Category Archives: Library 2.0

Who we are; what we do

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What types of media, access, and support do cutting-edge media centers and school libraries offer students? How are teacher librarians and library media specialists leading the charge to help students master 21st century literacies?

Issue 22 Volume 4 of ASCD Express “The Transformational Media Centre” looks at ways teacher librarians and library media specialists can collaborate with teachers and other staff to enhance student learning.

A good read overall – and I’m excited to say also includes a piece by me –  Content Used to be King – as the New Voices feature.

A Decade of Databases: Where to from here?

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On Friday the 7th August I was proud to participate in the annual UQL Cyberschool Seminar in Brisbane, Queensland: A Decade of Databases: Where to from here?   How lovely to escape cold weather, and to meet new faces in the Teacher Librarian profession. It was the 10th anniversay of the Cyberschool – a service to all schools in Queensland, and to other States in Australia, providing a wealth of information resources and online databases.

The Program of the day included Tanya Ziebell, UQ Library, Patricia Carmichael, a fabulously energetic TL from Concordia Lutheran College, Dan Walker, an inspirational Principal from Brisbane State High School, Dr Mandy Lupton, Lecturer in Teacher-Librarianship, QUT, Lea Giles-Peters, OLD State Librarian, Keith Webster, Director of Learning Services, Professor Phil Long, Centre for Educational Innovation, and of course – myself!

What a fabulous group of people to listen to before my turn came. It was great to have Phil Long talk in detail about the Horizon Project and together with Keith Webster, engage the audience with some interactive online trials using iTouch units on loan from Apple. Keith showed us his masterful way of presenting using CoolIris – loads of fun!

Here are the slides for my presentation. As always, the story is in the telling!  I hope I encouraged some people to think ‘out of the box’, be connected, be comfortable with social networking, and hopefully find ways suitable to their own context to transform school library learning services.

Libraries of the Future

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Students and researchers expect to be able to access information around the clock from almost anywhere in the world. Libraries are at a turning point. As technology rapidly transforms the way we access information, and resources are increasingly available online and in digital formats, the established role of the library as a physical space housing racks of books is looking increasingly out of step with the needs of students and researchers.

JISC’s ‘Libraries of the Future‘ debate has gone digital, with a specially-commissioned documentary.  Over 200 people have already viewed the ten minute video, which marks the culmination of a year long campaign.

The Libraries of the Future campaign stimulated debate among librarians, information professionals and academics on the issues surrounding technology’s impact on the emerging role of the academic library in the 21st century through a series of events, printed resources and podcast interviews.

The Libraries of the Future publication explores the issues surrounding Libraries of the Future, showcases the events and activities of the campaign and looks forward to some possible solutions.

Download the Libraries of the Future Brochure.

This documentary showcases interviews with leaders from JISC, Oxford University and LSE as well as students and academics who discuss what the library of the future will look like.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Libraries of the Future “, posted with vodpod

School libraries in the 21st century

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21clibrarywordle

Today more information is stored digitally than in all the libraries in the world combined. We simply don’t need to ‘remember’ everything. The output of our digital mediums exceeds the wildest dreams of nineteenth century industrialists, and alters our view of memory; forgetfulness; creativity and originality.

Thats why schools need to extend their vision of learning beyond ‘memory-arts’. We are in a hyper-dynamic world of connections, relationships, and adaptive tools that help us make sense of the information flooding about us. We are standing at the entry of an age of infinite recall, where the lines between original works and derivatives are blurred because duplication is simple and storage cheap.

Our students need to  develop insights into how to navigate and select a pathway in their learning world, how to juxtapose text, sound, media, and social connections in real time,  and how to mix and match what they see, hear and experience to build personal knowledge and understandings.

For that they need help from 21st century teacher librarians – by managing better school-wide library services; by creating better learning resources; by using better tools; and by developing better information literacy frameworks.

Rethinking our structures and learning frameworks is central to meeting the demands of 21st century learning. Along with the information revolution, we have the social revolution of new media which has created new relationships and new forms of discourse.

This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyse, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able (Wesch, 2009)

It is an exciting and challenging time for education.  Now students have the ability to search, work or publish at will using text, audio, and video, or any combination of these. They have unprecedented access to technologies and online tools that are instantly available and often free to use.  Learning and teaching has become a multimodal, multi-literacy conversation – where participation is an everyday reality for students, teachers, teacher librarians, and school administrators.

My thanks to Buffy Hamilton (the Unquiet Librarian)  for this fabulous presentation on information streams,  research and new media.

Emerging technologies = librarian

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Thanks to my friend (and fellow chocoholic) Kathryn Greenhill for sharing this fabulous set of slides and presentation –  which really puts into perspective what librarians should be about – if they aren’t already!!

The challenges are bigger in schools – emerging technologies are not seen as core business!  But let’s be clear about this. We are not talking about ‘using’ technology – but rather about changing our whole mode of operation to deal with disruptive change – and dare I say it?  to actively create disruptive change for the sake of the learners in our schools.

Kathryn is a tertiary emerging technologies librarian. What she shares is equally vital and relevant for schools.

Learning and design in your library

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Following on from my last post, I was really lucky to do my presentation after Kevin Hennah, and help put library design into the context of the digital changes that are impacting on 21st century learning. We did try to Ustream the event, but it wasn’t one of our successful efforts 🙂

However, I know that the all the wonderful people that were there for the day were all putting an enormous amount of energy, care and thought into planning their renovations, extensions, or new school library buildings. Here’s the presentation slides – I know that some people are looking for some of the hyperlinks.  Thanks to everyone in Cairns, and for making me feel so welcomed so far up north.

[thanks to Kim Cofino for some of her inspirational images. Kevin Hennah is going to drop in and visit Kim in a few weeks. Fab.]

Marketing and design in your library

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I am delighted to be in Cairns at a full day workshop organised by the Catholic Education office for the schools in this area.  “Contemporary School Library Design” – the whole day is designed to help schools look at their school libraries and to build or renovate school libraries that meet the needs of 21st century learners.

The first session of the day to set the scene was provided by Kevin Hennah.  Kevin is a wonderful inspiration to many in Australia, using design and marketing ideas to repackage school libraries.  Many of our teacher librarians are familiar with his work, and have already made transformations to their libraries – with either a lot of money or on a shoe-string budget.

80% of your loans are generated by 20% of your collection.  Yes!! Kevin urges us to weed, weed, weed.  Don’t pride yourself on the size of your collection – pride yourself on the quality and presention of your collection. No question, part of Kevin’s focus is to remind us of the hugely relevant focus of reading and literacy that our school libraries MUST retain in the age of digital learning.

The trick of great ‘merchandising’ is to cater for kids needs. First impressions count! Remember your visit to Boarders?  The presentation of so many ‘front facing’ books is essential, as our kids are so image conscious. We must market ourselves. We must entice. So grab the flavour of this conversation and make your transformations. Kevin always talks about “prime real estate”  –  don’t put a big table in that space, with a tablecloth and some books.  Think Borders and think clever.

School libraries have way too much signage. Return shute? make a list of all the things that frustrate you! Make sure you have lots of front facing books – and put them on the ends of your aisles.

Kevin loves the creative use of slat wall. But remember, to be careful what acrylics you buy and where you place these display units. Image Plastics are developing excellent perspex holders.

What we are aiming for – walking into a school library and thinking “wow”!!  First impressions are so important!  Retail book stores provide a powerful marketing ideas – take the ‘good stuff’ from retail, and package it into 21st century pedagogy. Use the base line of clean design, and a colour palette that allows you to change in the future.

Remember, don’t display your magazines by displaying them in alphabetical order!

My view for the future?   I believe we have to renovate to innovate – to make books and digital engagement our prime focus, to sell our passion for learning by ‘marketing’ to each new audience! Clean, creative, gorgeous!

Kevin’s message is to take the flavour of possibilities – and translate them into your own setting.  Make an impression – don’t be generic. Think outside the circle of traditional libraries. Be bold – and don’t let your teachers hold you back. Yes, it’s about change, and pedagogical innovation. Love life, love your library, love change!!

A Week in the Life of a New Media Teacher Librarian

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Sharing a bit of fun with you!  Why not write your own – you’ll be amazed at how much you can do in a week 🙂

Read the book AND watch the video

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Why do we need school libraries? Well of course I have lots of reasons why we need school libraries – but the reasons are wrapped up with why we need to change school libraries!!

I am not going to go into that in this post – because I will be talking about this topic and 21st century learning on Wednesday next week, up in Cairns, to a gathering of people involved in spending some government money on school facilities ( I will probably have something to share after that day).

Hopefully they will see the importance of fantastic 21st century learning facilities – school libraries have a significant role to play in facilitating good learning.

The merging of technologies, new media, social networking, interactivity, gaming, virtual learning, web 2.0…all reasons why school libraries are needed and why they have a vital role to play – if we change them.

One of our key roles is promoting literacy and an innovative use of creative spaces and places (real and virtual) that empower reading and writing.

Check these out!

Jumpstart with blogging and twitter

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My head is in ‘library zone’ these recent weeks – and so I am on the lookout for ideas, promotional materials, design ideas, pedagogical inspiration and more. Bit of a bower-bird for a while – before I head off for more presentations, workshops and the like.

So when I found this nice presentation from Nathan Wright, I decided I liked it!  Might be just what you need to get you thinking?