Forbes (business journal) article on TLs and travelling

I was alerted to an article in the US based online business journal Forbes by one of my colleagues. Now Forbes.com is not in my favourites but this article is about school students needed teacher librarians and ‘not just Google’. Now while the content of the article will be old news to us in the school library community, it is encouraging that an article featuring TLs and SLs appears in this prestigious business journal. The author argues that, in the business world, information literacy skills are of prime importance.  The author is a former corporate lawyer and now runs his own company and states that, without what he terms ‘effective research skills’ he would not have been as successful as he has been. A good article to send round the school.

I am now in Australia for 4 weeks, having travelled from Scotland to Dubai (2 days) and then on to Sydney (1.5 days) and to Wagga Wagga. Travelling is a mixture of the very interesting, the boring and the very tiring. It’s interesting to go to places which you are visiting for the first time or revisiting and it’s interesting to watch the variety of other people travelling and sometimes meeting people while travelling. Sitting in a plane waiting for take off and the captain telling you that there’s been another delay but, in as cheerful a voice as the captain can muster, telling you that we’ll be on our way ‘very shortly’ (never defined) can be boring. One of the odd things about travelling is that, while you are sitting in a plane for hours on end, it is very tiring although you haven’t actually done anything. In some ways, it is lost time.

Search engines and country walk

Doing some writing on search engines at the moment and I came across a useful source at The Search Engine List. There are quite a few lists of search engines on the web but this one is useful insofar as it categorises search engines into classes such as All Purpose, Blogs, Books, Business, Medical, Metasearch etc. The value here lies in the specialist nature of many of the search engines which are likely to find material which general search engines such as Google might not. Obviously, there is much overlap in these search engines and there is no guarantee that, for example, using a medical oriented search engine will produce better results than an Advanced Search on Google, but we do need to keep reminding ourselves that if we limit our searches to Google only, we are likely to miss out.

On Sunday, a Spring walk up the hills around Abbey St Bathans which is a hamlet which many people pass while walking The Southern Upland Way. The cold weather here has meant that the snowdrops are still in full bloom here and the daffodils are not out yet. Great to be out in the border hills which are a different landscape from the arable countryside around Dunbar, where I live. This is the lambing season and while walking up a track, a tractor carrying lambs and sheep to a farm in the hills passed by, as the photo below shows. As we walked back to the car, two buzzards flew high above the woods and hills, looking for afternoon tea.

Sheep transport at Abbey St Bathans

Information retrieval and Walcott poem

How good are your students at finding information – in books and on the web? In most schools, two answers are common. 1) Students are very good at finding information in books and on the web and 2) Well, I assume that they are, although I’ve no real evidence. Of course, 1) is often accompanied by ‘I mean – they’re very good at finding information but of course, it’s not always  the right information. Information retrieval – by which I mean not just information seeking, but the retrieval of relevant information –  is a skill which our students, magically it seems, because of their age and their constant exposure to technology, are supposed to excel. Reality of course is different and TLs face a continuing battle in finding time to teach effective information retrieval to students as part of their information literacy practice. No websites links here – just an observation.

Still reading Derek Walcott’s excellent book of poems White Egrets. This is one of these books that you can pick up and open at random and you’ll find a gem. Take today, for instance. ‘ The day, grey. The mood: slate. Too overcast to swim,/unless a strong sun emerges; which it may./Our hands, like ants, keep building libraries, storing leaves and riddling parchment; our books are tombstones, every poem a hymn’. What does all that mean? It probably means something different to you than to me, so take from it what you can, if only the rhythm of the words.

Learning platforms and kittiwakes

Many schools are now developing what Becta in the UK call learning platforms. These are also called virtual learning environments. The possibilities offered by using a learning platform are endless and some schools have gone ahead with projects which have transformed the way ICT is used in the school, particularly in the engagement of students with a range of ICT across the curriculum. The Becta guide is a very good place to find out more information about how to exploit the many aspects of a school learning platform and it identified five levels of development – aware, develop, adopt, integrate and transform. Learning platforms are an excellent opportunity for TLs to play a role in developing ICT for learning across the school. However, as I always point out, getting involved with the school learning platform will mean giving up something else that you are involved in.

It’s that time of year again. Walking along the harbourside on Sunday morning, a familiar cry could be heard as the kittiwakes have returned to nest in and around the Dunbar castle ruins. The birds go out to sea for the winter and return each spring. Kittiwakes are smaller than the larger common gulls or herring gulls which are also a feature of a harbourside walk. The kittiwakes are also very noisy birds and particularly when they are setting up nests with their partners. They have a high pitched call and when they start to call in unison on the castle wall, it can be quite deafening. As harbingers of Spring however, they are very welcome. The photo below is from last year but this year will continue the search for the perfect kittiwake photo. Watch this space.

Kittiwakes on Dunbar castle

Information literacy and Nam Le

I’ve just completed a podcast for my students on some aspects of information literacy in schools. One of the issues facing TLs and teachers has been the proliferation of literacies in recent years. So how do you distinguish, for example, information literacy, digital literacy and visual literacy? Should you distinguish them or are digital literacy and visual literacy components of information literacy. There is no agreement on this. One Digital Literacy site (and there are many) defines digital literacy partly as ‘the use of computers to retrieve, assess, store, produce,  present and exchange information’ but is this not also a possible definition of one aspect of information literacy? I think that the key aspect here is not to restrict ourselves to definitions of different kinds of literacy, but to see how they might overlap. So ask your self – how does media literacy relate to information literacy, and vice versa? Consider it your homework for tonight.

I’m reading an astonishing book of short stories at the moment. The Boat by Nam Le contains a range of stories which will grip you with a sense of high tension. You will also be fascinated by the range of characters and by how much you find out about characters in a relatively short period of time. There is so much depth in these stories that sometimes I have come away thinking that I’ve read a whole novel and not a short story – although many of the stories are not short in the sense of being only a few pages long. If you think you don’t read short stories, then try this book and prepare to be amazed. Seldom have I read a book that lives up to the lavish praise of the reviews quoted.

Concept maps and snowdrops

I’m writing up some research about students using concept maps in schools and how many students value their concept maps when doing assignments. With encouragement, students can be taught to make extensive use of their concept map (or mind map) i.e. not just to identify keywords for information retrieval but to help students think about how they might structure an essay or report. Concept maps can also be used to help students understand concepts and many science teachers, for example, find them helpful. If you want to increase your knowledge about concept maps then I would point you to a study by Novak and Canas. It’s fairly long but you can dip into it and gain some very good insights into how you might use concept maps with your students in the classroom or in the library.

The snowdrops have been out for a while now here in Dunbar and they are lasting longer this year because of the cold weather. There is always a great display of snowdrops at the local farm of Pitcox. The photo below shows the snowdrops in the garden of the ‘big house’ i.e. where the farm owner stays. Snowdrops, my web research tells me have the Latin name Galanthus Rivalis meaning a milk white flower resembling snow, but should not be brought indoors as this is bad luck – like putting new shoes on the table, I suppose.

Snowdrops at Pitcox

Teacher tap and spring tide

Doing some web searching for a new book, I came across a useful site that may or may not be familiar to you. Teacher Tap is a portal which contains ideas and resources for teachers and TLs – although the site actually says ‘educators and librarians’ as if we weren’t educators! – who want to use ICT for learning and teaching in schools. As an aside, the site also talks of ‘teaching and learning’ – I always tell my students, TLs and SLs that ‘learning’ should always come first, as that’s the key point of schools. One of the sections on this site which is certainly worth looking at is the Effective Web Assignments  page which has many good links. Check it out and book mark it.

The full moon has just passed 2 days ago, so we have had some very high tides (photo below)  here in Dunbar  with big waves slamming against the harbour wall and leaping way into the air. ‘Spring tides’ of course do not just happen in Spring - into which we have supposedly arrived, it being March, but it’s to be -3 tonight – but arrive just after the full moon. A Spring tide is a high tide and the highest occur nearest the 2 equinoxes in the year. So it’s not seasonal, with ‘Spring’ meaning to jump up. The opposite is a neap tide which is a calm tide. Nothing of course to do with the Scottish word ‘neep’ meaning a turnip or swede. When someone does something stupid or forgetful (e.g. like me driving to the shops and walking home), they are described as having ‘a neep for a heid” (i.e. head and pronounced heed).

Spring tide