of things I would like to think about further, and also to share:

From Mihaela Banek and Sonja Spiranek, concluding thoughts:

To me that means we have to jump in, embrace the possibilities, experiment, model, demonstrate, assimilate these tools until they are simply part of the fabric of what we do.

And an image used as part of the presentation:

(Released by Daniel F. Pigatto under a CC licence)

Now isn’t that food for thought???

And to finish off on a tangent, have you ever wondered how anyone could map the web?

For the past 10 days I’ve been reading, viewing, listening and participating in presentations and discussions for the YSL Online Conference 2, putting so many new ideas into my brain that I hardly know where to begin to sort out my own thoughts and responses.

One thing that just occurred to me is an analogy for how efficiently students work through the research process. As I was in my kitchen making a cup of tea at the time, the image that presented itself to me was a diagram of the workflow triangle used to help design useful kitchens. That triangle represents the arrangement of and distance between the fridge, stove and preparation areas. The easier it is to move between these areas the more efficient the ‘workflow’ in that kitchen.

Students need an environment that supports the development of an efficient workflow in their research tasks. They need easy access to information storage (the fridge), to select and organise information (preparation) and to put it all together to present a new product (stove). Each of these requires a combination of knowledge, skills and tools, and the way to ensure that our students have all three is by designing a learning environment that supports the acquisition of knowledge, the development of skills, and the application of tools.

I now want to think about my library and my library programs in terms of this analogy:

(Click image for better image of published Webspiration document)

Each group of knowledge, skills and tools needs to be considered in the learning environment I create; all will be more successfully taught in combination with each other, with a minimum of steps between each area.

I hope that this analogy was not too laboured – I’m thinking aloud here, working my way through the idea to see whether it gives insight or confusion…

First week of term + first week on conference equals = whimpering to self in office as yet another email/phonecall/humble student in need of help appears to nip away another five minutes…

I am finding the conversations on and about the conference stimulating, and the presentations are giving me much food for thought. I still haven’t caught up with #3, because I simply have not had one whole hour free anywhere.

Number 4 (or was it 5?) looks like I should view it on a big screen to enjoy all the YouTube stuff – should also provide some great links for sharing with staff who are looking for ways to introduce YouTube into their resources.

I have set up a YSL2 feed from del.icio.us, which I will add to the sidebar given five minutes (somewhere, anywhere!) to do so. I’ve also got a twitter widget on both my home and work computers, so I can keep up with messages durig the day – it is proving to be useful, and not tooooo distracting. If I’m too busy, I just ignore it!

This afternoon I have to add a couple of items to my wiki, as it is my turn today (gulp!). I hope that conference participants find some useful ideas on information literacy activities using web 2.0.

It’s that time again – Your School Library Online Conference #2, Information Literacy with Web 2.0.

We started on Saturday, and already I’m falling behind. Hopefully I will be able to block out some time each day at work to view the presentations, and then I’ll need less time at home to take part in the discussions.

I have been working hard preparing for this; I have a wiki presentation on day 6, which still needs a few things uploaded, but is basically done. I have to resist the urge to play around with prettifying it, so that I can concentrate my little free time on keeping up with the real conference stuff.

To whit:

Day 1: Information Literacy Assessment: 
A Systems Global Approach
By Dr. Lesley Farmer, CSULB

This was the opening ppt presentation, unfortunately not as fleshed-out as we might have hoped, but it certainly raised the issue of how/whether/why to assess information literacy skills, which is a tricky question. Information literacy is so enmeshed with the processes that it is hard to deduct from an end-product, unless that product includes perhaps some kind of journalling of the steps of the task.

Another key point for me was the cultural/international aspect – can we assume that information literacy is global, and globally agreed upon? I’m guessing not, as different cultures place different values upon information, from total ownership at one end, to communal sharing at the other. International students at the secondary and teritary levels cannot be assumed to have the same understandings or skills as students who have come up through our education system and curriculum. – Although that even applies to the microcosm at local school level – a new student who has moved from one suburb to another will have different ideas and experiences of information literacy skills than those held by their new peers – we cannot make assumptions, we must always start with an explicit definition and demonstration of the skills we wish students to acquire/develop or use , and even more so if those skills are to be an assessable component of their learning.

Lastly, (although I am skipping a great deal of what was presented), I am feeling caught by the issue of overlap; there are more and more ‘literacies’ being targeted by educational researchers or professional development writers, and so many overlap or are interdependent with information literacy, escpecially in the digital dimensions: “critical thinking, technology competency, problem-solving, research skills…” (Farmer, 2009) and technology/visual/media literacies – I cannot define any of these without being aware of the way that they relate to information literacy and sometimes each other. I think that as ever we need to be aware of the ‘Big Picture’ – to have in mind our goals for our students’ education, and to weave these skills and understandings in as and where appropriate. In some cases it is easy and helpful to maintain a tick-a-box checklist, especially for areas such as ICT literacy where we are being asked to demonstrate our integration of a key skillset. In others these important skills are side-notes on the syllabus, difficult to assess or demonstrate in traditional assessment routines.

hmm, that’s a lot of thinking. Perhaps it is time for me to catch up on Day 2.

:>

I had my Five Minutes of Glory today, presenting my vision for my library to the Junior and ELC staff. I know all too well that teachers are a hard audience, but also that they respond well to bribery, so I decided to use a technique I have heard of from various wondrous TLs, that of the Love Your Library showbag.

With the help of Big W and Chickenfeed (ie $2 shop) I assembled a document wallet for each staff member, a book of stickers, and highlighter and some stickynotes, then added

• Quick and Dirty Guide to the Premier’s Reading Challenge, + bookmark and poster
• Local bookstore 15% discount bookmark
• Andy Griffiths ‘Just Macbeth!’ tour flyer for yrs 5 & 6 teachers
• Referencing Refresher
• Bibliography examples and templates
• Information Literacy stages using ICT (from ASLA, 2004)

The last two items were targeted by year group, so each teacher only got the level relevant to their group, while their staff refresher doc had the full whammy. My aim was to give the staff an overview of the range of services provided by the library – most of which they know, but a reminder with prezzies doesn’t hurt – and to bring information literacy issues to the forefront a little more. We’ve been having a bit of a push in the Middle School to give staff and students this information and resources, so now I’m targeting the Junior School.

The other topic was that of the school library webpage. I do not like it – I find it text-heavy, disorganised, counter-intuitive (hey, this sounds a lot like me and my office…!) and I’m sure that staff and students find it very hard to know where to look to find anything useful. I want to redesign it, within the framework of the intranet software, to provide library and information services to everyone in an accessible way. I explained to staff my thoughts on this, and external issues such as forthcoming software changes to the catalogue search, and redesign of intranet appearance by contracted web developers later this year, and general lack of free time to do things instantly. I also asked staff would they like a more personalised library service – my library serves students from 4 to 14 yrs of age, an enormous range of skills, interests, literacy levels, subject areas. My thinking is to provide a page for each year group – or pair of years – based on a generic template, containing:

• annotated links to age-appropriate search engines
• research skills and tips (for students and parents working from home)
• hotlists of pre-selected websites
• links to in-house resources
• links to support leisure reading – Book Week, PRC, author blogs…

I asked staff what they felt, and there were some easy questions and some curlier ones – but generally it felt like staff are ready to participate in changes that would improve their access to services and resources.

Having offered all this, now I have to make good on it. ::gulp::

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