Metamorphisis of libraries & learning spaces

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

For some time I have been reading and thinking about the much-needed metamorphisis of school libraries in order to create a fully integrated information and literature learning environment for our kids that is in keeping with our Web 2.0 world. As I have 77 school libraries to think about, the idea of creating that metaphosis is ridiculously exciting and even more ridiculously challenging!

We have significant changes taking place in the various media that drive our social communications – in a range of digital ways. Overall ours is no longer an analogue world, though books in print retain their core place in literacy acquisition and leisure reading. What are your ideas about the changes that are rushing up on us? Whatever you think, I share this comment from an essay on Dead Media from the Sydney Alumni magazine:

The next question is whether these changes are analogous to the invention of the telephone, which changed us a great deal, or the invention of the printing press, which changed everything.

For my schools I have reflected on the need to restructure learning spaces and incorporate a whole-school approach to the traditional library.

The Learning Commons

The Learning Commons has been recognized internationally as an innovative approach in bringing together services that support students in their learning. In the tertiary sector academic institutions/libraries are responding to these same trends worldwide by rapidly developing “learning commons” or “information commons” – areas which are new on-site facilities designed to provide higher levels of technology (hardware and software), access to content (digital and print), and support for users working to access and develop information resources. While some learning commons facilities are in newly constructed buildings, most are renovations within existing or expanded library spaces.

The aim of a Learning Commons is to provide a physical environment which addresses the profound changes affecting how we teach and learn and which complements the evolving integrated, virtual/online teaching and learning environment of Web 2.0, advanced technologies, and Social Networking of the web.

We need to look for new ideas and new ways of working with literacy, information literacy, and digital fluency for teaching and learning. Whether it’s blogs or wikis or RSS, all roads now point to a social network that is collaborative and social in nature. Teaching and learning needs to change just because we have expansive access to a wide variety of ideas, can find and receive information in a way never before possible, and create and share at a global level with transparent ease.

In a newly designed or liberally re-organized and structured school, students can choose to learn in the Learning Common on workstations, on their own laptops or PDAs, connecting to the Internet and Learning Common online resources via wireless connectivity. Learning commons subsets can also exist in other places in the school – depending on how flexible learning spaces are developed.

An integrated approach to Library and Learning Commons

reading materials for pleasure or study

information retrieval and critical analysis support

learning activities

social activites

academic writing guidance

special education learning support

information technology support

multimedia design centre with Kinko-style production services

traditional bibliographic services

social networking services

24/7 learning

supporting creativity not productivity

A Learning Commons approach ensures a student-centred focus where school structures and technology exist as metacognitive tools, thereby helping learners and their mentors to understand better the processes of learning.

A metamorphosis of the Library into a Learning Commons allows us to include new or different types of spaces, features and services. I see the ‘Learning Commons’ as an approach that will provide an innovative environment to students and staff for accessing educational facilities and engaging in the creative experience of learning.

A framework to think about for Services and Structures

ICT and HELPDESK integration and management through Learning Commons
Technology integration as part of literacy, information literacy and curriculum and driven by curriculum leaders
Integration of new and emerging technologies such as Smart phones, tablets, PDA, podcasting, and active use of social software (wiki, blogs, flickr, RSS information distribution).
Provision of literacy and learning support
Fiction Collection for provision of resources for reading for pleasure and improvement
Online digital respository of materials and resources
Provision of audiobooks on iPods etc
Provision of a digital design studio facilities for multimedia and print output.

If you have some ideas or success stories, or good articles on the topic, I would love to know more.

Building an education strategy for metadata

Posted on September 4, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

On quite a different note, but nevertheless favourite topic of debate for me…well not debate really as teachers and educators don’t think about this…is a metadata focus.

I was diverted back to this track by a post from the Really Strategies Blog and a planned focus group meeting in New York City on the knowledge and usage of industry standards and metadata.

Now, as an information professional, metadata means a lot to me! But for the average educator reading this blog, take it from me – without metadata our learning management systems, our knowledge management structures, and almost everything we are building up in our online world is dependent on GOOD metadata.

What is metadata? Well, it is information about any resource either physical or digital, and enables management and organisation of information. Metadata is used to facilitate discovery and retrieval of information; enables data interchange; separates content, structure, presentation and behaviour; provides the opportunity to enrich information about resources; and ensures persistence in resources. In other words, as information is stockpiled, you get to be able to find it!

This isn’t the place to go into details, but standards for metadata are available from a number of sources, and are important as they allow consistency, help to establish authority and allow ease of access for users (that’s us! 🙂 )

Some very important global standards are in operation, and include Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (which includes an education set) and Learning Object Metadata from IEEE. A good example of the practical, vital and valuable application of metadata in Australian education is demonstrated by EDNA (Education Network Australia). This organisation recognised early on the essential role of metadata.

The EdNA Metadata Standard is based on the internationally recognised Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) and is consistent with the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS). The work of maintaining the EdNA Metadata Standard is conducted by the EdNA Metadata Standard Working Group which reports to the AICTEC Standards Sub-Committee and the education.au limited Board.

The problem is that school systems, and individual schools implementing knowledge management initiatives or learning management systems haven’t (on the whole) caught up with the priority of metadata. It’s a vital component of good Web 2.0 implementation of collaborative learning cultures.

At the end of 2005 I had the good fortune to work on a project (for a national online digital media delivery system used by Australian schools) developing a complete metadata set for the company. I guess I have a bit of an idea of what’s involved.

So I would love to be a fly on the wall and hear what the meeting in New York comes up with in discussion on how publishers are using metadata in their digital asset and content management workflows well as for enhancing content for reuse and product development.

However, some of the key points for discussion at that meeting have significant relevance for schools and learning or content management systems now and in the future. Here are some of them I’ve adapted for schools:

How will schools achieve sophisticated search today – or plan for it in the future?
Is there a way to easily share information with other schools or sectors?
What does an education enterprise metadata strategy actually mean in a practical sense? What is the value to schools and organisations that have one?
How will schools manage their digital rights in this environment?
Are schools achieving success with Digital Asset Management and content management systems and/ what are the critical success factors?
Is automating RSS or other types of syndication feeds an imperative?

Come on education – wake up to metadata, content management workflows, content reuse and information dissemination.

‘All Your Own Work’ in a Web 2.0 World

Posted on August 26, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

I attended an a full day seminar organised by ALSANSW looking at the issue of Plagiarism in light of the NSW Board of Studies unit “Working with Others” soon to be compulsory for testing in Year 10. My task was to provide a context for thinking about plagiarism which included an understanding of the Web 2.0 world of students and teachers.

Apart form ‘showcasing’ Web 2.0 my aim was to encourage teachers and teacher-librarians to re-examine what it means to create a community of enquiry for themselves and for their students…by participating in new forms of information organization and sharing…..like social bookmarking, wiki, and blogs. We have to recognize the level of social networking that kids engage in more and more, and the fact that information seeking will sometimes take place via instant messenger, myspace or other social ways.

With Web 2.0 the purpose and function of learning as defined by teachers needs revision. Maybe……..

The purpose of learning should…

Be informed by connections and communication
Promote open sharing of knowledge
Allow for individuals making decisions on their own

The function of learning should be….

About being a member of the community of practice
Recognize that all spaces are learning places

Perhaps Web 2.0 learning is defined by three things:

Focus

On identity
Who we are in society

Framework

Multitasking multi-modal environment
Virtual learning mode

Future

Personal integrity and social contribution
Individuality and creativity

A very interesting day, with some curious interactions and comments afterwards. The one that made me chuckle was “we are never going to use these [Web2.0] technologies”.

Hmm, a bit like the network meeting I organised back in Term 4, 1995. Some ‘system’ representatives came along – because I had organised a chap who brought his own computer, and who could access Ozemail at $5.00 hr and show us ‘THE INTERNET’. Yes, these visitors said to me “Judy, you shouldn’t have organised this – this internet business will never happen in schools!”.

OOPS! How about Web 2.0 then??

Remix epitomises Web 2.0

Posted on August 21, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

A concept I like to present when doing professional development about Web 2.0 is the idea of “remix”. If we look at millenials, we see that all their digital actions are associated with remixing and personalising of music, video, pictures, information – whatever really!

So the reappearance of Writely as a Google product, is another example of a writing tool that allows students to cut and paste, as well as combine and create, all in the one online tool. It features collaborative editing — multiple editors on the same doc at once — and can be used as the editor for writing your blog, saving out to a post instead of a file on your machine.

Writely – the Web 2.0 word processor is now accepting signups again.
We cannot escape ‘remix’ – nor would I suggest that we should! What is more critical is that educators come to better understand the shifting agenda in this ‘remix’ culture, and appreciate the strength of this approach and integrate it into our educational aims. Of course we have to work out what this means – and how ‘remix’ can be about developing creativity, fostering critical thinking, collaboration, and knowledge creation.

So a post on this topic from Sheila Webber is timely, as she alerts us to to the fact that Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel have generously posted Chapter 3 (“New literacies: concepts and practices”) of the forthcoming 2nd edition of their book New Literacies http://www.geocities.com/newliteracies/ and on their blog they had also posted Chapter 4 (“New literacies in everyday practice”) as well.

Three experts from Part 2: New literacies in everyday practice make a good summary of my views on ‘remix’:

Until recently the idea of ‘remix’ as a practice of taking cultural artifacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend was associated almost entirely with recorded music.

While this remains the dominant conception of remix, its conceptual life has expanded recently in important and interesting ways within the context of increasing activism directed at copyright and intellectual property legislation.

We accept this conceptual extension of ‘writing’ to include practices of producing, exchanging and negotiating digitally remixed texts, which may employ a single medium or may be multimedia remixes. At the same time we also recognize as forms of remix various practices that do not necessarily involve digitally remixing sound, image and animation, such as fanfiction writing and producing manga comics (whether on paper or on the screen).

Library 2.0 world of searching

Posted on August 16, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Searching is an essential skill for our Google Generation. Have you noticed the primacy of Google in the minds of students? Have you been told that libraries don’t matter because we have Google? This is not a bad thing really, as we are being forced to consider the complexity of our online world, and the remarkable range and depth of information resources that are available to us.

Thinking about this and developments in libraries I re-read a post written while back at Informancy on the shift in libraries and librarians raised some really interesting issues in the post and comments. Lets just take the issue of searching…

In library and information science precision and recall are two critical elements of the organization and retrieval of information in that they are inversely related. As the rate of recall grows with every addition to the Google database, the level of precision for responses from a Google search falls. Library and information science is about finding ways to increase both of these levels in tandem…that would be the holy grail of searching.

Searching is certainly at the crux of our ongoing debate – and perhaps the area that we need to grapple with most in terms of positioning (school) Library 2.0.

Comment to that post really grabbed my attention..

to me it seems pretty clear that in a net-centric environment, we’re more likely to find our solution to the needle in a haystack with advances in social software technologies tied to intelligent agents. As our folksonomies grow and contextualize information within knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing communities, the value of personalized agents should increase.

Christopher Harris also said

In a recent workshop that involved envisioning libraries 10 years from now, one of the things that stuck out most clearly for me was the need for the library to be the search engine. …. In a virtual library dealing with electronic resources, my avatar can move through rooms that are the facets of the information.

These comments help me to make sense of some ideas that I have put into a paper recently related to Library 2.0. Amongst the usual things I also suggested that future Library 2.0 developments might include

Searching of social network repositories alongside federated searching
Searching of other search aggregators such as Technorati
personalisation of the information research process with a personal library storage space
addition of virtual library environments such as Second Life
addition of read/write interactivity and Fan Fiction type activities
and ultimately ….adaptive hypermedia responsiveness to search strategies, stored information, personal tag structures and subject requirements

What we need is a new Library 2.0 Matrix – that allows us to draw elements from the resource environment of the library/information user and the Web 2.0 environment of the library/inforamtion user. This matrix would allow our schools students to move and be transparently and intuitively in both environments, rather than in two seperate environments – as they now are.

Need to get a good graphic to demonstrate this….sometime.

Here a more good thoughts from elearnspace:

Most of what we call “social network tools” will eventually just be features of existing tools. In very limited ways, this is starting with MS Outlook (and other email/communication tools) – the notification that someone is online, the link to names in address books, etc. are first run attempts at making social networking a part of work…not an activity separate from work

Net Neutrality

Posted on August 7, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

I want to pick up on a post from John Connell which picked up on ‘net neutrality’. He said

Tim Berners-Lee, as you might expect, has fought against any attempt to damage the open nature of the Net , and has used his own blog in the fight. A particularly interesting take on the protagonists ranged on either side of this debate is offered by Lawrence Lessig in his influential blog. He points out that, in his view, those arguing for net neutrality are those who ‘get’ the Net, and those opposed are those who have never ‘gotten’ it.

I am still a bit ‘rattled’ by the Phillip Adams session at the Education.au seminar – not so much by what was said as by what wasn’t said. I realise that it was the whole issue of net neutrality that was central to my concern, and that media people perhaps might not always ‘get’ the Net (not counting the media magnates who see the Net as a cash cow). Why is it bugging me so much?
With the launch of Microsoft’s blogging and social networking platform Windows Live Spaces (formally MSN Spaces), you can see the distance that even media commentators need to travel in order to effectively comment on learner needs as a result of the changes taking place under our very noses.

I may not have time to listen to a rerun of the sessions via podcast (though I have captured them in itunes already), so I could be wrong – but I do not recall much elaboration around the social networking that social software enables – nor the implications of this for learners. People throughout history have always developed their best ideas by discussing them with others. Nothing is different now, other than that it happens constantly online or via other communications media.

The issue for me then is who ‘gets the Net’? Who is going to ‘translate’ the developments effectively for teachers? Are we going to stay way behind developments with only pockets of currency?

Schools are busy working with various learning management systems – 5 years too late! And 5 years is a LONG time in the online world, but like 5 minutes in education. There’s the problem. Even if an LMS has interactive components it can’t keep up. Why? Because there is a constantly evolving suite of social software that can and should be used within the learning environment regardless of the LMS system currently in vogue.

So back to the beginning….how to promote curiosity, clarity, keeness, and conscience – faith in ourselves and our world?

Education au – FutureLab – Annika Small

Posted on August 4, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Our last presention came to us from Anika Small, the CEO of Futurelab UK.

In a previous post I said

The paper from FutureLab looks at Social Software and Learning and the ‘shape’ of learning as a result of the transformation in the new technology environment of our students.

You might like to check out (another) FutureLab’s blog here. [OK, for those who read this earlier, I grabbed another group – thanks to Stefan for pointing this out – but will leave the link here anyway]

Annika’s presentation is so packed with ideas and information that I can’t even begin to summarize it. For anyone wanting some clear ideas, gathered in one spot, you are not going to be able to past the podcast of this session. For schools it represents a thoughtprovoking listen.

A question from James Farmer about the sustainibility of the technology-intensive approach that Futurelab is able to undertake raises some important points. Annika’s response is that sustainability is actually underway as students find social software to engage in their social networking. They are already incorporating this into their lives.

A good point – yes the social software is there, but the reality in schools is that not all students have the same level of engagement with social software. Schools also have very different levels of technology available. However, I believe the future is staring us in the face, and that teachers DO need to understand the learning needs of students. Certainly the work coming out of Futurelab is providing a really good idea of what we need to do.

Bottom line is that we teachers have got to commit – NOW!

Annika encourages Australian educators to subscribe to their newsletter and communicate with her at Futurelab.

Education au – James Farmer

Posted on August 4, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

OK, here goes….live session with James, which is pretty cool! Nice to see the man, and get an overview of things.

So James started out commenting on what peopole say. “People say that pedagogy matters – technology doesn’t matter”

As he says, technology does matter! Th

e type of environment we work in makes a significant difference. We have operated in a hopeless utopianism…..put them into the discussion board, and then it will happen!!

If we want to engage students we should think about what the word engage means. A thesauras will give us words like captivate, rivet, involve, immerse, fascinate, engross. These synonyms tell us just how to engage teachers and learners.

Some wonderful ideas from James! From my point of view James didn’t raise anything new, because we have canvassed these ideas in the blogosphere. Having said that, James did present the sort of discussion points that allow us to raise these issues with others – and in my case, with teachers who need to develop their ideas about what technology is around to

help us engage our students. So the image of the ‘Victorian’ computer lab is a really clever juxtaposition. Yes, it is kids in rows, being told what to do! and when to do it!

Computer labs are the wrong kind of engagement, but still so prevalent. So the use of discussion asynchronous discussion boards do not meet the communication needs of our students who live by sms, MySpace, uTube! Teachers are often still in 1994 technology mode, while the students are experimenting and absorbing new things.

So James says we need to focus on personal preference and personal presence! Empower people to present themselves! in an online environment. This is just so important for our students. Use of social constructivist pedagogy – and new tools, such as those based around weblogs, do this very well. James introduced edublogs.org, and explained that in under a year they have grown to 16,000 blogs. Check these out and see the various things available.

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