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.

Evaluating sources and Le Tour

After a huge session marking, I got back to writing up some of my research this week and yesterday I was analysing student diary comments about evaluating resources. What was interesting was that it was clear that a sizable minority of year 7 (1st year secondary school) students had difficulty understanding the concept of evaluating sources which they use for assignments. While most students could cite a range of criteria such as relevance to the assignment, readability, authority (e.g. as established by other students or the teacher or teacher librarian), some students clearly had difficulty in understanding the concept of evaluation. In short, these students accepted what they found especially when searching the web and not only did they not discriminate between sources, they appeared not even to think about discriminating. All the students in the study had been told about evaluating sources but this was not necessarily reinforced – which may well be the problem.

Le Tour de France started on Saturday, so it’s time to sit back and goggle at the sheer strength, energy and commitment of the riders; the bikes they are riding – which cost a fortune; and the French countryside which is historic but also lush with abundant crops at this time of the year. Le Tour is three weeks of excitement, intrigue, drama, victory, loss and visual excellence – and you don’t have to be a cyclist to enjoy it. On my list of things to do in the next few year is to go to France when Le Tour is on and take in the atmosphere deep in the French countryside, not to mention the wine, the cheese, the baguettes and of course, Les Francais and Les Francaises themselves.

iTunes U and summer nights

From the reliable and occasionally very interesting eSchool News, an article  on iTunes U which has a new section containing “a wealth of free online content for K-12 educators”. Most of the iTunes U content was previously geared towards higher education but this new service is more related to schools. It is north American in origin and content but, with topics ranging across the curriculum, it could well be useful to schools in other countries. There is a video on the iTunes U site which is obviously a marketing tool but did give some interesting examples of material which could be easily used in schools by teachers, TLs and students. You do need to download iTunes if you haven’t got it but this is easily done on your PC or Mac. Looks a promising resource and I’ll post more when I check it out further.

Well, it’s past the longest day in Scotland and as we say here “Aye, the nights are drawin’ in”. In fact, it was dark here at 11pm last night – how awful is that? We’ve had some lovely evenings with the light lasting beyond 11pm and one of the pleasures of living here is sitting outside at that time of night and watching the sea and the sky. My sister Elizabeth and brother in law Jim were here recently from Tauranga in New Zealand and took the photo below from the back of our house. My sister recently retired as the librarian of the public library in the very picturesque Mount Maunganui. So 2 librarians in the family.

 

 

iBreadcrumbs and murder (nearly)

I’m alerted in a comment on a previous post (thanks Cathy) to iBreadcrumbs - a site which has the rather grandiose title of “The first way to save and share online research” – doubtful I would think. Despite that, don’t be put off as this tool has some potential for TLs across the world. There’s a short video – in PowerPoint style – showing you what iBreadcrumbs can do e.g. enable you to have “a unique twist on bookmarking” in that it will save all your web trails and allow you to share them with others. It can also be a tool for students – upper primary and secondary mainly – who can share websites they use for group projects. An example of a good potential use of this tool is that it records what you access online and if you forget to bookmark something – and don’t we all think back sometimes and wish we had bookmarked that “eh, what was it?” site? So possibly, a good tool for TLs to use and to encourage others to use. If you are already on the iBreadcrumbs trail, post a comment.

A bike is not usually thought of as a potential tool for mass murder but when you are cycling along a country road and a family of partridges – mother (I think) and 4 very small balls of fluff on two legs- appears out of a hedge and walks (the mother) and stumbles (the first three) and staggers (the last one) across the road, suddenly a bike is to the birdies what Gulliver was to the Lilliputians  You’ll be be glad to know that I managed to brake hard and avoid taking out one or more of this family, who disappeared into the hedge opposite and then into a lush green field of barley which was swaying in the wind.