Enquiring minds and back in Australia

An update from the ever innovative FutureLab  includes some online workshops  from the Enquiring Minds project. This includes some videos of workshop sessions, including Why try Enquiring Minds, The enquiry cycle and a case study from a school. These are very interesting viewing and TLs and teachers can learn a lot from John Morgan and his team. This is very much applicable research and although some of it may sound familiar to TLs engaged in information literacy teaching, it is nonetheless a challenge to what might some of our views and an innovative take on student enquiry. Put it at the top of your list.

I am now based in Australia for the next 6 weeks. I’m spending this week in Wagga Wagga at the very green and attractive Charles Sturt University campus where there are a wide variety of colourful birds as well as kangaroos which come down off the hills on to the campus itself. It’s really good to be back living near the Murrumbidgee River where the first bird call was the laughing kookaburra, followed by the squawking white cockatoos. It’s winter here, so having come from the Scottish summer via the Californian summer, to frosty mornings, it’s time to dig out the warmer clothes.

IASL conference and UC campus

The IASL conference  is now over. It was a very successful conference which took place on the attractive Clark-Kerr campus. The conference fosters international cooperation and while some of the agreements made at the conference are not followed up, some are and this can lead to exciting projects for teacher librarians and those who educate TLs. One very innovative presentation was by Marlene Asselin  and Ray Doiron who talked about a new issue of School Libraries Worldwide. The authors have put together an eclectic but very interesting range of papers on Web 2.0 bu there are also other features in this issue which has been created in the normal publication format (open only to subscribers) but also in this blog format which is open to all. These features include interviews with students about their use of ICT. This is a must read for TLs around the world and Marlene and Ray are to be congratulated on this quality piece of work.

One of hte features of the town of Berkeley is the huge campus of the University of California which has a mix of old and new buildings, wide parks and huge trees. One of the outstanding features of the campus is the campanile which was build in 1914 and can be seen from most parts of the campus. It’s a very relaxing walk through the campus which also has impressive botanical gardens.

IASL conference and video streaming

The IASL conference continues apace. One of the hardest things to do at a conference like this is to decide which parallel sessions to go to. For example, yesterday, you could go to a workshop on the new AASL Standards with an international panel or papers from 3 Australian speakers, a Taiwanese speaker and a US speaker. I did my keynote address in the morning on Reading Websites and I asked the audience to be IASL delegates for part of the talk and a year 7 class for other parts of the talk. I gave examples of text, images and video and asked them to discuss with the year 7 student next to them what they remembered about what I’d shown them. It seemed to go very well from the feedback I got.

One of the features of the conference this year is the presence of the enthusiastic and engaging David diGregorio  who has been videoing some of the sessions with the purpose of videostreaming them via his own school library. David videoed my keynote yesterday and this will be available later but I also did an interview with him - which he had on his website within an hour. You can see the interview in the IASL section of David’s site.  

IASL conference and Berkeley

The blog this week is from Berkeley in California where I’m at the IASL conference. This really is an international conference with people from every continent and a huge number of countries. The keynote paper this morning was by Stephen Krashen who has done a huge amount of work over many years in relation to the value of reading. In an entertaining talk, he cited many examples of how getting kids to read greatly improved not only their test scores at school but also other aspects of their lives. He believes in sharing his academic work and many of his articles are on his website. Some of the statistical stuff is a bit heavy going but he’s a great believer in school libraries, so he’s to be applauded for that. I’m the keynote speaker tomorrow (Tuesday) so I’ll have to go some to match the quality of his presentation. Having organised conferences in the past, I always feel for the organisers but Blanche Woolls  and her team, including Kristin Fontichiaro have done a great job in putting together a varied and high quality programme.

Berkeley itself is very much a university town, with the University of California  campuses making up a significant part. It’s a very affluent looking place with many examples of what I might think as traditonal south western USA houses, some with wooden fronts. It’s also a very cultural place e.g. opposite my hotel is the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. You also notice a few remnants of the hippy generation around - it’s not quite Byron Bay but some of the people here wouldn’t look out of place there. Berkeley is about 18K from San Francisco, of which more later.

Cuil search engine and Inspector Chen

I’m alerted by one of my students (thanks Martin) to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald  on a new search engine called “Cuil” pronounced “cool”. When you use Cuil itself and type in a search, the first thing you notice is that Cuil makes a list of suggestions i.e. I typed in visual literacyand half way through, Cuil gave a list of things I might be searching for, including “Visual learning“, “Visual lisp” (meaning?), and“Visual language” . So I continued typing and my search was “visual literacy schools”  - meaning I wanted information on digital literacy in schools. The results came up not in a Google type list but in 3 columns each with a paragraph for each website found and some of the paragraphs had images next to them. The SMH article claims that one day Cuil might replace Google as Cuil claims to have a wider scope and better indexing. We’ll see. The Cuil website states that cuil  is “an old Irish word for knowledge” - and they already have a strapline i.e. “For knowledge, ask Cuil”.

I’ve just finished reading A case of two cities by Qui Xiaolong featuring the enigmatic, intelligent and thoughtful Inspector Chen who is a policeman but also a poet. It’s a very good novel firstly but also a very good crime novel. Chen is always quoting poetry, often from 9th or 10th century Chinese poets. The poems are sometimes rather difficult to understand fully but many have poignant imagery. An author to add to your list. This novel is set both in China and in the USA - you’ll enjoy it.

YouTube, boats and lifeboat day

The final part of my plenary/keynote paper at this year’s  IASL conference  is going to be about reading video i.e. do we teach our students how to “read” a video i.e. view, understand, interpret and evaluate what they see on the screen? Or do we just assume  that because they watch TV or view video online, they can view video in a critical manner?  One of the ways to get students to be critical viewers  of video is a) to get them to watch videos and b) to allow them to create their own. Stuart King, from Eltham College, wrote an interesting paper for this year’s ASLA Online Conference  in which he argued that the policy of many schools - state and private - of banning YouTube was mistaken. If you don’t have access to the ASLA Online Conference Papers, check out the article in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Obviously, there is some material on YouTube which is unsuitable for most school students but it can also be a valuable source of educational material.

Last weekend, here in Dunbar, it was Lifeboat Day which I unfortunately missed. It’s a great event with crowds of people around the harbour and the volunteer lifeboat men giving demonstrations of rescuing people. What I did do, was go down to the harbour on the following day. I took the picture below at the harbour but went down the steps to water level. You can see the bunting still up from the Lifeboat Day and some of the boats in the water at fairly low tide.

Boats at low tide

Google Library Project and happiness?

Two interesting pieces from The Guardian this week. The first is an article in the Education section by John Sutherland which focuses on the Google Library Project, which Google actually call Google Books Library Project. The article is generally supportive of the project, which has been controversial e.g. in terms of how legal the project might be and the effect it might have on book sales. Sutherland’s article is also about the reliability of Google’s indexing and thus the ability of people to search for information which might be in the books Google is making (partly) available online. Sutherland makes a good point about Google controlling the indexing and thus controlling, in some ways, access to information. In short, we will get what Google thinks we shouldget - maybe not what we want. Given that students in our schools see Google often as theway to access information, we should be finding a way of telling the students that, while Google can tell you a lot, it may not be telling you everything.

The second article is a review of a book called The Geography of Bliss - now this is not about the Bliss classification system, which some of you alert librarians (of a certain age?) may have come across in your studies or in an actual library. It is about happiness and the review has a great opening line “How happy are you? On a scale of desolate to rapturous, do you make it much past OK?”. One of the interesting comments in the review is about university degrees and states that while undergraduate degrees make us more happy, “advanced degrees bring us down”. Of course, as a teacher of Masters degree teacher librarianship students, I would have to say that this is unsubstantiated rubbish - but of course, I haven’t read the book, only the review. It must be all about context and subject - I hope.

21st century skills map and The Open

From the new issue of  eSchoolNews, an interesting source called the 21 Century Skills Map  which is focused on social studies but could clearly be used in relation to other areas of the curriculum. The document from the USA based Partnership for 21st Century Skills- based on extensive research and feedback from educators - gives examples of a range of skills including general areas such as creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration but also more specific skills such as information literacy, media literacy and ICT literacy. So it is good see that information literacy is recognised in such a report although there is a tendency to over emphasise accessing information in the IL section. While this report cannot be said to be definitive, given the range of views on what 21st century skills might include, it is nonetheless worth checking out and although produced in north America, it looks applicable to the curricula of other countries.

I’m taken to task (gently) by my colleague Lyn Hay, teacher, researcher, writer and golfer for referring to Le Tour - it gets more exciting by the day - and not The Open  (aka The Open Championship), probably the world’s premier golf event which is taking place at Birkdale in England this week. For golf aficionados, this is a momentous occasion and I’m sure lots of people in Australia will sit up into the wee sma’ hours watching it. It’s good to watch but ce n’est pas Le Tour. Where I live in East Lothian, there are 19 golf courses (including Dunbar’s main course, just round the corner from my house ), in a county which is only about 45K from end to end. So some great walks and scenery and, for players, as much frustration as you can eat, accompanied by the occasional shot which feeds the addiction and gets you back on (the) course.

Not agreeing with the ASLA president and video for my students

In the latest issue of the ASLA journal Access,  ASLA President Rob Moore writes a column which focuses on his love of literature and how this influences many TLs’ views of their post. Unfortunately, he comes out with the statement “We all know that the teacher librarian is a multi-faceted creature and foremost (my bold and underlining) amongst these facets is an unashamed love of literature, matched with the desire and skills to put the right book into the right hands”. One of the bees in this writer’s Scottish bonnet has always been that TLs and their equivalents around the world, have done themselves and their profession no good at all by identifying themselves primarily as promoters of children’s literature. What I have yet to find is a job description for a TL - anywhere in the world - which identifies literature promotion as the key element. Excuse the pun, but in my book, TLs are employed to work with school colleagues to develop learning in the school and they do this via the school curriculum. I’m afraid that views like Rob Moore’s can only lead to greater marginalisation of TLs in schools. This of course is my own view and not necessarily that of my colleagues at CSU.

I’m going to be talking to some of my new students on 28th July on Skype from my home here in Scotland. It will be 5am my time and 2pm in Sydney where the students are gathering. So I thought I’d do a wee video to give them a flavour of where I’ll be speaking from. As it will be 5am, I will not be sitting outside the back of my house - not because it might not be a beautiful morning, but because my wife will be asleep in the bedroom next to where I sat in the video. If you want a look, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSEelhK88eo - it’s only 2.14 minutes, so not Lawrence of Arabia.

Reading digital text and Shardlake

In early August, I’m giving one of the plenary/keynote papers at the IASL Conference  where I’ll be talking about Reading Websites. So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I, as an educated adult, reada website, so that I can think about how school students might read online material. One the readings I’ve come across - and yes, read digitally - is Reading Digital Material  which looks at how students might be taught how to obtain meaning from text, images and sounds. One of the key messages from this article is that while there is much attention paid to teaching reading early in the student’s school career, this is not followed up later. There’s a good checklist in the article for TLs and teachers (and others) to use when encouraging students to gain meaning from what they read digitally. 

On the fiction front, I have just finished Dark Fire  by C J Sansom, featuring the lawyer/detective Matthew Shardlake. The novel is set in the time of Henry the Eighth - if you don’t think you like historical novels, don’t look away now - and is a novel, a crime novel and a historical novel all rolled into one. Shardlake is an interesting character who is disillusioned with much of what he sees in his society, especially the political and religious controversies of the time. What Sansom manages to create in this novel is the atmosphere of the time and you can almost smell the unpleasant odours of the back streets of London. This is the second of C J Sansom’s historically set novels I’ve read and he is worth seeking out.