Information literacy and cooking (reprise)

In the last post, I was talking about information literacy maybe being ‘a way of thinking’ and there was an excellent comment (Thanks Cathy) which pointed out that getting students to think about their information literacy skills is important but also that “an awareness and attention to the way one is thinking” is also crucial. But how to do this? I think that teachers and TLs often shy away from this part and assume that if we teach students about information literacy skills then the thinking will automatically come along with it. As we all know, for most students, it doesn’t. My own recommendation is to get students – no matter what grade or level they are in – to talk about this in groups and maybe recommend to each other ways of thinking – yes about thinking although I wouldn’t necessarily use that that phrase with younger students – about information needs etc.

Well, you cook something and it turns out very well so you go back to the same cookbook and try another recipe. This time it was Hungarian goulash with potatoes and onions. So I followed the recipe and it was as bland as a politician at election time and the accompaniment was basically fried potatoes and onions. So what would I tell students about this? Always evaluate your information sources and just because you find something useful and relevant and useful in that source doesn’t mean to say that everything in that resource will be useful – or tasty. I’ll still use the cookery book, however.

Information literacy and cooking

As I start a new semester with a new group of students looking at some aspects of information literacy, I have to sit back and ask myself the question I’ve been pondering over for the past 20 years or so. What exactly is information literacy? Of course it’s not a simple question, like ‘What is the capital of Scotland?’. [Note: If you even thoughtabout saying any other city than Edinburgh, especially one beginning with G and ending in W, consider yourself barred from this blog for at least a week]. Asking what information literacy might be is similar to asking what education is or what life is. Despite this, people like me will going on trying to define what information literacy is. My very knowledgeable colleague Anne Lloyd views information literacy as ‘A way of knowing’ e.g. that knowing about your own information environment is a key factor in being or becoming information literate. Reflecting on my own recent research in schools, I’m more inclined to see information literacy as ‘A way of thinking’ in that if you can get students, in particular, to think about what they seek to find out, reflect upon and perhaps ultimately know, then these students are more likely to act as information literate individuals. Another thought that I often debate in my head and occasionally with others is that we are all perhaps on the road to being information literate but because we are always learning and our information environment changes, perhaps information literacy is a goal for us all. Tell you what – I’ll ask my students.

 I always like when I come across a new recipe and this happened at the weekend. You know how you collect recipe books as presents or you get them ‘free’ within newspapers or they come with a new cooking vessel? Well, this one came in a guide to using a creuset [Yes, this is advertising but I get no reward]. It’s simple but very tasty dish in which you basically soften an onion in olive oil, add strips of chicken, grated rind of lemon, lemon juice and fresh coriander. Once the chicken is partly cooked you add creme fraiche (or less healthily cream) and put this in your oven dish – in my case the cast iron creuset. You then top this with freshly made breadcrumbs mixed with lemon zest and chopped coriander and cook for about 20 minutes. Modesty aside, it was delicious. Now was this thinking or knowing? It was a bit of both. I knew about the recipe book, I thought I’d look through it. Serendipity found me the recipe.

Digital video and the wind

According to the latest E-School News (for which you need to register), thee has been a huge rise in the use of digital video in schools in the USA and this has been caused partly by the availability of what the article calls ‘vast repositories’. What is not clear is whether these sources of digital video are free to schools. The emphasis on visual learning as one of the most effective ways for students to learn has been with us for a long time. Recent examples of students using visual learning to help them use their information literacy skills better have included use of concept maps and many schools use the ‘Inspiration’ software to allow students to express themselves visually and to think more clearly about what their purpose for information is.  One aspect which still remains open to question is whether students are actually given advice on what is, in effect, an excercise in ‘reading’ a digital video or whether this falls into the large pit of teacher and TL assumptions i.e. students can watch a video therefore they must be able to watch it effectively. Methinks not.

Unusually for this part of the South East of Scotland, there has been little wind for the past week but today it came back with a vengeance and out on the bike, at times having to work very hard to make progress, I thought about one of my favourite poems which is Shelley’s ‘Ode to the west wind’. Although this is winter here, with abundant signs of spring, and the poem is set in the autumn, it has the superbly optimistic last line – ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’. A favourite novel of mine in the past few years and one which should resonate with teacher librarians and school librarians is ‘The shadow of the wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Set in Barcelona, it features the wonderful ‘Cemetry of Lost Books’ on the first page – read it. Or of course you could try The Rabid Librarian’s Ravings in the Wind but …..

New semester and rain in Mackay

Yesterday saw the start of a new teaching semester and I’m teaching 2 subjects: Teacher Librarianship and Information Literacy. The first subject is an introductory one and many of 200+ students are new to CSU and to distance learning. The 2nd subject – Information Literacy – is for students who are NOT doing a teacher librarianship course. So an interesting mix and many intriguing and debatable topics. For example, next week, students doing the Teacher Librarianship subject will be looking at the history of school libraries in Australia. What was your school library like when you were at school? – the answer to that is likely to be determined by how old you are and possibly by what part of your particular country you lived in. Of course, the key physical changes in school libraries across the world relate to the now ubiquitous presence of desktop and laptop computers in the school library and – for the fortunate few – whiteboards. The biggest source of satisfaction for people like me who have been in the teacher librarianship world since the early 1970s, is that school libraries have improved – and some out of all recognition.

A cliche – It’s a small world – but on this cold, very frosty but brilliantly bright morning here in the south east of Scotland, I was reading The Guardian and there was a feature about devastating rain in Mackay, Queensland where they got more rain in an hour than they should get in a month. I then started work and in my email inbox, there’s a message from one of my students (thanks Karen) who is in Mackay and whose school has been flooded. So I hope the good folks in Mackay (I say MahKye and you say MickOi) are recovering from the rain and the floods and best wishes to all the teacher librarians there.

Free WiFi and spring

In the technology section of the Sydney Morning Herald, there’s an article on a group of what the paper rather disparagingly calls “socially-networked geeks’ who are trying to set up free WiFi spots across Sydney following the failure of the state government’s free WiFi project to get off the ground. For teacher librarians and schol librarians across the globe, free WiFi access within and outside school would be a real bonus as at the moment, it tends to be the prerogative of schools with enough money and staff to set up WiFi access. Also, given that students will increasingly access the web via their mobile phones, free access to the web would enhance their use. Use for what? I hear you ask. The challenge for us educators is to harness some of our students’ web use to their school-oriented learning – and make them better at using the web. As I am based in the UK for most of 2008, it is almost Spring-like here. Normally, in Wagga Wagga, I’d be coming to the end of summer. The weather in Wagga has been fairly mild this summer with temperatures mostly under 30 degrees. Out cycling the other day, there were certainly signs of Spring as the snowdrops are out in full and some daffodils are starting to appear, as you can see in the picture below. Mind you, it was -4 here overnight and a hard frost at 8am this morning when I went to meet my cycling mates – so maybe Spring is a wee bit off yet.  

Jux2.com and Barcelona

I was alerted this week to a search engine with which I was not familiar i.e. jux2.com, by an aesthetically minded TL who uses it with her high school students, as it lets them see that there are more search engines than Google, although Google is one of the search engines used. Now jux2.com was named best metasearch engine by the reputable SearchEngineWatch.com in 2005. Jux2.com searches Google, MSN and Yahoo and gives the best results overall plus what was found on each search engine. Having said that, today it was only finding MSN results. One good thing about jux2.com is that it clearly identifies sponsored links for students. So have a look and see what you think. Obviously, it’s similar to Dogpile which used to allow you to compare the results from search engines in columns but this is no longer available, which is a shame I thought this was an admirable feature.

Talking of admirable features, Barcelona has plenty. It has so much culture that it makes your head spin and you could easily spend 5 days there sitting in one of the lovely outdoor cafes, having a glass of rioja and just readingabout what you can visit and see. However, it is best to get up and go and walk round the city centre with its huge squares leading off to side streets which house a myriad of eating places. Culturally, Barcelona is best known for Picasso and Gaudi (as well as a host of other names and places). The Picasso Museum  is an amazing visit as you learn so much about his earlywork and the influences on his later work e.g. a metal mask from Benin. Gaudi’s architecture e.g. in the Sagrada Familia leaves you wide-eyed and some of the sculptures on La Pedrera are excellent examples of Gaudi’s vivid imagination. See what you think in the picture below.

Information literacy revision and Barcelona

I was listening to some students from Junee High School in New South Wales whom I interviewed in December 2007, talking about how we might get more students to use their information literacy skills in different subjects. My focus at present is whether students transfer IL skills across time and subjects. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about this – they don’t! – but it’s clear that this is not simply a case of ‘do’ or ‘don’t’ as some students clearly do transfer skills or at least some skills but others don’t. The interesting thing that these year 8 (2nd year secondary school) students said was that, while they often got revisions sessions e.g. in maths or science or history, they never had revision in the classroom about information literacy skills and this was especially true when they moved from year 7 to year 8. This of course is back to the assumptionsmade by teachers and TLs that students will transfer skills but these assumptions are often wrong. So trying to get teachers to build in revision sessions for IL skills when students do assignments is a challenge for TLs – we now have some research evidence!

Next week, my wife and I are going to Barcelona for a 5 day holiday. It’s a very historic and culturally dense city with famous architecture of which the most famous is the buildings designed by Antonio Gaudi. So a cultural week and maybe even a wee post on the blog at some point.