Category Archives: Personal

How does your garden grow?

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nature flowers blue summer
With silver bells, and cockle shells…and pretty maids all in a row!  Perhaps that is one way of looking at the wonderful record of professional learning that will come to reside in your online learning record of your Thinkspace blog.

Yes, it could be a beautiful garden, or it could be a collection of weeds with the occasional bright flower.  So it is time for me to write a strong reminder of the importance of keeping a clear focus on your personal learning, which is more than just studying and writing assessments. Your learning is about lifting your knowledge to new levels and reaching out to your new professional community to discover the full dimensions that teacher librarianship can offer you.

But blogging first.  What have you all been achieving so far in ETL401 with your blogging? There are many many posts written that wonderfully capture the measure of emerging engagement with ideas and interactions with your new knowledge spaces. The confidence that you bring to your writing, however, is not necessarily a natural process for all of you.  Don’t let that be a concern.  Focus rather on the importance of teacher librarianship.  While I am on the topic, a special shoutout to your fellow student Fiona who wrote her first assessment about TLship entitled Would you like an adventure now, or should we have our tea first? 

I was so taken by this blog post that I could ‘hear’ Fiona in my head – and contacted her to ask if she would record this blog post for me to share at the ASLA conference as part of my closing keynote. It was indeed the perfect wrap up for the whole conference closing.  Thank you Fiona – I was proud of you, and the audience all agreed that her charm and confidence was very special indeed!

More importantly, you are all ready to be fully badged teacher librarians, but you must always and every day extend your knowledge – and blogging is one space where you can do this well, and push yourself to think and record your knowledge.

In particular you need to do this for your subjects and your course.

It really is not enough to just write a few posts, just so that you can write your final blog reflection for a subject. Of course you can ‘get away with it’.  But learning is not about, ”getting away with something”.  Learning, as you well know, is about pushing the boundaries to know more, to challenge ourselves and others around us.  The thing is, for your final subject you are asked to review your learning through all your subjects, and being able to draw on your blog posts is a marvelous way to capture this.  Don’t miss the opportunity to start now, get strong in blogging and learning habits, and have a good record as well as build your collaborative knowledge together.

As it happens, too many  people have only written one, two or at most three posts.

Gasp!

BUT…………I can also see this much needed curiosity and reflection already happening in the posts that are being written in many other examples such as Tanya, Nicola (with clear use of ETL401 and ETL503 categories),  Anastasia, Rebecca (also with good ETL401 and ETL503 categories), and of course Trish who likes to write reams, but whose blog template puzzles me!  So if you are only doing one subject, there is still time for you to polish your blogging tools and get going!

Forgot to set up your categories?  Just revisit the video we provided in the Introduction module Managing your subjects in Thinkspace.

It’s no surprise that those who write little on their blogs are those who write little or never on the forums.  Please know that it is through engaging with the subject, the cognitive stress, pull, strain of the subject, that real learning actually happens.  Study is not about content any more – it is all about professional development.  A small tip as well.  Look at the title of your blog.  Does it say “just another CSU Thinkspace blog”, or have you changed the byline?   Take a look at Deborah or Donna‘s blogs which all have something else.  Donna’s A reflective journal of learning by an aspiring Teacher Librarian is particularly apt!

You set this up in your blog dashboard. Click on Settings > General.  See the Tagline under the Site Title?  Write yourself a nice tagline right there and you too can have something nicer than “just another CSU Thinkspace blog”.

For more quick tips on blogging, if you need them, take a few minutes to check up the many links provided on the landing page of Thinkspace  to look at the many Tools and Resources provided their for you as your blogging habits improve. http://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/.

In addition, here is a very short video with a quick run through some basics for you, as a reminder, if you need it.

Finally, there are a few advanced learners amongst you, who are ready for a bigger challenge. So I wanted to share with you a blog post of one of our graduates who was a champion of both blogging and efficiencies in organisation for study. There was a day when many were asking just HOW to manage everything in a busy day of work, play, and study.  Nadine of course was working full time, studying  through several Masters degrees, and sharing and building connections all the while. Here was her post in response for the cry for help – which I now share with you. Being organised upfront saves time!  Digital reading and studying – teachers are students too. If you are serious about getting organised, you will want to read this! This blog post was subsequently turned into a short contribution to inCite, for ALIA.  Nadine is now working in China.  Nadine has archived her Thinkspace blog, and continues to blog at https://informativeflights.wordpress.com/

Finally, let me leave you with a final word of encouragement.  I received a phone call yesterday morning from a TL, whose first words to me started with “Judy, you won’t remember me, but…..”  She graduated six years ago, and despite challenges, continued her study.  She is now the keenest advocate and happiest TL in a low socioeconomic area school, ready to tell the world her story.  The journey is not always easy.  Some of you will find blogging easy.  Some of you will not.  I found it hard at first, but now it’s second nature.

Give it a go! Start writing, recording, reflecting, challenging, keeping pictures, taking videos, sharing memories…anything.  Your students do.  You can too.

It was a wonderful opportunity meeting up with current and past students at the recent ASLA conference in Canberra, as well as seeing Lori in person again after only interacting online. Those professional conversations we have at big TL gatherings are well worth it.  Keep smiling!  Here are my slides for my final presentation, which included the lovely contribution from our student.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com 

A year of data goodness

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This is another year again…and one that may well see me more productive on the digital front – at least in terms of data.  I have not been writing much online as I have been pretty much taken up with my various positions at CSU  – yes, two different ones in 2016 saw me pretty much scrambling most of the time trying to make sense of my workplace.

But 2017 is going to be a little different.  Along with all the adventures of 2015 and 2016 (who can forget being bed and housebound for so long in 2015?), I have also been working on higher degree doctoral research at LaTrobe.  This year I hope to be more immersed in the data collection phase.

What’s this all about?  Research of course, and in an area that is of deep interest to me, both at an individual level and how it plays out in our higher education enterprise – particularly in the field of academic digital scholarship.

The internet lies at the core of advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data and information-intensive collaborative research. Perhaps it is that the technology and digital environments which now exist can enhance scholarship and learning since technology has become a pivotal process or tool in connectedness through globally accessible knowledge and scholarly connections. Digital scholarship is valued for openness or open access within the boundaries of open data, open publishing, open education and open boundaries , and for utilising participatory or collective ways of thinking. The impact of technology has emerged as complicated and disruptive while being highly relevant and transformative. The emerging implication is that academic scholarship practices are undergoing something of a transformation in internet-enabled online environments and that this requires review and reconsideration of the technology-related pivot points (or dimensions) of liminality within this environment of digital scholarship.

So I’m out to learn more about digital scholarship and leadership.

The landscape of learning in higher education is such that it creates complexity for academics, and places demands on leaders within institutions to foster growth and change. In fact, the complexities and influences impacting the processes of both learning and teaching as an academic endeavour are the topic of much research and writing, and according to Savin-Baden (2015):

“much of the current research that transcends pedagogy, technology, education studies and computer science remains disconnected, with the result that although we know students adapt to the cultures of school and university, their learning preference and practices in the twenty-first century continue to be under-researched” (p. 16)

No need to say more, other than that it will be an adventure. My working field of endeavour is to be an analytic auto-ethnography of pathways to digital scholarship in academic leadership. No, this is not navel gazing at all, but a highly complex endeavour using an emerging research approach that will be more demanding than the average “go and interview and survey a bunch of people, and write it up” kind of research. It’s going to be a big job, but what is more important, it is going to be an interesting job!

A year of data goodness?  Or a year of living dangerously?  Time will tell.

Here’s the scenario: abstracted from my first annotation in the diary that I will also be keeping offline (not quite – digital format in OneNote which is in the cloud and online privately -right?).

Welcome to my auto ethnographic diary of myself.   I am looking forward to taking up almost where I left off some years ago when I wrote A Week in the Life of a New Media Librarian, which was eventually also turned into a publication in Dutch.  O’Connell, J. (2010). Het 21ste-eeuwse klaslokaal,  Media Coach, January, No. 1.

In this publication I said:

“Our capacity to ‘connect’ will strengthen or weaken depending on our socialnetwork awareness and our capacity to use Web 2.0 tools to harness and organize information and add value to the collective. Educators who understand this know that to be good mentors in the 21st century learning landscape is to use the power of personal learning networks and Web 2.0 tools to empower information seeking and knowledge creation”.

Published in 2010 it’s essentially my last year in school education, so sets the scene nicely for the work that followed.

I have spent time while on leave reorganizing my digital files – just because things DO get untidy.  I’m new to OneNote, but  as part of my digital preparations I found that Nvivo imports OneNote data  so had to add this tool. Now the scene is set for a rational and organised approach to the personal diary of events, thoughts and more.  Plus I can access it all in the cloud too!

So I have re-organised my digital tools related to the research – specifically

  • OneNote
  • Evernote
  • Papers3
  • Zotero
  • Scrivener
  • Scapple
  • Dropbox
  • Google Docs
  • Google Drive

It’s all part of the personalisation – being digital doesn’t mean that we don’t want to personalise things – right?

These are all tools I use daily, except for Scrivener, which will be used more as I progress.  I am also investigating NVivo to see how concept mapping in that program compares with concept mapping with Scapple for Scrivener .  I suspect that they will each stand separately – one around the idea formation for writing, the other around idea formation around the data analysis.

Time will tell. In other words – this thing is digital.

Interestingly as I was cleaning up (as you do at the beginning of a new year) the physical trappings of papers and filing cabinets were useless.  Yes, I had printed out stuff, and promptly forgotten I had that very same stuff.  But digitally – I knew exactly  where things were, and when I hadn’t filed them neatly to be able to be organised!

In a sense this is a data discovery – or confirmation  for me that I am fully digital, though not AI (artificial intelligence). I wish!.

This IS also the  commencement of genuinely and thoroughly investigating how my digital scholarship practices have emerged in my work within higher education and how they are shaping or have shaped my leadership practices.  Were they shaped by higher education or by evolution in digital environments? Or my PLN? Or something else?

A year of data goodness indeed!

Savin-Baden, M. (2015). Rethinking learning in an age of digital fluency: Is being digitally tethered a new learning nexus? New York, NY: Routledge.

Image: Research Data Management flickr photo by jannekestaaks shared under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license

Libcrowds: crowdsourcing keeps getting better

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crowdsourcing_from_the_british_library___libcrowds

LibCrowds is a project from the British Library and British Library Labs that uses crowdsourcing to transcribe some of the printed cards still housed in physical card catalogues.

The British Library’s online catalogue, Explore, contains nearly 57 million digital records, but for some important research materials these printed cards remain the only access points.

Three projects are currently underway: Pinyin Card Catalogue: Drawer Five; LCP (the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays and Correspondence): 1824-1899 (Abbe-Belles); and Urdu Card Catalogue: Drawer Two.

Ample instructions for volunteers who wish to contribute are provided, including video demonstrations. Volunteers and anyone who’s interested can track the progress in the Statistics section of the LibCrowds website. A heading here indicates that “688 volunteers have participated in 14 projects, made 32,119 contributions and completed 10,392 tasks.” Following the heading, data is presented in graphic form. For example, there is a map of the locations of the most active volunteers and a graph showing hourly contribution levels over the past 24 hours.

Technology

LibCrowds is built on top of PyBossa , an open-source Python framework for the creation of crowdsourcing projects. PyBossa is written in Python and uses the Flask micro-framework. Each project on the platform is written in a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript. The community forum is powered by Discourse. The LibCrowds theme and any plugins developed to provide additional functionality are open-souce and available on GitHub.

LibCrowds is currently running the following plugins:

While I’m familiar with crowdsourced work at National Library online catalogue at Trove in Australia, and the community working there to help improve the digital resources there, it was great to learn about the British Library project.

home_-_trove

If you are interested, join the TROVE community that’s organising and improving this information resource.

Connect to others with similar interests on the Trove forum

The academic integrity challenge

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While technology is changing the information environment, the transactional nature of information interactions and knowledge flow still has to underpin learning. A major challenge for education is to enable and facilitate the creation or generation of new knowledge via an appropriate information environment, to facilitate integration of new concepts within each person’s existing knowledge structure.

In this context the phenomenon of academic dishonesty has attracted much interest over the years – and the challenges and strategies for maintaining quality assurance is often addressed by policies, coupled with an investigation of new strategies for assessing the ‘iGeneration’.  I live this experience in the higher education sector, and my strong believe is that the issue is what we teach and how we teach it – or rather, what learning environments we create for our students.

I acknowledge that policy is needed, but many of the draconian strategies still employed are not necessarily the right producing the ‘fix’ that we want.  In this context,  the story of our journey in creating learning in a participatory networked learning culture provides some insights and alternatives that just might help drive better learning as well as improve academic integrity.

Long story short – a paper written for a conference has finally made it into the ‘open’.  May not be polished, but it’s authentic – these things really happened and continue to happen!

O’Connell, J. (2016). Networked participatory online learning and challenges for academic integrity in higher education. International Journal for Educational Integrity. 12:4
Grab a copy here! http://rdcu.be/mrKu

Image: flickr photo shared by opensourceway under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

The winds of change!

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Building 288 Biomedical Sciences

Winter is settled in, and with it has come a lot of change in my personal and professional life – hence my social media comment recently – “there’s a blog post in that!”

So what is going on?

First up, we sold our home of 27 years (yippee) and moved house to a brand new apartment in the inner west.  One complicated change- tick. How did that go??  One third of our possessions were either given away or disposed of, another third came to our apartment, and the last third was placed into storage ready for the house we are building in country Albury.  Another change underway – tick.

Albury /ˈɔːlbəri/ is a major regional city in New South Wales, Australia, located on the Hume Highway on the northern side of the Murray River. This is our tree change for 5-10 years, though we also have an apartment in Sydney of course.  It’s a quick flight from Albury to Sydney or Melbourne, so we will be back in Sydney a lot, or popping into Melbourne by way of a (shopping)  change.

I also heard that my teacher librarian team and I are to receive a Faculty of Education citation for academic excellence. I’ll travel to Bathurst in a couple of weeks for that, and am honoured to have gained this second award since being at CSU.    Yes, there has been a tremendous amount of work done, and some of it has had significant influence beyond our own team.  Good work – tick.

Finally, if you have been ‘reading between the lines’ on social media you will know that I officially commenced in a new position a week ago – moving completely our of the Faculty of Education after leaving the School of Information Studies earlier in the year.

I’ve moved into the Faculty of Science. #gasp Don’t worry – I’m not claiming to be a scientist, chemistry boffin or pharmacist. The focus of my new role is still on e-learning and/or online learning as part of a quality learning and teaching project from the u!magine Digital Learning Innovation Laboratory at Charles Sturt University. Here we are working on a range of things, including change and innovation in the elearning space which is also being shaped up at CSULX | Online Learning Exchange.

We have a new three-faculty structure at CSU as of July 2016 (another big change) and I’ve stepped into the Faculty of Science position, working with my #globaleducator friend and  Julie Lindsay in the Faculty of Arts and Education.  That has to be another  good tick!

Right now I am immersed in the Bachelor of Medical Science, soon to be followed with the Bachelor of Nursing for some intensive elearning design work. I’m glad that none of the scientific terminology is new to me at all, as my first ‘real’ professional work early in my career was as sub-editor of the Australian Medical Journal, followed by editorial assistant on the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery.

So curious how things have come full circle in a way – and how technology change has been at the heart of it in some practical ways. For example, it’s amazing to reflect on how complicated my editing work was  back then, because typesetting was pre-digital so pre- press work meant a need for extreme editing accuracy and quality presentation of content prior to typeset.  That was a real challenge I recall with some bemusement – particularly when I remember the editing the work of a noted Australian medical figure who also happened to be dyslexic.

So winter has really been a period of change – and one that I hope heralds a beautiful and calm spring ahead – oh and moving to our new home in Albury before Christmas.  Tick!

Good bye to all my students in the various degrees that I have worked with in the last 5 years.  Thank you for your friendship and passion for learning – please do stay in touch.  You know where to find me on social media 🙂

Thinking is awesome – eportfolios

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Current online information environments and associated transactions are considered an important ‘information ecosystem’  (Haythornthwaite & Andrews, 2011, p in ch 8) influencing and shaping professional engagement and digital scholarship in communities of learning in the higher education sector (Lee, McLoughlin & Chan, 2008).   This kind of  information ecosystem is also considered to be social in practice and making use of use of participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect, critique, improve, and validate academic engagement and scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012, p.768).

Thanks to advances in technology, the  powerful tools at our disposal to help students understand and learn in unique ways are enabling new ways of producing, searching and sharing information and knowledge (Conole, 2013). By leveraging technology, we have the opportunity to  open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. While practical recommendations for a wide variety of ways of working with current online technologies is easily marketed and readily adopted, there is insufficient connection to digital scholarship in the creation of meaning and knowledge as an action of digital scholarship. It is perhaps simplistic to migrate a pre-digital taxonomy to a digital environment and to ignore the function of and relationship to digital scholarship for the educator or higher education academic.

Portfolios are a well-researched and proven pedagogical approach to support reflective thinking as well as providing the opportunity for students to demonstrate functioning knowledge in the context of intended learning outcomes within a subject or through a course.

A portfolio provides reflective knowledge construction, self-directed learning, and facilitates habits of lifelong learning within the profession.

Considering the potential of e-portfolios means that we can also meet the challenges of learning within enhanced subject experiences which we have detailed through the CSU Online Learning and Teaching Model.

CSU Thinkspace is an online blogging and web platform that allows for varied and flexible use of the tool during a course, creating a range of subject experiences that can build into an extensive digital portfolio of learning achievements. header2-295kwr0

Back in 2013, as part of my work as Courses Director, we established Thinkspace which is a branded version hosted by CampusPress from Edublogs.  Awesome.  Working with my favourite consultant Jo Kay, the design and support structures were set up.  We were ready for the integration of reflective blogging and an integrated approach to an e-portfolio!

We have been using Thinkspace for :

  • reflective blogging
  • website creation
  • digital assessments of various kinds
  • digital artifacts
  • open education resources
  • course and subject specific learning experiences
  • peer-to-peer engagement
  • developing digital literacies for working and learning online
  • providing graduates with evidence of their personal and professional capabilities in their chosen discipline field.

I was recently asked to create a video that explains what Thinkspace is, and the pedagogical rationale of using Thinkspace in subjects with a particular emphasis on the use of Thinkspace as an e-portfolio within a course (degree program) Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship). We also adopted the same approach in the Master of Education (Knowledge Networks & Digital Innovation).

Here is a video that tells the story. You may often see blog posts shared on Twitter as part of the participatory learning experiences!

 References:

Conole, G. (2013). Designing for learning in an open world. New York, Springer.

Haythornthwaite, C., & Andrews, R. (2011). E-learning theory and practice. California, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Lee, M. J., McLoughlin, C., & Chan, A. (2008). Talk the talk: Learner‐generated podcasts as catalysts for knowledge creation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(3), 501-521.

Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked participatory scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766–774. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.10.001

Image: flickr photo shared by BookMama under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license

 

 

Is there a library-sized hole in the internet?

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It was in Florence during the Renaissance that the West realised we could surpass the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients, ushering in a new idea of the future. Now, in the Age of the Net, the future is changing shape again. Progress looks less like a path upwards that we carefully tread and extend, and more like a constantly forking domain in which ideas are barely born before they’re being reworked and applied in unexpected ways.

Embracing the future requires libraries to face basic tensions between their traditional strengths and the new shape of invention, including the role of privacy, the need to anticipate users’ needs and the role of experts in the networked age.

Embracing  new ideas of the future requires libraries to face basic tensions between their traditional strengths and the new shape of invention, including the role of privacy, the need to anticipate users’ needs and the role of experts in the networked age.

Last year, an interview with Internet thought leader, David Weinberger, published in Research Information pointed to a “library-sized hole on the Internet“. In it, David warned of library knowledge being marginalised should they become invisible on the Web and suggested linked data as a possible way of averting this.

David Weinberger is senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet &
Society, and has been instrumental in the development of ideas about the impact of the
web. He states:
Assuming that content remains locked up, then I think the right track is to make library information both public and interoperable where possible. Libraries can best achieve this
 Shortly after the article’s publication, David presented on these ideas at OCLC’s 2015 EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Florence.  This is 40 minute presentation is worth listening to.

Image:flickr photo shared by Bonito Club under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license

Doodle to learn?

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As a teenager I spent hours doodling in my exercise books – much to the chagrin of my teachers. Unlike the example from this report from Harvard Business Review on the scientific case for doodling while taking notes, my doodles were creative pieces that were more in keeping with hippy style swirls influenced by Hungarian cultural patterns. (sorry, no samples survive, though they were dubbed ‘creative’!)

Did that doodling help me learn?

Well certainly the doodles were not notes or summaries  of the kind we see popularised on Twitter and showing how drawing in class and meetings can help people pay attention–and remember information afterward.

Visual note-taking blends these two approaches. By using a combination of words and quick images, the note-taker listens, digests, and captures on paper the essence of what has been heard.

My creations were a way to occupy my creative mind while I listened to a teacher talk talk talk. Having said that, I am not implying that all the teaching was boring – rather that the doodling was in keeping with the recent trend to colouring books for adults that have become so incredibly popular.    According to this article on HuffPo (and many others!), as well as being great fun, colouring in is a fantastic way to ease the stress we face in our adult lives.

Begs the question if I was stressed by the constraints of my classroom as I did not doodle out of school.  The answer to me is pretty obvious – I was, as is also evidenced by the number of classes I skipped.  To give the nuns their due, they did not hassle me about classes skipped too much, as my escape was to go and practice piano for hours instead. If I think of our schools and my tertiary online teaching environments – we still have a tendency to ‘old school’ – we still expect students to attend classes!

Of course we now understand the importance of creativity in learning. But what do we do today to accommodate our learners?  Whether it’s school or tertiary settings, and whether we have flexible classrooms or not, perhaps its time to better discern what the modern stresses really are and to stop hiding behind ‘open plan, multipurpose spaces’ as being the obvious (and only?) solution.

What are you really doing to make learning more about engagement than compulsory completion?

Image:flickr photo shared by m01229 under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

 

The road to change

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If you still have my blog loaded into your RSS reader, you may be surprised to see some posts appear again. 2015-2016 has become more than a challenge – more like a hurdle and then a steep and winding road to change.

From Just another Bag Lady to walking relatively confidently 12 months later, to:  a decision to sell up house (what a ghastly exhausting job that was!); a new position for 2016 as Project Manager – Online Subject Enhancement in the Faculty of Education at CSU; and to two planned moves in 2016 (one to an apartment in Sydney and another to a still-to-be -built new home in country Albury.  Phew!  That’s different!

Well, life is too short to be static and unchanging. You knew that didn’t you?  So after all these years of writing here (more than 10 years), it’s time to begin to record a little more of the professional curios that come my way.

I hope your 2016 is filled with professional and personal adventures as mine certainly is!

flickr photo shared by heyjudegallery under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

IFLA and School Libraries

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I am happy to be gaining back some mobility – and as a result I have been able to attend and provide two presentations at the IFLA Information Literacy/School Libraries Section Satellite conference in Capetown, South Africa.

It has been an honour indeed to meet up with old friends, and meet new colleagues here in Capetown. It is humbling to learn of the challenges faced by my South African colleagues, and the passion they have for school library activism – a term I would now like to adopt!

I shared a number of documents, which can be accessed via dropbox here. I am including the two presentations below, as a summary of the theme and flavour of our conversations. Thank you Capetown!

Photo: Welcome to the Library cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Enokson