SKILLs Act Needs Action Now August 28, 2007
Posted by droth in : Community , add a commentNow is the time to CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVE. Contact them this week, while they are home in their states and districts, or next week when they return to Washington DC. Do not wait any longer. Congress could decide the SKILLs Act very soon.
SUMMARY of the SKILLs Act and REASONS TO SUPPORT IT: http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslissues/SKILLS_Act.cfm
and the Talking Points link from there.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
•ASK YOUR SENATORS TO CO-SPONSOR S. 1699, the SKILLs Act bill in the Senate.
•ASK YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO CO-SPONSOR H.R. 2864, the SKILLs Act bill in the House.
SOME WAYS TO CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES:
•Go to their office in your district before they return to Washington DC if you can. Bring librarians, parents, teachers and other supporters with you if possible.
•Write a letter — fax or email it to your Senators and Representative (U.S. Mail is too slow; it needs a security check). Get librarians, parents, teachers and other supporters to write and send letters, too.
•Phone your Senators and Representative at their office and ask them to co-sponsor the SKILLS Act. Get other supporters to do this, too.
To find your SENATORS’ CONTACT INFORMATION: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
To find your REPRESENTATIVE’S CONTACT INFORMATION: http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml
FINALLY,
When you hear from a Senator or Representative about their position on SKILLs, please let me know — aasl.legis@gmail.com
Interested in an ALA Committee? August 26, 2007
Posted by Sara Kelly Johns in : Community , add a commentThe window of opportunity is now open and I hope many, many of you will consider going through it!
The online committee volunteer form for involvement on ALA Committees is now open. It will be used to develop a pool of names for ALA President-Elect Jim Rettig to use to fill open committee slots. The window closes on December 3rd but many appointments will be made before that since they have to be approved by Council at Midwinter.
How? Go to the Committee Volunteer page to fill out the online form and then send an e-mail with your choice(s) to AASL President-elect Ann Martin (libraryann@comcast.net) who will work with Jim. The more Ann knows about your preferences and your qualifications, the more she will be able to encourage Jim to have at least one AASL member on each committee.
AASL staff will have access to that database, too, and I will be able to get names for ALA task forces and fill-in committee appointments, but this is a chance for us to have a LOUD-er voice in “big ALA.”
Send in your form as soon as possible; AASL members are smart and savvy and can bring our views and expertise to ALA committee work. Thank you!
Information Literacy at IFLA August 22, 2007
Posted by aernst in : Community , 2 commentsGreeting from Durban, South Africa. I’m attending the International Federation of Library Association’s World Library & Information Congress with librarians from 116 countries. I will be serving on the IFLA Standing Committee for Information Literacy. Thus far, most members of this committee are Higher Education librarians. I attended a program and working session focused on the committee’s recent projects. The “International Information Literacy Resources Directory”, an online database of nearly 1000 records (and growing), provides access to world wide contributions under the general headings of: Publications, IL Products for Users, Communication (conferences, weblogs, etc.), Organizations and “Training the Trainers”. Please visit this site at: www.infolitglobal.info. Most importantly, please add information!
The second major project undertaken by the IFLA Information Literacy Standing Committee is a “State of the Art” report on Information Literacy globally. The report is available and downloadable from the previously listed site. During the IFLA session, program participants broke into groups to discuss the report and make suggestions. I worked with librarians from Malaysia and Germany. Comments from all the working groups were similar. It was noted there should be more acknowledgement of Information Literacy efforts in schools and public library settings. There was also a strong call for indexing of the report, creating access points such as library type and language. The program participants agreed it is a good beginning to an ongoing process.
The group noticed that regardless of which country or what kind of library participants came from, the following concerns were fairly universal:
• How to gain institutional buy-in for information literacy standards
• Challenges of working in partnership with teachers/faculty to implement information literacy skills
Another project in process was pitched; a contest to create an international information literacy logo. The purpose is to develop a logo that can be used, free of charge, as an international symbol of information literacy around the globe. The winning designer will be awarded a prize of $2000. For details about the contest, please refer to the opening page of www.infolitglobal.info
All these efforts are supported financially by UNESCO, the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization, in part because the mission of IFLA and librarians all over the world are in synch with UNESCO’s work, “Empowering people through the free flow of ideas by word and image, and by access to information and knowledge” (http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1657&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)
For further information check out:
IFLA – www.ifla.org
IFLA information Literacy - http://www.ifla.org/VII/s42/index.htm
UNESCO – www.unesco.org
Submitted by:
Alison Ernst
ISS Chair
Director of Library and Academic Resources
Northfield Mount Hermon School
alison_ernst@nmhschool.org
Blogs, Wikis, Social Networks and Listservs. August 19, 2007
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : Hot Topics , 2 commentsThe NECC Conference is sponsored by ISTE and their particular focus is on the use of technology in education. The ISTE special focus group known as SIGMS (Special Interest Group Media Specialists) were a big presence at the conference. The SIGMS forum had a full house, requiring more chairs than originally in place. School Library Media Specialists proved their willingness to embrace technology.
While Second Live and other neat new applications (Twitter http://twitter.com/ )seemed to be the new really hot topic, blogs, podcasts, wikis and other older web 2.0 applications were evident with sessions on how to use them as well as loads of examples highlighting their use. In thinking about them over the summer I still believe that Technology is about tools, creating and using tools to make what we need to do easier. Sometimes a new tool is just the thing we need but we should not throw away older tools that often perform a function as well or better. At any rate, here are my musings on these tools.
ck out this blog posting for some great questions http://vvrotny.edublogs.org/2007/07/15/four-essential-questions-that-need-answers/ Four Essential Questions That Need Answers and engage in the discussion.
Two questions about blogging that bother me some:
1. Does everyone need to blog? In looking at the NECC blogs, just wading through that many postings takes way too much time. I would like to see more people use a central blog such as the AASL blog for this kind of posting.
2. Bloggers were often writing up their posts while the session was still going on. Why? I find the best blog posts are those done after the fact, when you can read through notes, think about the topic and reflect.
WIKIS: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) seem to be springing up all over and they were often the topic of all or part of a session. One session I attended had some great ideas for using Wikis (exhibits.wikispaces.com,) in the classroom. For this post I want to focus on some wiki’s specifically for and by school librarians. This is where I really see this tool shine.
SIGMS has its own wiki http://sigms.iste.wikispaces.net/ One document begun on the wiki concerned a topic at the SIGMS business meeting What is the difference between a librarian and a Media Specialist? Check out the posts and add to the growing document. Check out the Teacher Librarian Wiki http://teacherlibrarianwiki.pbwiki.com/ for all kinds of documents on how we do our job. For those who like to see the LM_NET hits especially for the book lists check out http://lmnet.wikispaces.com/
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: especially myspace and facebook were, of course, topics for discussion from sessions on how to use them in the school to vendors promising they could protect students from them. I must admit to not being sure about this particular tool. I joined facebook but don’t spend much time there not sure what to do when I get there other than read what students who graduated from my school are doing.
One I found to be more useful is Teacher Librarian Ning http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/ a much more focused environment. You can even network with other specific interest groups such YA lit in school libraries. There is also Harry Potter discussion group. The problem I have is spending the time to look around through the whole site. I would like to see some kind of cross referencing of topics, for example posts in the collaboration group would probably contain items of interest to a high school group person. But for now I have to join and monitor all the possible groups in order to see what the community as a whole is thinking about. (Kudos to Joyce Valenza who set up the last three on the web.)
Second Life is a MUVE – (Multi User Virtual Environment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muve The Wikipedia article can tell you lots about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
I will have to say that I don’t at this time feel this is really a useful tool. First of all, it needs a software download, a big one! Knowing the state of computers at my school I am not sure I want to foster a big memory hog program like this, even if my school allowed librarians to download programs. I also understand that there are frequent almost daily updates. Second, I cannot get on at home either even with the program download as my graphics card can’t handle it. Even with my brand new laptop, I still cannot get on. Any tool that requires expensive downloads, constant updates, and top of the line equipment will not get used by most of us. So, my opinion on Second Life is on hold.
My last item on this ramble concerns an old friend and great tool, LM_NET. Listservs are “old technology” but as a tool LM_NET fits the bill. First, it is easy, I don’t have to login, I just get my email. Second, the discussions range across the board. While I could be on the ning and just read items that concern me as a secondary librarian on LM_NET I can see discussions that cover all of us. A topic posted by an elementary person may well be of interest to me, if not now then later. Two recent ones illustrate my point. We have had a good discussion concerning ALA accreditation, something that affects librarians at all levels in one way or another. It is much easier to read them all at once instead of going to all the different wiki, blogs, networking sites to read the discussion. Second, people are keeping me informed on the status of an important bill the SKILLS act in Congress http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslissues/SKILLS_Act.cfm The issues centered around this act can well be discussed using the other tools, but for just getting everyone to be aware of the topic, the listserv is the best tool.
Have a great new school year, everyone!
(posted by Debbie Stafford)
Pop Culture August 6, 2007
Posted by ayucht in : Hot Topics , 1 comment so farSophie Brookover and Liz Burns are writing a book — Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect With Your Whole Community — to be published by ITI in 2008.
They are looking for input from school librarians, in particular, because “It’s one thing for us to write about what we think makes a great marriage between pop culture & libraries; it’s quite another, more powerful thing to quote our experienced colleagues on this topic.”
Please take a moment to participate in their survey, at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=qCrnyElyXlrUW6xD7KHI1w%3d%3d
so that the impact of pop culture on *school* programs can be included in their book.
Any questions? contact Sophie, at sophie dot brookover at gmail dot com.