Tag: content

If we build it will they come?

In my past “homeless” week I’ve had opportunity to offer PD to my fellow librarians & library staff and to some teachers, and also to go into classrooms for a longer period of time and help with research, and I’ve had time to find, curate and put resources onto our libguides, and I’m hot-desking in the coordinator’s office. Its’ been a very informative time.

What I’ve learnt:

  • Never make assumptions about a basic level of digital literacy – just because you’re comfortable with screenshots, copying and pasting, using short-cuts etc. your audience may not be. Often they only know the very specific applications and programs (and operating systems) that they need for their specific tasks in their job.  You need to be very explicit and slow in explaining things.
  • Many many students do not know the difference between being in a browser window and typing in a URL (even a shortened one) and typing in a search term in a search box since the two have become ubiquitous to them – and Chrome as a Google product has played into that by allowing you to access either a search or an address from either. That’s something I never paused to think about, as a computer child of the 80’s they were very distinct things. This is philosophically interesting and I wonder if it impacts on understanding the nature of search and query?  I see a considerable amount of blurring generally – and if one thinks of aspects of information literacy in terms of threshold concepts I’m wondering if all these developments, while apparently making things easier are actually making them more difficult?

My biggest learning is that I have a poor understanding of how, where, why and when students and teachers access information. I’ve gone for a (at least) three times redundancy concept in providing access to anything –

  • in the OLP (Online Learning Platfrom – both on the homeroom page AND on the library page)
  • on the front page of our OPAC
  • on our Library Guides

In initial library lessons we’ve also had students (and teachers and parents – in our library bytes sessions) bookmark the 3 primary sites – the catalog, the library guides and then library OLP page. But the issues with information seem to be more deep-seated than that. I suspect that there is still confusion about not even knowing why you’d want to access anything – a kind of informational existential issue.

I’m guessing about 10-15% of the students in a class are making full use of the resources we’re providing.  Our school is probably not unique in this. I hear the same lament everywhere.  There is the saying of “meet your customer where they are” (not where you want them to be) and I think we neither really always know where they are – or we suspect they’re just on google, nor are we able to meet them there. AND OUR VENDORS ARE NOT HELPING US!  Let’s take our OPAC / Catalog as an example. Follett has finally woken up to the fact that google, and not our catalog or databases is the first place students look, so they’ve come up with a very nifty chrome extension that allows you to plug in your catalog (and webpath express) as the first search result – like below

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But, it only works with iOS on desktops / laptops. And we’re an iPad school (not an android / chromebook school). So it doesn’t work on iPads. So far so useless actually.

Oh, but there is a Destiny Discover App for iPads… except all it does is try to update every time you access it, and it gets to 31% and then crashes. And you can only set age / Lexile / grade level limiters to books, not databases or online resources, so it’s even more overwhelming than good ole google.

So at our last inter-campus librarian meeting we decided to try and encourage entry and access to our paid resources by making them options on our UOI guide resources page – so we’ve semi-standardised our boxes to have Books (with a link to the catalog via Librarythingsforlibraries book display widget), Videos (since Youtube is the 2nd only to google as the “go to” place for student research) and Resources (including Britannica, Brainpop, Epic Books and other curated links).

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The thought is, that they then don’t have to leave the page in order to go to a resource, they just click on the picture, and get to say Britannica, and once they’re there, the threshold is lower to then search for something from within there … we’ll see what the reality is.  I’ve also explicitly told them this in their last research lesson. Now to follow up and see if the usage stats change.

So what now? 

I think I need to move to a simpler and more intuitive layout – Following Katie Day’s layout for her research guide, perhaps making it student question related?

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At a whole different level is the services and guides that happen at Scotch College ….

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I think I need to sit down with teachers and students and really understand how they use information, how they look for it and where they expect to find it. Customer journey maps – something that I was thinking of as an alternative study avenue before I looked at our Blokes with Books club as my case study. Has anyone looked into that in the library context? I know people have looked at social media in library, but this is different – the physical and digital paths our patrons use to get information (or get frustrated by us). Any pointers?

 

Chalk talk? inquiry? technology? what really matters?

In our #INF530 course we are exposed to a wide range of thoughts and ideas. Some Facebook groups, twitter feeds, paperli, google alerts yadayada throw even more at me.  One that is currently doing the rounds is whether chalk and talk is better than all this new fangled (from the 70’s no less) participatory and inquiry learning stuff.  After all, look at the Chinese! Look at the Pisa results.

One of the most significant videos I have watched in the last few years was “The classroom experiment” I don’t like learning through watching videos generally, as I can read way faster than I can watch and listen, so I get bored and distracted, so it’s quite something when I say it really is worth two hours of your time.

In the last 7 years, my children and I have gone through various extremes of educations. They’ve had liberal PYP type inquiry learning, and chalk and talk rigorous structured learning with continuous high stakes assessment in the Chinese system.  I’ve spent 2 years full time studying Chinese at university and I’ve spent nearly 3 years doing two masters degrees by distance learning. 
I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and students and my own children, and reflecting on my own learning.
On Friday one of my teacher friends was telling me about the debriefing she’d had with her Grade 12 students on their final day of school before study weeks and exams.  She’d asked them what was really important in a teacher, in the classroom setting. What really mattered.  Was it inquiry, was it content, was it technology, was it the way the space was organised. Was it giving everyone a voice, was it content or thought or frequent testing or never testing or something inbetween?
Without fail she said, every single student said none of that really mattered. The only thing that really mattered was whether the teacher really cared about you and your learning or not.  Knowledge and passion for the subject came next.  And they then went to name teachers with widely different teaching philosophies and personalities that embodied that caring they were talking about.  And the fact that they really really wanted to work hard and succeed to show the teacher that the caring was mutual.
We were then talking about how to make sure you reach each and every student in your classes, particularly if they classes are big and some students are naturally more dominant than others. She was saying she teaches nearly 80 students directly and more than 100 indirectly, and she keeps a list of each and every one, and each week goest through the list and makes notes on conversations she’s had with each and if she’s not had a personal conversation with one of them, makes sure she does so the next week.  She said how easy it was for students to slip through the cracks. Especially if they were shy or unassuming or didn’t participate easily due to language or cultural barriers.
When I was studying Chinese I had a lot of struggles.  It was difficult.  It was really really really hard. I had a lot of smart alecks in my class (watch those videos above!), I became quieter and quieter and lost my voice. And because I wasn’t speaking, I couldn’t speak and it became more and more difficult to speak. Then in my second year I got a really old teacher.  He was well into his 70’s. He’d been doing this for years.  He lined us up into the traditional classroom, all facing forward.  And we went through the material methodically.  If we had to read, it wasn’t on a voluntary basis. He started in the front and each and everyone had to read one sentence and then we’d move on to the next student. If our pronunciation was not up to scratch he’s say “ting bu dong” (I hear but I don’t understand” and gently but relentlessly correct us until we got it right. Same would happen with working through questions and assignments. If someone tried to jump in or interject or interrupt or mock or any of the other crap that had been going on up to then he’d look up fiercely and out stare them and we’d go on. 
I passed chinese. It was never easy for me no matter how easy studying had been to me before. I learnt first hand what it was to struggle as a student. I learnt how shame and fear could negatively impact on learning.  And it changed my views completely on who deserved to be heard and to participate in a classroom.  You know that cartoon about privilege?  It’s not just about class or race or financial privilege.  Is also about learning and knowing how to learn. About whether you as a child were cultivated or left to nature (see JP Gee).  
I think about it often.  The right of every child to learn content and learn to think. About how are assessments, or teaching, our scaffolding our assumptions shape how far they will go. The explicit and the implicit things that stand in their way and our way of making the way clear. And how we don’t even know sometimes that or what we are doing wrong.