Today the main topic in class was “worldwide libraries.” When I did my initial individual search of this term, I was lead to a number of online library catalogs. But what I was in search of was academic articles on the topic. One such such I found was International Association of School Librarianship (IASL). “School Libraries Worldwide” is the offical professional and research journal of this site and publishes current research and scholarship on any aspect of school librarianship. I did not have a chance to look at many articles, but this is definitely one of the sites I will bookmark on Diigo (once I figure out how it works!).
In discussion with others who teach secondary, we talked a bit about what we thought worldwide libraries meant and their implications. We agreed that the ideal would be: resources accessible to anyone/anywhere with an internet connection, since online material is growing in popularity compared to textbooks and other information books. But the reality is that we are limited by things like copyright, publishers and internet accessibility. One of the group members talked about the idea of producing things for the sake of sharing with other people rather than for the sake of financial gain; she called it “creative commons.” I feel as educators, this should be at the forefront of our beliefs. Unfortunately, I am not confident that governments and financial institutions would buy into this ideal so easily.
When discussing worldwide libraries with my inquiry group, we agreed that inquiry already demands outside connections. Some examples of connections we came up with were web quests, pen pals in other countries and skyping with experts in a particular field of work or subject. We also agreed that up to date, current information is not always found in the books we have in our libraries, so it is important to make connections to other libraries throughout the world.
Finally, Jenny put up 3 words at the end of class: Why, how and what. I immediately related these three questions to my future vision project.
Why?: I am conducting my “inquiry of inquiry” to become the “inquiry expert” for my students and for the staff at my school. I want to be able to teach my students about info and digital literacy, social media etiquette and how to create and answer those overarching big inquiry questions they wonder about.
How?: The way I plan to start this by continuing my research on inquiry-based learning and eventually adding “inquiry” pages for teachers and students to my library website, addressing the items listed above and by connecting with students and teachers to facilitate inquiry projects.
What?: What I hope to get out of this is the satisfaction of knowing that I played a pivotal role in the incredible changes that will take place in my students, in my staff and in my school through inquiry. I want to be driving force for change.
Hi Harjeet,
I enjoyed reading your posts. Your passion for teaching and the students really comes through. It is so wonderful that you are striving to be a “driving force for change”. Imagine what education could look like if everyone was striving for this!
I thought the idea of a “creative commons” is a great one. In a way, the internet is already like this but there is a lot of extra stuff we have to weed though to find the real “gems” of information. However, even on the internet ,while it appears to be “free”, people are still finding ways to make money from it. It would be hard to convince someone who spent a year gathering materials and writing a book to just give it away for free. On the other hand, everyone has different knowledge and ideas. If each educator just posted one idea online, we could have an amazing collection.
Good luck with your inquiry project!
I would also encourage you to take a look at Open Educational Resources (OER). We did not have time to cover this in class, but it might bring up interesting philosophical concepts for school librarianship and sharing information. Creative Commons is an area of Internet creative production. There are different ratings – sometimes you are allowed to use someone else’s creative work without any citation or reference, sometimes you are asked to cite where the creative work came from (I think this is really fair to the producer of the content). There are great discussions going on right now online about curation and what it means to be someone who brings others’ creative works to the attention of those who would not otherwise see them. Check out Brain Pickings blog.