Teaching Privacy in a 2.0 World

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….with thanks to a tweet from Michael Stephens @mstephens7

A Decade of Databases: Where to from here?

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.

MySpace – a quick reflection

MySpace, Facebook, Beebo – in fact all similar social networking sites are a ‘big’ topic of conversation amongst educators. The conversation more often than not revolves around filtering or blocking access to such sites at school. I am unhappy about being the ‘MySpace’ police – shouldn’t I and my fellow teachers be MySpace teachers instead? Here are a few words on the topic from Will Richardson.

Tell the teachers they have to ‘get it’!

Now that our online newspapers also include social networking tools, it is clearly too late for any teachers to hide in the classroom and pretend that Web 2.0 isn’t here to stay.

I was thrilled to see a while back that the Australian Herald Sun (widest circulation in Australia) added some tag tools.

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Now our own Sydney Morning Herald also shows it’s style!

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BUT you’ve got to love The Australian!

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So teachers – add some new tricks to your toolkit and get the kids involved with networked media services. Teacher Librarians – it’s also time for you  to make sure that you harness the power of these tools to aggregate useful topical information too 🙂