Branding the school library and swans

I was reading an article the other day about how Barack Obama had turned the presidency into a brand and it set me thinking what a school library brand might look like. A brand gives a product an individual identity e.g. a Volkswagen Beetle car or Starbucks coffee shops. The idea is that people can recognise certain qualities from the brand name. So if the brand is the school library, what is the brand? Books, access to the web, the teacher/school librarian, knowledge, information literacy? Branding is alluded to in Valenza and Johnson’s article which is very worth reading as it may make you think about how you would like to brand the library and how you think you might go about persuading your school community to recognise that brand e.g. seing the school library as a virtual as well as a physical space.

Out walking on Sunday last, 3 groups of swans took off from a wee loch at St Abbs Head and conducted a flyover, swaying above the cliffs and down through the valley where the loch provides them with nesting cover. You could hear the wings flapping and the constant calls from each group. Were they discussing what they could see as my wife and I were discussing what we could see? Improbable but not impossible, methinks. The photo below was taken from a distance but if any of you can lipread swans, then let me know what they were saying. 

No blog next week as I’m on leave. Blog back in wb 1st Feb 2010.

Swans at St Abbs Head

E-books and garden bird

I was doing some reading about learning in schools and went on to the CSU Library and discovered (yes, to my shame, I should have known this) the extent to which the collection of e-books  has risen over the past couple of years. I’m quite comfortable with reading e-books as, because I work at home for most of the year, I tend not print out material in the same way as I might when I’m on campus in Wagga Wagga. The fact that you can download e-books i.e. borrow them for up to 7 days, is a great help and download times are not all that onerous – you do need to have broadband of course. The extent to which e-books have become more prevalent in school libraries has not (I think but correct me if you know otherwise) been the subject of empirical research but anecdotally, there does appear to be more TLs who are encouraging the purchase and use of e-books.

Sitting at my laptop a couple of weeks ago – when the snow was still on the ground – I was alerted to a fluttering on my windowsill and I looked round to see a plumpish bird with a speckled, reddish breast, sitting on the windowsill outside. Of course, by the time I got my camera ready, it had flown off. I assume this was because the bird saw me as some kind of ornothological paparazzi who would splash the photo all over the web. OK, maybe I just moved and it took fright. Despite this, two more of these birds appeared in the garden and I managed to snap them through the window. Not ideal but if I had open the front door and tried to catch them directly, I’m sure they would have flown off. I think that the birds were fieldfares which come here in winter from Scandinavia. See the photo below and if you are more ornithologically observant than I am, let me know.

Bird in the snow

TACCLE and James Ellroy

Thanks to Luisa Marquardt for posting information on IASL-LINK about the TACCLE (Teachers’ Aids on Creating Content for Learning Environments) project. TACCLE seeks to ‘help teachers [TLs and school librarians also] develop state of the art content for e-learning in general and for learning environments in particular’. The project has produced a handbook which you can download after registering or you can register to be sent a printed copy. E-learning is coming to a school very near you and very soon, if it’s not there yet. The TL as resource creator will become more important in schools as we move towards digital libraries in schools where students have e-learning as a normal part of their curriculum.

I’m reading James Ellroy’s new book ‘Blood’s a Rover’. This is crime/political thriller at its very best. It’s not for the fainthearted as the book features a series of extremely flawed characters living in the late 1960s and 1970s who are involved in subverting mainstream government and politics. There are also appearances by real people – J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon – and there is much speculation about the plots to kill J F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. There is some gratuitous violence in the book and much political machination. If you like your fiction to be enthralling, sometimes funny, sometimes gruesome, and always fast paced, with a language of its own, then this is for you. Miss Marple is certainly is not.

2010 predictions and snow

Firstly, a very Good New Year to all readers of this blog. Thinking about a new year and how people make predictions, I came across a reference to some predictions for 2010 in relation to educational technology. The article highlighted 5 predictions i.e. 1) e-books will continue to proliferate 2) NetBook functionality will grow 3) More teachers will use interactive whiteboards 4) Personal devices will infiltrate the classroom and 5) Technology will enable tailored curricula. So no great surprises there although it is interesting that no. 4 uses the word ‘infiltrate’, a word usually associated with secret and possibly illicit activities. The fact that some students will bring their own web connectivity on their smart phones is commented on in economic terms in the article. If you had to make 5 predictions about your school library or your role as a TL or school librarian in 2010, what would the list include? Think about it as it might help you identify your priorities. No need to make the predictions public of course.

Here in the south of Scotland, we’ve had the first real winter for nearly 30 years. It  has snowed and the snow has stayed with us for at least a couple of weeks. Where I live in Dunbar, I’m right on the coast, so the salty air tends to keep the temperature up and less snow falls than, for example, on the hills a couple of miles away. I’ve put a few snowy photos – taken at the golf course nearby and put them on my Flickr site. I’ve included one below as a starter. The snow has gone now and the crocus bulbs have sprouted – no flowers yet. As the poet Shelley wrote ‘O Wind/If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?’.

Snow on the golf course