The Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, and the International Forum on Research in School Librarianship

Citation

Calvert, P.J. (2001), "The Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, and the International Forum on Research in School Librarianship", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918hac.004

The Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, and the International Forum on Research in School Librarianship

Philip J. Calvert

"Inspiring Connections: Learning, Libraries & Literacy," was the theme of the joint 30th Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship and the 5th International Forum on Research in School Librarianship, held in Auckland, New Zealand, 9-12 July 2001.

If there was one idea that recurred in so many papers that it almost became the conference theme, it was that children must be given the opportunity and the tools to develop their own learning strategies and skills. Giving them the opportunity to learn in their own way and at their own pace has been shown to be a powerful way of improving education across all levels of ability. The role of libraries and media learning centres in this kind of "constructivist" education was obvious to everyone at the conference. Speaker after speaker talked about empowering students with knowledge found in a wide variety of media, including information found on the Internet, and so two important points related to school libraries and information technology emerged. The first was that the teachers and librarians must put their heads together and discover the most appropriate kinds of technology to use in each distinct learning environment. The second is that children need to learn a variety of literacies in order to cope in the modern world, and that the best place to learn those literacies was in the school library. Media specialist or teacher-librarians, whatever you call them, will play a crucial role in the development of an information literate generation. It has to be remembered, though, as James Henri (Charles Sturt University, Australia) pointed out in his "reality check", his research among teacher-librarians in Australia found that they were not good role models or mentors for children when it comes to information seeking. In particular, the teacher-librarians lacked confidence in searching for information on the Internet, which may reveal low confidence about ICTs in general.

Common themes from speakers included positives and negatives. The positives came mostly from the wide variety of learning media now available to students, helping to motivate those who did not find books appealing. Those teachers who realized how this could be of benefit were able to use a diverse range of assessment methods using ICTs, such as students making Web pages, video presentations, and such like. The negatives were mostly predictable: not enough money to spread between ICTs and traditional print materials, thus making collection development harder than ever; time pressures on media specialists who have to do more in the same number of hours; and demands for a wider range of skills that is not being meatched by in-house funded training.

All of these points came through in Kay Bishop's paper on "The impact of technology on school media centers in two Florida school districts." Bishop, who is at the University of South Florida, surveyed 23 media specialists to investigate the effects of technology on:

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  school library media programs;

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  collections;

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  jobs of media personnel; and

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  student learning in media centers; to determine if media staffing influences such activities.

The focus of the study was the media specialist and his/her opinions about changes brought by technology. Clearly, some media specialists are upbeat about the introduction of technology; some expressed the view that it has made the media center the heart of the school. They like the variety of media and the way it helps students who do not like books. Many pointed out how it offered teachers the opportunity to use alternative assessment and teaching styles. ICTs, though, cost money and there has not been a rise in funding to match the extra demands on the collection. The need for more training was often mentioned, and an interesting point made by respondents was that attention must be given to defining the roles of "team players" such as technicians, who currently are not sure of their place in the organization. This may help ameliorate a common complaint by media specialists, which is that they spend too much time fixing broken or temperamental equipment

Delegates seemed very interested in Intranet developments in schools, and all presentations on that topic had capacity audiences. Brain Waddell and Janice Jones of Karori West Normal School in Wellington, New Zealand spoke on their intranet development that uses simple technology to provide a scaffold (platform) for learning and literacy. Clearly, content is king in this intranet. The speakers chose four central roles for the intranet: linking to the school community, literacy links, teaching and learning links, and basic administration. Of these, the literacy links seem to be considered the most important. There are several parts to the literacy links in their intranet: reading recommendations, a parents' area, library links, books online, book chat, and "our writing". Much of the material in this part of the intranet comes directly from the school children. Their clip art is used extensively to brighten up the pages (and the obverse is that unnecessary "wizzy" stuff has been avoided), and they even write a large part of the content themselves. The children provide reading recommendations, small quizzes about popular books, and so on. External links are used where they are useful, such as adding online book sales to the parents' area to encourage the giving of books as gifts. The technology used is all relatively simple both to lighten the load on teachers and so that children focus on content and not on the technology. All children are encouraged to think about content and map out ideas on paper first. Then they create pages in PowerPoint (including hypertext links) which are converted into html for them by teachers and a few children familiar with FrontPage. The school uses an external server hosted by LinkEd www.linked.net.nz. Waddell was adamant that it was best to avoid overloading teachers with technology administration and maintenance. He also spoke strongly for a focus on content and not on learning technology (very few of the children learn html) and as a result they produced good content for the intranet.

Another popular topic, rather inevitably, was the creation of school library Web pages. Thomas Kaun gave a very practical talk on this topic that avoided excessive jargon and technicalities. He said that setting out the objectives of the Web site was the best place to start. Who could argue with that, yet is that really what happens with all Web sites? He suggested looking at many other school library sites in order to gather ideas, but in the end each school should create a site that suits its own programme. Popular content in many sites are pages such as family resources, student work (especially poetry) and homework resources. He was insistent that a site map should also be included. For design, he advocated the middle of the road, i.e. 640 x 480 resolution, keep all pages under 60k in size (for speed of downloading) and use gifs for flat color and jpegs for graduated color images. In contrast to Waddell, Kaun said that the school was the best network provider, done through a local ISP. There was an interesting idea from the audience at this session. One librarian said she had made one student the Captain of Information Resources, just as other children were made captains of basketball, and so on, and this gave them a feel of ownership in the library.

For an interesting and rather different use of ICTs, delegates could hear Jennie Bales of Summerdale Primary School, Tasmania, Australia talk about the use of Multi Object Oriented (MOO) domains in the support of Literature Circles (LCs). Bales gave an introduction to LCs as a means to promote literacy, then presented her research on the value of MOOs as an environment for LCs. Her school uses MOOs in a purely text format, yet encourages the use of virtual objects such as rooms, beanbags, and so on. The children seem very comfortable with this kind of environment, rather as they would enter the world of a good novel. Children have taken to the MOO environment and seem to regard it as a way of "talking" with their friends. They make use of features such as "addressing" others in the MOO directly, using ellipses, and even such features as boxes, emoting, and imaginary extension. Her research is not yet complete, but it seems clear from Bales that the MOO helps to create and support a specific learning environment.

The 2002 Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship will be held in Petaling Jaya (Kuala Lumpur), Malaysia.

Philip Calvert (philip.calvert@vuw.ac.nz) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is a Co-Editor of Library Hi Tech News.