Critical thinking and Boris Pasternak

This week, some of my students are looking at aspects of critical thinking and models such as De Bono’s  Six Thinking Hats. Another model is Elder and Paul’s Universal Intellectual Standards – no modest in the title, at least. What Elder and Paul suggest is that there are 7 key standards that can be applied and ‘infused in the thinking of students’. These include Clarity – students should ask if their statements or questions are clear and this is the ‘gateway standard’. The other standards are Accuracy, Precision, Relevance, Depth, Breadth and Logic. While the title might be seen as grandiose, the content provides some very useful advice and guidance that we might pass on to students and might consider ourselves when we are communicating in some form. I hope that’s clear enough, so it passes the first standard at least.

Browsing my bookshelves, I come across a 1965 book of Boris Pasternak’s  poems. Pasternak is most famous for the novel Dr Zhivago and those of you of a certain age may have seen the film and perhaps even read the book. The first poem in the book (Poems 1955-1959) is about writing and contains the lines: ‘I’d lay out my stanzas/Like landscape gardens; A shiver of sap/And my lines would bloom into rows of lime trees./I’d air my stanzas with mint and roses/With haymaking, rushes /And rolling storms’. Invigorating. Any resemblance to lime trees in the lines of this blog is purely accidental.

E-book readers and cycling

In yesterday’s Guardian, an article in the technology section caught my attention. The article is mainly about how there are a number of different formats for e-books at present, including  The Kindle  and the  Sony Reader and whether, in the future, there will be a standard e-book reader which is flexible enough to cope with a range of different publishing formats. What’s very interesting of course is that these e-book readers are designed to be of a similar size to a paperback novel and to look like a standard print book. I guess the psychology here is that we are more likely to buy something which, while not the same as what we are used to and like, is very similar. This of course raises the question about what we really like about print books e.g. is it turning the pages? Or is it more to do with having physical objects on your shelves which not only decorate your room but give you a feeling of being physically near intellectually creative works?

I’m touching wood before I write this, as my back has recovered a good deal and I can go out cycling for a couple of hours without coming back feeling as if I’ve been subject to a session on one of those medieval contraptions which stretched the innocent until they not only said they were guilty, but also felt guilty. Spring time cycling hereabouts is made easier because there is more to see along the country lanes – the hawthorn blossom (see picture below), the new leaves on the trees and bright yellow gorse on the hillsides. It’s easier because it can take your mind off the strain of getting up the hills. Of course, there is that well known song so familiar to cyclists – The Last Hill is the Steepest.

Hawthorn blossom

Barriers to Web 2.0 and divers

From eSchool News, an article on barriers to Web 2.0 in USA schools. If you are in Australia, Canada or the UK, the barriers outlined in this report will be familiar and to some of you, depressingly familiar. The report notes that there is a still a wide gap between how  our school students engage with Web 2.0 outside the school and how they engage with it while at school. Key barriers were concerns about student safety e.g. where most district administrators thought that social networking could be used well in teaching and learning, most still banned the use of most social networking sites in their schools. Other barriers included a lack of teacher training, lack of technology support in schools and school/district policy. On a more positive note, the survey found that use of multimedia resources accessed via Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, had increased. The latter point may be very good news for teacher librarians promoting wider use of resources via wikis.

On Easter weekend, my wife and I went down to St Abb’s Head  where the guillemots arrived in huge numbers at the nature reserve – they cling to the side of the rockface and from a distance you could mistake them for oyster shells stuck to the rocks. Another set of returning visitors are the divers who flock to this site because of the quality of the diving in the clear waters around the village. The divers must be dedicated people as it seems that the proportion of time spend actually diving is wildly disproportionate to the time spend preparing and lugging heavy cylinders along the harbourside to the boats. The diving suits do provide some amusement and possibilities of headless divers – see picture below.

Diving suit at St Abbs

Information literacy site and Romanno Bridge

There are many information literacy sites available on the web but a very useful one is the UK based Information Literacy  site which contains a comprehensive array of features of information literacy. While much of the site relates more to higher education e.g. information literacy tutorials  (which my students have just been evaluating), there is much to interest teacher librarians on the site. One of the issues relating to teaching information literacy skills in schools is how to make sure that well designed online guidance to students is actually used by the students. By getting online information literacy guidance incorporated into, for example, teachers’ assignment specifications for students, there is more chance of ensuring its use. Online guidance, of course, can never, on its own be enough to develop information literacy skills in our students.

I have just finished reading Andrew Greig’s novel Romanno Bridge  which is partly an adventure story about a group of people trying to find the real Stone of Destiny ( allegedly the ancient throne of the Scottish monarchy), partly a tale of different personalities which are very well established and developed, and partly a poetic description of places, mainly in Scotland but also in Norway. Greig is both poet and novelist and this comes through very well in the novel as you get an atmospheric description of highland Scotland locations but also a poet’s philosophical musings on life and on people. A fine read.

Multiple intelligences and poem

This week, some of my students are looking at Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and they are looking at Gardner’s theory in relation to their own learning and also how the theory might be applied in education at all levels. Gardner identifies 8 intelligences to do with how good we are at using words, numbers and pictures, at listening to music and relating to other people and to nature. So, a huge variety of intelligences and covering many aspects of our lives. I think that one of the best ways we can use multiple intelligence theory in practice, is to get our students (of different ages) to think about how they learn and what they think they might be good at and then to ask them to consider how they might improve some aspects of their learning. So if I think that my logical-mathematical intelligence isn’t as good as it might be, what might make it better?

I picked up Answering Back , a book of poems edited by Carol Ann Duffy, again yesterday and came across the poem Ithikaby C P Cavafy. The poem contains the lines – ‘Hope your road is a long one./May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy,/you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time’. The poem is really about travelling somewhere – in this case Ithika – and enjoying the journey as opposed to the destination. So the message is don’t rush to where you’re trying to get to, just in case you miss something along the way. Easier said than done, of course.

World Digital Library and skylarks

Thanks to Tom Kaun for alerting me, via the IASL  listserv, to the World Digital Library project which is being launched on 29 April 2009. the aim of the library is to make ‘primary materials’ from different cultures available to us all via the web and to do this in a multilingual format. The WDL will also feature videos made by curators from a range of national libraries around the world and these videos will explain to us why some of the primary documents are important to a particular culture. This looks a very promising source for teachers, students and teacher/school librarians because it will offer resources of value to history, cultural studies and other languages teaching. So check it out once the launch date arrives.

Out cycling today against a fairly strong southerly wind at times but mostly sheltered from the wind – thankful for that as the hills are hard enough going without having to fight the wind as well. One of the features of today’s cycle was the prominence in the countryside well off the main roads of skylarks  which were soaring in the sky and singing their hearts out. Just when you think you’ve done well to cycle up that hill in maybe one gear higher than previously, you hear the tiny skylark’s melodious calls and you have to wonder how that little bird can hover as it does and sing at the same time. A neat coincidence then, that Tom Kaun’s school is in Larkspur, California and, continuing the natural theme, that Larkspur is also a bonnie flower.

Public libraries and Melrose

Two articles in The Guardian  last Friday make interesting reading about libraries. The first article looks at the proposed new public library to be built in Birmingham in the UK. This is promised to be ‘Britain’s biggest ever public library’ and will cost 193 million GB pounds (c A$450m) to build. The article also states that the use of public libraries in the UK has gone up by about 10-15% since the recession began. The new library will do away with some of the traditional aspects of public libraries, according to the article’s author, who states that ‘Voluble group learning will take precedence over hushed reading rooms’. Whether the present Birmingham public library has an ‘hushed reading rooms’ is probably open to question but stereotypes die hard when it comes to libraries of all kinds. The second article is entitled ‘Warm words’ and contains a series of statements by writers on libraries. If you want something to put up in lights in your library, then here’s the place to be. John Banville states that a library can be ‘a haven from the bleak realities of the time, and an opening on to a wider and richer reality’. Alexander McCall-Smith notes that libraries are ‘beacons of light in a difficult world’.

On Sunday, my wife and I drove down to the border town of Melrose which is a very historical town with a famous abbey.  We went to walk in the Eildon Hills which look down on Melrose. It’s a steep climb up the sometimes rocky paths but as you ascend, you get great views across Melrose and along the River Tweed. At the top of the hill (there are a few peaks to choose from) you get a 360 degree view across the Scottish borders. The wind was quite strong at the top but we were sheltered on the way down. A good way to spend a Sunday morning if you’re ever in the neighbourhood.

Technologies and sunset

From eSchool News, an interesting article on Six technologies soon to affect education.  Some of the technologies mentioned are already happening in some (but not many)  schools e.g. collaborative environments such as Ning. Another example given is VoiceThread  which looks interesting but may necessitate some payment. The article also refers to online communication tools and one example given is Edmodo which claims to offer a free private communication platform for teachers who can share “links, notes and files”. I have had a brief look at Edmodo and it looks as if it could have potential. Another example in the article of new technologies is referred to as smart objects and one example, very relevant to libraries, is ThinkeringSpaces which is directed at school students and seeks to develop ways in which students can engage in discovery learning through a combination of physical and virtual environments. The title is a pun on “tinkering” – worth a look.

The clocks have changed here and it is now light until after 8pm. Due to good weather this week, we’ve had some lovely sunsets and the place in Dunbar to see the sun set at its best is at Belhaven Bay which has a long history as a harbour and early holiday spot. Today it is a haven for walkers, runners, surfers of different kinds and bird watchers. There is a bridge at Belhaven which is referred to locally as the bridge to nowhere, as when the tide comes in, the bridge is surrounded by water. The bridge is used when the tide goes out, to allow people to cross the stream below. In the picture below, you see the bridge at sunset.

Belhaven Bay at sunset

Referencing and potato planting

As all librarians know, referencing is important if  the citations are to be accurately found by the reader. As all teacher/school librarians know, getting students to reference their sources is a good way of making students think more about the sources they use and perhaps avoiding plagiarism. For my students, there are 2 main referencing formats i.e. Harvard   and APA and the key thing I always ask for is that my students select a referencing style and use it consistently. Having said that (and those of you who think that referencing properly is as important as the content of a student’s work should look away now), why does it need to be so complicated? Why do we need more than one system of referencing and why do referencing rules (like cataloguing rules) appear to have been designed by the  “put a comma in the wrong place and I’ll break your arm” school of librarians? Having just written a book chapter which demands that I use APA, I’m now writing a conference paper which demands that I use Harvard. So having previously written as a citation,  Herring [comma] J 2006 [comma] …., I now have to write Herring [comma] J [full stop] [open brackets] 2006 [close brackets] … If you tried to explain this to a visiting Martian or even to most people walking down your local high street, they’d probably advise you to get help.

Out cycling today around the country roads and many fields here in East Lothian have now been planted with potatoes. Nowadays, potatoes are planted by a man driving a tractor with an appendage which plants the potatoes in neat rows (drills). In the past, when the fields were much smaller, a man with a horse and plough made furrows in the ground and it was often women and children who came behind, carrying a basket of potatoes and planting the crop by throwing a potato into the furrow, stepping on it and walking on, repeating the planting. Behind the planters came another horse drawn plough which covered up the potatoes. Seeing the numerous rows of newly planted potatoes as you cycle by is not only aesthetically pleasing but it is more evidence that Spring is advancing.