Delightful diversions – end of the summer holidays

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

My last day of school holidays, so it’s time to enjoy delightful diversions!

From me:

A trip back to my home town, Albury, dead set on the border between New South Wales and Victoria and on the great Murray River. Visiting dad, who is turning 95 in February 🙂 Enjoying the bush environment of this city of 42,500 souls. We spent time just relaxing at the local park, on the banks of the Murray. Very Australian! (Wish the drought was over)

From Julie Lindsay:

Oh my, what a wonderful diversion from Julie and definitely something completely different. A great aussie in Qatar made me chuckle! Thanks for sharing the vegetable orchestra Julie 🙂

The best bookmongers

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

During my holidays I have had plenty of opportunities to visit bookshops, and my favourite local library. Searching for a book I wanted to buy at a variety of bookstores, I was struck by the changes that have taken place in marketing, accessibility and presentation of at our best bookmongers.

I must say that in a few of the stores I found myself foundering – where do I find the book? Is it there? Here I was, an information professional, confused and disoriented as I tried to make sense of the layout and organisation of the store!! Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything. Bad luck bookstore.

But in two places (both highly successful and well patronised) I felt at home – and clearly so did everyone else – ages ranging from toddlers to grey-power!

What was the common feature of these two places:

visually appealing furniture, layout, and spaces
nice displays and signage
easy to understand organisation e.g. scifi/fantasy, crime, biography, history, travel, sport
no shelf clutter, with attractive jackets on display
lots of comfy chairs to sit and browse
magazines, dvds, audio books and more
a handy computer so that I could carry out a catalogue search to help me find what I wanted – easily with a good human interface, not a “library” interface
wireless access
my favourite – a great coffee shop!

I love the carpet that’s on the floor and the different places you can settle down and read a book.

I love the use of object architecture to add interest.

Oh, and I’m a regular visitor of the coffee shop in the last picture.

So the two most successful places are Borders book store and my favourite Library, which does have its own fabulous coffee shop – including a super outdoor terrace with water features.

This is interesting don’t you think? It slams home the changes needed in our school libraries quite nicely.

But you know the great thing is that our public and school libraries can offer a lot more than even the best bookshop – loads of extra services, learning support, community support, meeting and study rooms, lots of computers, reference and information services.

Better still, at my favourite library I can scan and issue the books out to myself – sometimes after I have picked out new releases to borrow that I have just read about in the Saturday paper! Good one! Saves me a bomb.

How can a bookstore compete with this service, especially since some of the books I get are ones that I have reserved online at home.

The astounding thing is that its all free!!

First Photo: At Borders

International Edublog Awards 2007 Finalists

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

This year we see another fabulous line-up in the annual Edublog Awards.

I am genuinely amazed and proud to find this blog nominated for Best Librarian blog – special thanks to those who considered Heyjude worthwhile for the honour!!

The wonderful thing about the annual Edublog Awards is the opportunity to share our finds, celebrate our work, and discover the wonderful new people who have joined us in the world of blogs and wikis.

As my super online friend (and multiple nominee) Sue Waters said

While it is really nice to be nominated we need to remember the best aspects of the awards is it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social software is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners; which means we are introduced to new sites that we might not have found if not for the awards process.

Please take the time to visit the web sites of the Edublogs Award Finalists, explore the resources, do some voting, and perhaps add some excellent educational blogs to your feed reader.

It’s great to see Best Library/Librarian listed amongst the award categories. In schools we work hard to promote the role that Teacher Librarians/Librarians/Media Specialists have to play in 21st century learning. Our work is vital (critical even!) yet not always acknowledged for being central in each of our student’s lives.

I’m a teacher and I’m a librarian. That’s special – and what makes Heyjude special for me is that I know that the audience is strongly drawn from teachers and librarians alike – all interested in 21st century learning issues. Teacher Librarians are very special people 🙂 and we all have to work hard together to makes sure that we keep good school libraries in our Australian schools.

If you are keen to help the promotion efforts, take a visit to The Hub – the campaign blog for quality school libraries in Australia!

The best Award innovation this year?

The winners will be announced at the Award ceremony which will be held in Second Life on Saturday December 8. Cool!

Congratulations to all the nominees !!!!! It’s a stunning lineup of great people.

Happy voting – and thanks to all the work by James Farmer and Josie Fraser behind the scenes. 🙂

Photo: Special

Celebrate Edna’s 10th birthday in Second Life

Posted on November 23, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Recently Kerry Lorette Johnson from EducationAU.limited sent me an alert via Facebook about a big birthday event! My avatar, Heyjude Jenns will be dropping by!

Education Network Australia (Edna) has been providing free online resource collections and collaborative networks for the education and training community in Australia for 10 years! This is worth celebrating – and the celebration includes holding an event in Second Life on Tuesday 27 November — and they’d love for us all to be there!

Here are the details:

“Official” start time is 2:45pm Adelaide, South Australia time – or check this time for your time zone in World clock time.

The birthday event will be on the island of Terra Icognita: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/157/107/33

They’ll have free tedna -shirts, virtual cake and champagne and, after a live broadcast of speeches including the launch of myedna. Afterwards your avatar can rock out to popular Second Life band Space Junky.

When you teleport over, there will be a glowing poster on the floor of the gazebo with the edna logo and an arrow, and there will be helpers to guide you on your way. Kerry’s avatar is Pandora Kurrajong, but she’ll be busy channeling the audio from the presentations so you might not get too chat with her.

So look for Spotters Square – the name of the island quadrant they’ll be using. They’re promising a decent size stage!

Kerry has created a Twitter channel for the edna 10th birthday celebrations. The address is: http://twitter.com/edna10

The RSS feed subscription link is:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10456232.rss

More about Edna

For educators, the most visible products of edna are the web site and the services available through edna Groups, edna Sandpit Groups and edna Lists as well as the workshops delivered by the staff of education.au, the ministerially owned company that manages the edna web sites.

As part of the 10 year celebration you can catch up with a talk with current education.au CEO Greg Black, former CEO Gerry White, General Manager of Business Development Garry Putland and edna Communications Officer Kerrie Smith about the past, present and future of edna and e-learning.

Listen to the mp3 file (7.4 MB)
Download the transcript
- Word doc (155 KB)
- PDF (132 KB)

Good stuff aussies!

Real Wired Child

Posted on November 17, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

A while ago I had the opportunity to speak to the P&F at our largest high school. The topic was Myspace or Yours: Possibilities and Pitfalls.

Parents wanted to spend time talking about online safety, games, and hacking! Yes, it is true that for some of our students it is hard to provide them with the online and computer challenges that they crave.

I took with me a copy of Real Wired Child by Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. This is a wonderful guide for parents (unfamiliar with the online world) who want to know what their children are doing online, and what they can do to ensure their children’s wellbeing when they venture into cyberspace. Real Wired Child gives practical advice to parents on how they might manage their children’s online communications, social networking, web surfing, downloading and gaming. The truth is that we need to start teaching our students from a young age exactly how to learn, collaborate and share using blogs, wikis and more as part of everyday learning. I love the work of Al Upton and his young ‘mini-legends’ – proving that students are never to young to work in a global online world.

Michael Carr-Gregg urges parents to venture into the online world inhabited by their children and get in touch with their day-to-day lives. He explains what kids get up to, provides guidelines for family internet safety and advises how to minimise the risks without limiting your children’s freedom to learn, explore and communicate online. At $19.95 I consider this a bargain. Better still, buy some copies for the library, so parents can borrow a copy. More information available from Penguin.

I prepared a presentation for the evening, to stimulate discussion and thinking about the issues. Thanks to my (online) colleagues Graham Wegner and Sue Waters, whose earlier work provided a basis for this presentation.

Book hacks for the library crowd

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

This is one that I have been meaning to post about for absolutely ages….thank goodness I was not quick and efficient this time 🙂

Thanks to Paul Reid who took the trouble to email me the link to Hack Attack: 13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd.

Covers all the obvious things like integrating your public library catalogue into your own computer; online booksellers; notifications for overdue books; building bibliographies; book downloads etc; as well as cheeky things like an ‘invisible bookshelf’!

So my delay in writing gives you the benefit of the additional information included in the comments. Perhaps you have other recommendations to add to the Book Hacks collation to keep this useful compilation alive.

Photo: FlickrCC

The whole audio thing…?

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

I’m not to sure if I have a need for this, but VozMe beta is a bit of fun. I dropped a bit of “Library and Web2.0” text into VozMe text box – it converted the text to an mp3 audio file, which I could then download, and add to this post.

You might think of a use for this.

What I found fun was that I could just drop some text in and create this . I don’t know how long the text can be either. Also, the audio output is not a good as Voki ….. which, last I looked, I couldn’t embed on WordPress!

The day will come when all of these tools will be more fluent in application. Just keep watching the developments and keep testing the beta tools.

The Connected Library – get one now!

Posted on November 9, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Earlier this week, our network of teacher librarians were able to spend the day with one of Australia’s leading school library practitioners. Fabulous Suzette Boyd from Scotch College has been an inspiration to many of us during our careers, keeping us grounded on quality services, imaginative enterprises, exciting initiatives, and most important of all – customer focused!

Yes, the kids are what it is all about, and Suzette certainly knows how to manage a school library to achieve the best.

As Victor explained

Suzette was indeed different. I would have liked to have spent an entire day listening to her recount many of the things which she has tried over the years – her ideas are innovative, creative and above all real-world.

During the course of our day we looked at Suzette’s key points:

building connections and trust with students
communicating with and enlisting the support of all users
being positive, upbeat and enthusiastic
marketing and promoting the library through an extraordinary array of ideas and activities
influencing the Principal
becoming the cultural and educational hub of the school.

The best news of all is that Suzette’s inspiration is no longer a secret. She is sharing her vision with us all through her book The Connected Library: A handbook for engaging users.

John Marsden says

The Connected Library is a flight manual for librarians

Marita Thomson says

Slim enough to be manageable in these days of information overload, I found this book affirmed many of my current practices but more importantly inspired me to reach a bit further. There are first all those things I always meant to do but didn’t quite get to and then the more difficult area of taking a few risks. I think what is obvious or correct or a risk will vary from one library to another, but Suzette’s book is an excellent place to find your next project.

In recent times librarians in schools have come to be considered technology experts, curriculum leaders, literature gurus, web masters and providers of on-line information and professional development. They are also expected to be human dynamos, with energy to burn, to have a huge capacity to absorb new information, to have the imagination to deliver exciting new programs, whilst at the same time having the ability to maintain an efficient and relevant library service.

Suzette Boyd believes this is probably still not enough and that the level of engagement with users is the real measure of success!

This book is good reading and very manageable. Go on, order it today, or borrow a copy. Your local public library will probably buy it if you ask.

E-Learning07 – Connected Keynote panel ‘in-world’ today!

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Come join some of the worlds best for “Cooking up a Storm in Education” the e-Learning07 Connected Keynote Panel – ‘in world’. Barbara Dieu will be leading the panel discussion at this Sydney conference, Friday November 2.

The menu?

Appetizers – Food for Thought: Challenges and opportunities social tools bring to learners and educators, our cultural and social heritage, exposure and access, local and international communities of practice, formal and informal learning, knowledge building and transmission.

Main dish – Meat and a Hot Potato: Traditional classroom delivery and e-learning/institutional barriers and educators’ resistance.

Dessert – To Make Your Mouth Water: Creativity, openness, interaction and sustainable partnerships.

Come along, join in some fascinating discussions with the cream of the crop guests :
Josie Fraser, Alan Levine, Nancy White, Dave Pollard.

To join us, simply Teleport to the Island of jokaydia.

The Connected Keynote Session will be held from 12:00pm – 2:30pm AEST Time. Click here to check your local time.