Friday, March 07, 2008

Session from David Loertscher

Today in Second Life, the virtual world, I attended a transmission of a session that was being done by David Loetscher at San Jose State University SLIS. The talk was called How can librarians get back in the information game: new directions in schools and academic libraries and slides are at http://amazon.sjsu.edu/slisPod/
colloquia/sp08/4loertscher/
21stCenturyLibraries2.pdf
Loertscher has done a good deal in the information literacy area.
I must say I never thought librarians were out of the information game, and the ideas were not all new, however it was interesting to see the presenter "live" and I did pick up some ideas and a new thing (to me) i.e. that the American Association of School Librarians had produced Standards for the 21st Century Learner in 2007. You can download the brochure that describes them at http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/
aaslproftools/learningstandards/standards.cfm
I like the emphasis that the learner must "Inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge", although there are some of other statements that I would like to poke about a bit. Anyway, this could be a useful booklet if you are not aware of it already, and in his ppt, Loertscher translates the standards into a dynamic diagram.
Other things I'll pick out of Loertscher's talk are advocating use of iGoogle and blogs, and use of a wiki for "professional literature collaborative synthesis" in a class. In fact the session was more of a dialogue with Robin Williams (not the film actor), rather than a talk, which definitely made it more fun to watch.
The photo shows the auditorium on SJSU SLIS island, with the slides from the ppt mounted up front and the video feed on the screen. Fortunately I'd updated my Quicktime software the day before otherwise all I would have seen is that irritating Quicktime logo.

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