IASL2003Conference

International Association of School Librarianship (IASL)

2003 Annual Conference, Durban, South Africa, 7-11 July 2003

OUR VIRTUAL CONFERENCE SESSION

Comments and Messages from Participants

When the virtual conference session is under way, you will be able to read comments and messages from other participants; messages will be cross posted to this page from IASL-LINK during the conference.

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From Barbara Braxton (Moderator of the Virtual Conference Session)
8 July 2003
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening -- depending on just which part of this wonderful world you are in!
In Durban, South Africa, it is 12.15pm on July 8 and I can hear Dr Ross Todd clearing his throat, ready to deliver his keynote address "Learning in the Information Age School: opportunities, outcomes and options."
For me, here in the national capital of Australia, it is 8.15pm on July 8 and I am actually enjoying dinner in a restaurant with my son and his mates as we celebrate his 29th birthday! But through the marvels and magic of email I can be in two places at once -- something I had thought was confined to the imagination of J. K. Rowling and the precincts of Hogwarts Castle.
Welcome to the Virtual Conference proceedings of the 2003 IASL Annual Conference! For those of us not able to be in Durban, the VC is an opportunity to be a part of what is happening in South Africa and to discuss some of the future issues in education which we can see now and which our colleagues will expect us to have suggestions and solutions for when they are confronted by the reality.
Participation in the VC is simple --
1. Read Ross's paper
2. Read the instructions for participating
3. READ the messages; REFLECT on their message and RESPOND with your message.

And now, drum roll please, may I present Dr Ross Todd!

Barbara Braxton
Teacher-Librarian, Palmerston District Primary School, Palmerston, ACT 2913, Australia

From Barbara Braxton (Moderator)
8 July 2003
If you have read the brief bio of Ross on the IASL pages, you will know that we are in the company of one who is on the world's top-shelf of teacher-librarianship.
Visit his pages on the Rutgers University site at http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~rtodd/Vita.htm and you will discover just why this man is held in such high regard by his peers, and why those of us at a lower level remain in awe. For someone who only received his Certificate in Secondary Teaching in 1970, Ross has had an incredible career to now be Associate Professor, School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Along the way, he has attained more professional qualifications; has written more papers; been to more conferences and taught more students (in reality and in writing) than most of us would care to contemplate. He is indeed a Big Voice from Down Under.
Among his current research interests is "how school libraries and the role of teacher-librarians may more effectively empower student learning" and as the wave of "my staff and principal don't understand me" messages continue to roll around the global teacher-librarian listservs and the pullers-of-the-purse-strings continue to target the school library when deliveries exceed the dollars, Ross's work in evidence-based advocacy comes at a very critical time.
Here, if we seize the opportunity, Ross gives us a pathway forward that will ensure our future as a most vital part of the education process. All we need to do is open the gate and take the first steps.
It is up to us to ensure that those steps will be in the right direction ....

From John Royce (Turkey)
Hello, All,
James has made some nice comments, opening the discussion. (Okay, Ross opened the discussion -- James is leading off the virtual conferees’ share of it.)
I fully agree with James’ concerns about research, and how it is so often viewed, even by those who one would think should know better -- and I will come back to that shortly. At the same time, though, it is worth recording those experiences which make up for research, even if it is not immediately statistically quantifiable. Anecdotal evidence is valuable too.
What really concerns me though are the interpretations sometimes placed upon the observations which might go to make up this research. There was a note on LM_NET just recently, a librarian showing how she had contributed to learning over the year, a summary for her Annual report. Good so far.
But her observations ran along the lines of
     Miss P’s class learned how to evaluate web sites
     Mr Q’s class learned advanced search techniques
And so on.
Sorry, they might have had lessons in these areas, but there are some learning activities which really do call for lifetime learning, one lesson is not sufficient to teach, give practice, allow students to understand and assimilate and practice and use and build on -- Ross (not the first of course) points out that teachers often assume that students already have information skills, or that they learn these skills somewhere else, or that they just pick them up by osmosis. We must not fall into the same trap.
Which is where, I think, that I have problems with some of the research and evidence-gathering techniques Ross describes in his paper. We need to show transformation, that real learning has taken place, that students can use the process skills they have used in one exercise (especially when they know they are specifically being graded on these skills) and apply them in situations when they don’t know whether these skills are needed or not. As example: when they know that the exercise is web site evaluation, students will use judgement, look for the clues they have been taught to follow up, authorship, date, authority, bias and so on. But do they use these same skills when the exercise is something different and these particular skills are not particularly emphasised? (Do adults, especially those who should know better?)
Thus a need for long-term research as well, the kind of achievement based research pioneered by Lance and replicated in so many other studies. Including the Scottish study which James mentions.
But whatever the research suggests, no matter how often or widely its validity is shown, there are always those who will not or cannot be convinced, alas -- the point I said I would come back to. Don’t forget the political aspects as well, and the fact that money is usually limited: no matter how great the evidence is to show that school library programs under the guidance of trained professional school librarians are the key to educational and personal achievement and development, headteachers and boards faced with limited budgets are more likely to invest in the classroom than the library --
I’m on a soapbox, and I have gone on long enough -- but I won’t be able to contribute later this week; this is my one and only chance to contribute to the discussion. So please forgive one further thought: I can’t help feeling that Ross misses out, as do so many, on the school librarian’s role as promoter of reading, reading for pleasure as opposed to reading for information. So much of the research points to readers being better users of language, better able to understand and to use language. It’s basic Krashen. Reading is so fundamental: before information literacy there must be literacy --
Did you catch a recent article, "From Thinkers to Clickers: The World Wide Web and the Transformation of the Essence of Being Human" By M.O. Thirunarayanan, available at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/m_thirunarayanan_8.html It’s worth the read.
Have a good conference, all in Durban, wish I was there. And to those who are virtually there, come join the discussion.
John
John Royce
IASL Regional Director: North Africa and Middle East

Introducing
Dr Ross Todd
Read Ross Todd's
Keynote Paper
Information and Instructions
for participation
Read the comments
of other participants
 

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Last Updated 8 July 2003