E-pathfinders and kangaroos on course

Firstly, apologies for the absence of the blog over the past month, due to a combination of circumstances. I’ll try to rectify this with some additional posts before going back to a weekly addition. My students on the M Ed. Teacher Librarianship course at CSU last session completed an e-pathfinder as part of their studies in the Information Environment subject. Students were asked to construct an e-pathfinder which would be a prototype learning website for their school. The e-pathfinder assignment restricted the students to a particular format, with an introduction to the topic (e.g. water conservation for year 2), keywords and definitions, and information literacy advice. This was followed by a total of only 15 resources, both print and digital which were to be accompanied by a meaningful annotation i.e one which advised students on using the resources and not just a description of the resources content. Students had to use a wiki format or construct a website using a package such as Weebly. The results, from a large class of students, were very positive although inevitably there was a range of quality in the prototype learning websites. My hope is that my students will follow up this assignment with actual use of their sites in their own schools. Examples of the e-pathfinders can be found at a wiki site constructed by one of my top students.

I have been travelling for almost the last 2 months and the main part of my journey was to work at CSU in Wagga Wagga. One recreational aspect of my stay was a weekly cycle around Pomingalarna reserve, a large plot of land near Wagga Wagga which is a walking/running/mountain biking site for active people. The reserve features a range of wildlife including many birds, as well as snakes and echidnas. There are also 2 tribes (mobs) of kangaroos which live on the reserve and it can be an unnerving experience as you are flat out on your mountain bike on one of the trails, and 3 or 4 kangaroos of different sizes hop across the trail not far in front of you. Next to Pomningalarna is one of Wagga Wagga golf courses. In the evening, the kangaroos are often seen on the golf course and this makes for an unusual site – see picture below.

Kangaroos on golf course

SLJ webcasts and Scottish walls

If you would like some easily accessed CPD (continuous Professional Development) then you might want to take a look at – and listen to – the webcasts provided by School Library Journal. I’ve just accessed one which looks at integrating digital resources in the school curriculum. The webcast has 3 presenters – a teacher librarian, an administrator and a teacher, who all give their own perspective on this topic. My impressions were that this was very down to earth, not that difficult to achieve, advice on using e-resources. You will need time to listen to the webcast, and it would be a good idea to dedicate some time to doing this – and importantly, tell your colleagues, managers etc that you are doing this and when you are doing it. Too often, TLs/SLs do this kind of self development without indicating that they have done so. Letting your manager know, in particular, is important.

One of the questions I always get asked by visitors to Scotland from Australia, New Zealand, North America and elsewhere, is why are there so many walls in the Scottish countryside? In the south east of Scotland, where I live for most of the year, you will see many farms with walled sections,  high stone walls stretching out often for perhaps 100 metres. Also, along fields, you will see dry-stane dykes i.e. dry stone (no cement used) walls which edge huge fields. The simple answer is that, perhaps 300-400 years ago, wealthy farmers had a plentiful supply of free stone – from their fields – and a plentiful supply of very cheap labour – their farmworkers. Walls were also status symbols for owners of large estates and were build, not just to keep other people out, but to impress them. During a walk near Peebles on Sunday, I took the photo below of this dry stane dyke, carefully constructed only from stone – an impressive work.

Dry stane dyke near Peebles

TL abilities and snowy sprouts

Firstly, a very Good New Year to you all. The ever informative, imaginative and practical Joyce Valenza has presented us with a list of abilities that she would like to see TLs/SLs have, in order to be ‘fully loaded’. Now, the term ‘fully loaded’ may have many meanings and not all of them suitable for a family show, but in this instance, Joyce Valenza is talking about the ability of TLs to have mastery of a range of areas in order to be fully effective. The article highlights mastery of: publishing platforms, web based pathfinder creation tools; applications for digital stories; “cool tools for publishing digital work’; search tools and strategies – and many more. I’ll certainly be getting my teacher librarianship students to read this article and discuss it. It is aimed at practitioners, so I hope many of you will access it and think about how it fits in with your present role and your possible future role.

Over the midwinter festivals period here in Scotland, we’ve had – by our standards – a lot of snow and very low temperatures. If you are reading this is north America or Scandinavia however, what we’ve had will be fairly mild. One of the great features of snow, of course, is that it’s a boon for photographers. I took the photo below on a walk not far from where I live. It’s a field of sprouts which look like an army of terracotta warriors with white helmets. Sprouts taste horrible! How people can eat them with their chicken, turkey, veggie roast is beyond me. A recently cropped field of sprouts up the road from here had a flock of sheep in it, munching away. I think that the sheep should go in first. I’m sure that those of you who are sprout lovers – and the farmers – would not agree.

Sprouts in the snow

Pathfinders and hydrangea

I’ve just completed a chapter for my new book – of which much more later – and one section discusses what a pathfinder for the web 2.0 age might look like. Pathfinders started out as printed list of books in libraries and sometimes there was some annotation with each title, mainly describing the book’s content. Pathfinders now appear on blogs, wikis and websites. Joyce Valenza argues that pathfinders should now take the form of wikis. My argument is that we need to rethink pathfinders as learning resources and provide much more for our students. Thinking of a pathfinder as part of a learning website is to view the pathfinder in the context of providing students with subject content, assignment, information literacy guidance and mediated resources. This puts more emphasis on having meaningful annotations i.e. annotations which do not just focus on content but advise students on using resources. You can also engage your students by using wiki tools to allow students to add their own resources.

In the garden this year, we have a hydrangea which has produced more flowers than ever before. We’ve also got two new and different hydrangeas. The picture below shows one of the new ones which is now darker in colour. What we call hydrangea, the Germans call Hortensie and this was the name on one of the plants we bought. I think I prefer Hortensie. The name hydrangea roughly means ‘water barrel’ because of the plants constant need for water, although it could easily be a Malapropism for some vagueness of thought or action, as in “I think James may be suffering from hydrangea’.

Hydrangea

Wikis and camelia

This week, some of my students have been completing a wiki as part of their 2nd assignment for my Information Environment subject. As I’ve noted before, there is a plethora of information on the web about wikis in schools and elsewhere. A good source is Classroom 2.0 which has a large section on wikis including a useful video (from YouTube) on a plain English guide to wikis. There are also quite a few good examples of wikis, including an award-winning site Welker’s Wikinomics. You can use this site whether you are interested in the subject content or not, as it’s a very good example of what can be done with a wiki, within the school context. My students are creating wiki pathfinders for groups of students and, for most of them, this is the first wiki they have created. Almost all students have found this an exhilarating experience – once it’s done.

It’s Spring in Australia and the flowers are starting to come out in profusion. Everywhere you look there is a new splash of colour. One of my favourite flowers, not easy to grow except in a greenhouse in Scotland, are camelias. There are many different varieties and I’m not capable of identifying the one in the picture below – the after-rain camelia, I’ll call it.

After-rain camelia

Pathfinders and rain

For about 150 of my students, it’s time to look at Pathfinders as part of the TL’s role in developing learning resources in the school. Pathfinders are guides which lead students to resources. I’m not sure if I like the title ‘Pathfinder’ as it has connotations of printed lists of books for students. However, it is a recognised term and nowadays, pathfinders are usually in a digital format. Joyce Valenza argues coherently that using a wiki is an excellent vehicle for a pathfinder. My recommendations to students and to TLs is to think of a pathfinder not only as a guide to resources which have been mediated by the TL and by teachers, but also as a scaffold which will help improves tudents’ information literacy skills. Effective pathfinders give students choices, save them time searching and take them to relevant sources from which they can learn.

Now that I am back in Wagga Wagga for a few weeks, the subject of rain comes up. In the UK, we get plenty of rain so no-one talks about it, unless you are in Glasgow and it’s rained for 3 days in a row. In Dunbar, where I live, it rains but not to the extent it does in the West. In rural Australia, there has been a drought of various severity for about 10 years now. So when it rains in Wagga Wagga , people discuss it at length. You overhear conversations – “How much did you get?” “What, 18 mils, we only got 11″. While the fields are green at the moment, with summer approaching, more rain is needed. Rain is also a collection of poems by Don Paterson and you can listen to him talking about different aspects of rain in a Guardian Podcast - excellent listening. Of course, there is Elizabeth Regina (whom Mrs Malaprop might refer to as the Queer Old Dean) who is apparently  good at serving tea. Thus the expression “She never reigns but she pours”.

School library websites and the Poetry Book Society

In the latest edition of Scan, there are some articles about using school library websites to enhance learning in the school. A number of issues arise here, including whether the school library website should be open to anyone to see or should be part of the school intranet. In some cases, TLs may find it easier to develop pages which are part of the intranet and therefore stay within the school, with students having access from home. An intranet, of course, does not let others and in particular, other TLs, view the site and get ideas from it. A second point about school library websites is that many of them are well designed and the result of much work on the part of the TL but many school library websites still focus on providing lists of unannotated websites for teachers and students. As I’ve written before about pathfinders, there is much more likelihood of students and teachers using websites which give them more than the URL i.e. they provide a guide not only to content but to why the student or teacher should use that particular site.

I have just rejoined the Poetry Book Society  (website being updated) and the way the subscription works is that 4 times a year, you get a parcel with a new poetry book plus a magazine with excerpts from other new poetry books. The beauty of this system – for me at least – is that someone else chooses the books and it’s a surprise. I have enjoyed the great majority of the books sent to me and this quarter’s book is Theories and Apparitions by Mark Doty. I try to read one poem per day and enjoy lines like, from a poem entitled Pipistrelle ( a kind of bat) “two twilight mares in a thorn-hedged field/across the road- clotted cream/and raw gray wool, vaguely above it all”.

Pathfinders and making soup

My students have just completed an assignment in which a good number of them have designed pathfindersand have used a range of wikis such as Wetpaint, pbwiki or wikispaces . If you do a search for pathfinders school libraries, you will find lots of examples butmost of them, while providing a range of resources suitable to their student audience, often have very content-driven annotations. What I teach my students is that pathfinders should contain information literacy skills advice at the start  of the pathfinder and in teh annotations. Some students search within websites effectively and are good at interpreting what they find in relation to their purpose – but as we know, many are not. So including reminders in the annotations of resources about searching and interpreting is likely to help many students in your classes.

One of the most therapeutic things that I do is to make home made soup. I think that the processes of chopping, slicing, peeling, grating, stirring, seasoning, tasting and simmering are all relaxing. I realise that this might sound awfully middle class, educated, comfortably off and western and I know that for some people in the world, making soup used to be and often is, a chore. Given that admission, however, making soup e.g. lentil soup which I made yesterday, is relaxing and satisfying. My recipe? I used stock from the gammon joint we had, washed the lentils and added them, bringing the stock and letnils quickly tothe boil. I then added chopped leeks, grated turnip (aka swede in England an other places) i.e. large, round and thick purple skin and grated carrot. For more stock I used a vegetable cube and yes, i know there can be a lot of salt int these cubes. Stir the whole thing together and simmer for maybe half an hour. Delicious.

More on Pathfinders and the Life of Pi

Pathfinders are a great way for teacher librarians to create accessible and school, subject and topic specific annotated lists for students to use. I mentioned that creating a wiki is an excellent way to present an interesting pathfinder to students and there’s a very good article in School Library Journal about choosing a wiki format. I also think that it’s a good idea for teacher librarians to put their school name and maybe even class and topic as a heading on the wiki as the students are more likely to impressed by a wiki heading ‘Gumly Gumly year 7′s project on birds in Wagga Wagga’ rather than a more general and staid title.

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in recent years is ‘The life of Pi’ and there’s now an illustrated version. You can see some of the illustrations on The Guardian’s books section – so TLs: alert your English and art departments and any local tigers.

Pathfinders and The Hibees

My students in one of my subjects are currently thinking about doing a pathfinder for their next assignment. Pathfinders are guides for students who are learning about a topic or doing an assignment. In the past, pathfinders used to be printed lists in the library for students to use – but these were very static and often book-only. Pathfinders can be done electronically and can come in various guises e.g. pages on the school intranet or on accessible websites. They can also take the form of Hotlists or even Webquests, although the latter tend to contain more than just lists of learning resources. With the advent of Web 2.0, pathfinders can also be created on wikis and Joyce Valenza has an excellent argument about why pathfinders should be on wikis. Some pathfinders have been very poorly done in the past e.g. giving students a list of unannotated weblinks or book titles is unlikely to stimulate student interests. Pathfinders should be relatively short (e.g. no more than 15 itesm) and very specific. For example if year 7 are doing an assignment on ecology in the local environment, a pathfinder entitled ‘Local ecology’ is not going to light the students’ candles. However, if it was called, for example, ‘Looking after the Murrumbidgeee River in Wagga Wagga’, it would be much more meaningful to students. Also, annotations in pathfinders should not just be content driven but should encourage students to go to particular sections of a website or book and perhaps pose a questions or encourage students to use keywords.

OK – I have resisted long enough. I need to mention my football (don’t call it soccer!) team which is Hibernian Football Club or Hibs or The Hibees. I normall sign off my emails with “it’s hard tae be a Hibee” because following this club, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, normally is hard as the team would win any competition for inconsistency over the years. However, on Sunday we beat Celtic 3-2, so for this week anyway - and I know it can’t last – it’s good to be a Hibee!