Visual literacy (2) and Black Sheep Bitter

Following on the visual literacy theme in the last post, another article well worth reading and which has many good links, is by Thibault and Walbert which is has a starting statement “Images are all around us, and the ability to interpret them meaningfully is a vital skill for students to learn”. The article is an excellent introduction to visual literacy. The authors rightly point out that teaching literacy, in the form of reading, requires comprehension and students need to build a vocabulary and to have a range of experiences of reading. So with visual literacy, if we are to expect our students to “read” the visual aspects of websites as well as books, then students need to be taught how to build the equivalent of a vocabulary for images and video. Critical thinking is also involved here and while we can all point to aspects of visual literacy in our schools e.g. in art departments, is there any general focus on visual literacy which provides students with skills to cope with websites?

One of the best real ales in the UK is Black Sheep Bitter and sampling it last weekend in Edinburgh’s Guildford Arms was a treat indeed. As you can see in the picture below , which is reproduced with permission (thanks Ashleigh), it is a very clear and attractive looking beer and it tastes as good as it looks. It was named after the son of a larger brewing family who went off to America but returned to be reconciled with his family and set up his own brewery – thus the Black Sheep. Your visual literacy unfortunately won’t help you get the taste – you’ll have to try it.

 

Visual literacy and roe deer

Having a look at the ever excellent Knowledge Quest  online journal, the current issue is on Visual Literacy  and there’s a very readable and interesting article by the prolific Debbie Abilock – famous for NoodleTools  – in which Debbie discusses “Reading a documentary photograph”. When looking at a photograph, Abilock poses these questions: 1. What do I see 2. What does it mean to me? 3. What in the photograph leads me to say this? 4. Why was this photograph created? 5. What does it mean? There is also a good discussion about teaching students how to interpret photographs and Abilock rightly points out that photographs are constructions – as she says, there is an eye behind the camera controlling what is being taken. As our students’ world is increasingly visual, this is a great place to starting thinking (and learning about information literacy).

When I’m living in Wagga Wagga in Australia, I often come across kangaroos when out cycling and you can’t help but smile as hop away from you or take prodigious jumps over fences. When I’m living here in East Lothian, I regularly see roe deer – very shy and often quite delicate animals – perhaps in a field or like this morning, coming out of one field and across the road in front of me and into the trees on the other side through a gap in the hedge. They are very like kangaroos as they bounce rather than run and can jump fairly high fences. Some nice photos taken in East Lothian are on Arthur Grosset’s site. Use your visual literacy to study them.

Standards for school libraries and football (UK version)

Some of my students are getting excited about … OK, they are examining as part of an assignment… the ASLA “Standards of professional excellence for teacher librarians” which raises the question of what standards are for and how effective they might be. Standards are useful guides for teacher librarians (or what they are called where you live) and some would argue that they are excellent benchmarks against which a TL can judge her/himself. I think this is a possibility but we have to be careful of the extent to which standards might represent too much of a challenge for an individual TL who might (wrongly) assume that most other TLs are achieving the levels of excellence in the standards, while s/he lags behind. Taking a realistic view of standards, TLs can see possibilities and perhaps, if given the right support, training and motivation, achieve much of what is in the standards. For many TLs, I suspect that achieving even some of what is in the standards is worth aiming for.

For those of you not interested in sport and particularly sport which features 22 men (in this case) running around a pitch chasing a largish round ball (so it’s not hockey then) – look away now. Tonight is the final of the Champions League which is always a great occasion, although not always a great match. This football (called “soccer” in some parts of the world – a term frowned upon by James Herring) match features 2 UK (OK – English!) clubs and every year I hope it will be an exciting match – full of goals and incident. It’s usually a very tight game – intriguing but not exciting. Of course, tonight may be different. For the pedantic among us, of course the term “Champions League” should have an apostrophe after champions but don’t get me started on apostrophes.

Driven or drifting and cycle to Glenkinchie

In my paper for the ASLA conference  referred to the in the last post, I discussed the idea of the teacher librarian or school librarian being “Driven” or “Drifting”. This aspect arose when I was doing some workshops in Perth (Australia) when I was asking TLs to think about their own role and what they might change about it, if they could or if they wanted to. Driven and drifting of course are perhaps 2 extremes, with the driven TL being a forward planner, a strategist, a collaborative colleague, a welcomer of Web 2.0 and a leader in the school and the drifting TL being someone who has been doing more or less the same things for a few years and may or not be a forward planner etc. Most TLs, I suspect (and please correct me) are somewhere in between these two. The point about my paper and workshop session is for TLs to think about their role, to take some time e.g. to write out (in a list or concept map) what they think they actually do and what they would like to do. This is not easy as it’s challenging and most of us would rather get on with what we’re doing (and there’s SO much to do) rather than reflect. The novelist John Updike said that the hardest part of being a writer was explaining to people that when he was staring out of the window, he was, in fact, doing his most difficult work.

On Sunday, a 65K cycle to Glenkinchie Distillery on a bright but cold morning. The countryside in East Lothian (aka the garden of Scotland) is a lush green at the moment with rolling fields of barley and wheat and the stalks of early potatoes (tatties) showing through the neatly crafted rows or drills. A good few hills on the way there and, at the distillery, we stopped for a drink – but before you think it was a wee dram that we stopped for, the distillery was still closed. Back home against a distinctly coolish east wind but again with panoramic views across the hills.

ASLA online conference and Whiteadder Dam

The ASLA online conference is currently running and I had a paper in it about the role of the teacher librarian. Some interesting discussions on the forum about a range of issues including digital environments and multiliteracies. One of the problems of course about both online and face to face conferences is that they are often fairly costly and the audience is restricted. I hope that there will be a number of summaries of papers and forum discussions in the TL journals so that a wider audience is reached.

On Sunday, in very cold and misty conditions, a long hike on the bike to the Whiteadder Dam which is normally a beautiful setting but not when the haar comes in off the sea. Very big hill to climb about 3K from the dam (or reservoir as it’s also known) and you’re not sure if you’d rather have a really sunny day when you can see the top of the hill, which seems a long way away, or a day like Sunday when you can hardly see where you’re going and you’re thinking that the top MUST be near soon. Ah the joys of cycling.

Teach today and old bridge

Again in this week’s Education Guardian  , there’s a useful website for TLs and teachers who need fairly straightforward introductions to various aspects of ICT in schools. Teachtoday is a well constructed and unalarming site directed at teachers and TLs who perhaps are interested in Web 2.0 and other applications and issues but often find that sites are too technical, too complicated or too gung ho about how this site will change your life if only you’ll sit here for a few hours and work it all out. The site highlights some issues such cyberbullying and e-safety, as well as a few “60 second guides” to blogs and wikis. Very readable and worth recommending to the technologically faint hearted.

On ANZAC day, a couple of weeks ago, I went on a woodland walk with my wife, to a place nearby called The Brunt. It’s best known to me on my bike as being approached by a climb up a hill to get there from both sides and a climb up a hill to get back from whence you came. The walk is above a stream – it would be called a burn locally – and there are great swaves of bluebells at this time of year – but we were too early. A couple of shy deer were seen briefly before darting into the trees. We came across a bridge across the stream (see photo below) which was obviously used in the past, probably by farm workers, but is now disused, and you’re warned not to cross it. So looking at it and admiring its location and structure is enough.

Google Apps Education and beach walk

In today’s Link section of Education Guardian , there’s an interesting article on a growing number of schools using Google Apps Education Edition which offers free access to what the article calls “a bundled package of web-based email, calendar and office software originally tailored for business”. The positive aspects of this package are that it’s free, that data is held on Google servers and not the schools and that schools can save much money by using some of the tools such as a word processor, instead of having to buy expensive Microsoft products. So far, so promising. The downside, as this balanced article shows, is that what is free today may not be free tomorrow; that putting all your data eggs in one basket (Google’s) may not be wise and some question the level of future support. So, you pays your money (or not in this case) and you takes your choice.

At the weekend, went for a walk on Tyninghame Beach which is about 6K from Dunbar. This is one of these multi-experience walks, as you start off going through some trees, then walk along a track next to the sand dunes, then on to the beach, then alongs a rocky shore, and finally back through  the trees to the car. (Wot? No bike you ask. This was Sunday afternoon after a 40K bike ride at 8am). This is an aural as well as visual experience, with the larks singing above the sand dunes and the you can hear the waves before you see them. There were gannets diving into the sea and shorebirds such as oystercatchers meandering along the beach looking for food. On walks like this, you have to stop, breathe in deeply, feast your eyes and open your ears. You are also safe in assuming that it’s unlikely to be hijacked by Google or Microsoft and day soon.

21st century literacies and May Day

Doing some reading around on “new literacies”, I came across the 21st Century Literacies Homepage  which states that “Today discrete disciplines have emerged around information, media, multicultural and visual literacies” and argues that it is the combinationof these literacies that our students need today. Although the homepage states that it was last updated in 2002, much of the subsequent content is more recent. The multicultural literacies pages are well worth looking at as they include not only definitions but good links and lesson plans. As ever, what’s on these pages may need to be adapted e.g. for an Australian or UK context, especially as the word multicultural means different things in different cultures.

Today is May Day. The first of May. May the first. So as they say in good drinking circles “May the thirst be with you”. Also, as my late colleague Bruce Thomson used to say, Sunday will be Star Wars Day – May the fourth be with you.