Six weeks done and we enter our virtual online Spring Break. And my social media both professional and personal is awash with questions from people about school closure and online learning from a teacher/librarian/tech/personal point of view. It's the long tail, the tsunami hitting land after the earthquake at sea. And I know that's just … Continue reading First the earthquake and then the tsunami
One of my most popular blog posts was "Advocacy is not enough we need power" and I still stand by that. Ironically enough in my new role I am teacher librarian slash Edtech integrator, and I like to joke with my colleagues who need anything from data to access to fixing an issue to equipment … Continue reading Does Activism require Power?
Classroom libraries vs. school libraries, teacher superstars marginalising teacher librarians - or is it our fault?
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 … Continue reading Ask the inhabitants
Last week I attended a "#Call to Action: Fake News, Misinformation and Post-Truth" held by the SMU libraries in Singapore. Library network groups are full of requests for student appropriate examples of fake news. Most librarians have a stock list starting from the spaghetti harvest (1957) / tree octopus (1988). And we've unfortunately become over … Continue reading #fakenews – symptom or disease?
Continuing in my series of "no excuses" rants, I'm moving onto a biggie. Facebook. Except my rant isn't so much against FB - everyone has done a better and more eloquent version of it in one form or another from one viewpoint or another. It's more a rant against us librarians as consumers of FB … Continue reading No excuses: Facebook
It must be an age thing - but as I'm getting further into my 50's I'm becoming less tolerant of fancy sounding reasons and explanations that are actually just excuses for staving off change. This is the first of a series of posts on things that really annoy me as an international librarian, with a … Continue reading No excuses: Syndetics
And it's not the usual stuff about being poor misunderstood under-utilized bits of the school / community. No, the frustration goes much much further. It's about how information, knowledge, books, data, well just about anything is NOT being tagged and catalogued and made generally searchable, available. What prompted this? Well my inbox. I subscribe to … Continue reading Frustrations of a librarian
There's been quite a to-do on librarian sites recently about the acquisition of RefMe, an academic citation tool by Chegg, a purveyor of online textbooks and tutors (and more). Before you click past this, let's have a little look and think about this business model... The citation engine issue In the opinion of my peers … Continue reading Buying the future of research …
FastCo had an interesting post yesterday about how you can download your browsing history on google (Twitter also lets you download your tweeting history) and how you could then see what marketeers and google knows about you. I don't think that's nearly as interesting as the potential if you could see the browsing history of … Continue reading Whose history would you like to see?
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 