ETL523

This week marks the beginning of ETL523 Digital Citizenship.

It's probably worthwhile to record some thoughts about Digital Citizenship(DC) and how it relates to the role of the TL. My initial understanding of DC is that it relates to the behaviours and responsibilities we all have in the digital environment and that it encompasses issue such as cyber safety and bullying and awareness of digital footprints and ethical online behaviour.

In some ways the responsibility for this does not lie solely in any one teachers domain but needs to be the responsibility of the whole school - It has occurred to me that my children's primary school does not have a digital policy or framework in place to address many of these issues. In fact my 9 year old indicated that the only one that has spoken to her about cyberbullying was the WestTigers footballers when they came for a 'stamp out bullying' session.

Library policy help and morals (again)

As i was trying to get stuck into this assignment, I came across the UK publication of Primary School Guidelines. See below.

http://www.cilip.org.uk/filedownloadslibrary/groups/ylg/primaryschool_guidelines_2002.pdf

Its quite a good little publication and i wish I had it prior to doing  ETL503 the Library policy.

So, to the question of moral purpose again ... Fullan has suggested that this includes a plan to make a difference - that is, intend to do something 'good' that will improve our 'clients' -  in this instance planning to do something that will increase a persons' ability to use information successfully (Wizenreid, 2010).
So I guess I have to concede that in this context we do have a moral purpose - albeit one that is not used in the traditional sense of "moral".

Wizenreid, A (2010) Visionary Leader for Information. Centre for Information Studies: Wagga Wagga.

ETL 503 assignment 2 reflection

As the blog is a reflective process and tool, i thought i'd share an abridged version of PART C.

This exercise has proved a great focal tool for assessing and examining collecting practices and the way in which these can purposely or inadvertently affect the collection, its development and ability to adequately support teaching and learning in a specific school context.

My understanding of resource management and its facets has been widely extended and the interrelationship between the collection and a comprehensive policy that inherently links to the needs of the school was both developed and reinforced. Developing the purpose and goals of the collection forced me to consider the role, aims and priorities of the collection, and if, or how, these priorities aligned with the needs and expectations of the School and library users. This consolidated concepts raised in assessment 1 and Hughes-Hassell and Mancall (2005) and Bishop’s (2007, 2007a) approach and focusing on understanding the user and their needs.

The importance of gaining a thorough understanding the collection and its strengths and weaknesses was reinforced as essential to assessing what the collection priorities need to be. This is linked to an increased understanding of the relationship between evaluation, priorities for the collection and learning and teaching outcomes and the way in which knowledge of these are imperative to writing effective policy, without which the policy simply reflects the current status rather than providing a framework for the future.

Perhaps the most profound outcome of undertaking the assessment of the School collection and policy (or lack thereof) was the absolute necessity to weed the collection and the importance of having this as a key element of collection management (Baumbach and Miller, 2006) which again highlighted the need to evaluate the collection, an area of collection management that until completing this task I had neither adequately considered nor assigned the central role in collection management it deserves.

REFERENCES

Baumbach,D & Miller, L. (2006). Less is More: A Practical Guide to Weeding School Library Collections. Chicago: ALA Editions.

Bishop, K. (2007). Community analysis and needs assessment. In The collection program in schools : concepts, practices and information sources (4th ed.) (pp. 19-24). Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited.

Bishop, K. (2007a). Evaluation of the collection. In The collection program in schools :

concepts, practices and information sources (4th ed.) (pp. 141-159). Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited.

Hughes-Hassell, S., & Mancall, J. (2005). Collection Management for Youth: Responding to the needs of Learners. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

collections and collecting

This is sounding familiar....
As i read through Kennedy (2006) i am struck by the correlation with the Museum world. (i am not currently teaching, but have worked in Museums and museum education for years - and am still in the Museum now).

In museum studies and practice we use the same terminology and there are many parallels with the school library.
Each museum has a collection policy which relates to its own philosophy, goals and strategic plan and drives the selection of materials to be added to the collection - in the same way that the school library has a collection development policy.
The museum then has a collection management policy which includes an acquisition and deacquisition policy - the library has similar though the use of the term weeding wouldn't be popular in a museum context!
in the museum the curator is the collaborator who advises and works with other teams to advise on collecting new items (which often have to be approved by an executive or board - in the school the process is similar with teachers as collaborators and an executive to approve spending.
We also have to content with emerging technology and access to collections - no longer just through items on display (similar to print based materials in a library) but through social media such as blogs, flkr groups and digital collections online (as with digital materials in a library).

So here i find my former and present studies have many parallels ... which i'm hoping ay somehow help me with this unit

Kennedy (2006) Collection Management: A concise introduction. Revised edition.Wagga Wagga: CiS Charles Sturt University