The phrase “life long learning” gets bandied around a lot, and today I’m going to write a little about just how much learning is involved in moving job, school section, country, and home. I left a country that was easy to live in (Singapore) and I job that I loved and was comfortable with for a place (Beijing) that generally led people to shake their … Continue reading Learning and change
I threw down the gauntlet to my mentor, Katie Day last night. She who taught me all I know about being a teacher librarian in the weeks and months that I sat by her side while doing my MIS and part of my M.Ed before I was thrust into the world of a library of my own. I was mentioning how I was a little … Continue reading A little writing about writing
I’m busy preparing for next week’s library lessons. G5 has one of my favourite units in “How We Express Ourselves” People create messages to target specific audiences Ostensibly it’s about advertising, as the lines of inquiry indicate, 1. Advertising techniques can be used to influence society (Perspective) 2. Critically evaluating messages presented in the media (Reflection) 3. Ways adverts can cause people to form opinions … Continue reading #NotOurDiversity
My online library network is getting excited about a couple of articles that are challenging beliefs. There’s danah boyds’ You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? it is an incredibly powerful article that needs to be printed out and highlighted and read very slowly. A couple of times. One passage that struck me epitomised the near futility in what we’re trying to do on the “fake … Continue reading Ask the inhabitants
Recently I’ve been given to much pause of thought about learning and education, not the least following watching the movie “The imitation game” about Alan Turing’s code breaking during WW2 on the plane, followed by three days of intensive attending of presentations at 21CLHK. It’s taken a while to try and crystallise my thoughts, and they’re probably still not as coherent as they should be, … Continue reading The Imitation Game
I subscribe to way too many Facebook groups. I need to stop it actually, they’ve become like women’s magazines. But worse. You keep seeing the same things come up over and over again, but instead of ignoring them you can actually have a say, which is giving yourself the delusion of helpfulness, but actually the smartest person in the room of Facebook groups is not … Continue reading Educational advice – from Facebook?
The whole diversity thing bothers me. Has for some time. We seem to love the optics of diversity, but not so much the reality. And so we mete out our diversity in acceptable chunks at acceptable moments. And in doing so we can fool ourselves – most of the time. We also mete out our encounters with diversity such that they don’t necessarily have to … Continue reading Meting out diversity
A fellow librarian in Shanghai and I have been working on creating some new MLA8 posters in Chinese for her bilingual school / library. It’s been an interesting process to put it mildly. We started off with the MLA posters I created with Katie Day about 2 years ago, and which she updated recently to reflect the MLA8 changes. Now translation is as much an … Continue reading MLA8 and Chinese …
I received an email last night from someone who had read my blog on Building a LOTE collection in an international school and she quite rightly pointed out that it’s a relatively easy thing for a librarian thing to do. Here is her question: I am a school librarian in an IB candidate school. We are trying to find strategies to promote mother tongues within the school. … Continue reading L1 and the role of the school
Just came across this very interesting infographic while trying to justify a moral gut-feeling on why we need to care about multi-cultural, multi-lingual (MCML) learning environment accommodation for all students. If nothing else – it impacts on the bottom line! Continue reading Why is multi-cultural understanding important in e-Learning?
