ETL507 E-Portfolio

Check out my professional portfolio, assessment 2 for ETL507. I have really enjoyed my Masters of Education, Teacher Librarianship and hope to continue to love my chosen profession. Thank you.

Canberra Study Visit

 Parliamentary Library was a great place to visit and I learnt a lot about their responsibility to ministers and staffers. I could imagine the researchers’ job to be quiet daunting, as they play an important part in politics.  'Summon' was a web interface that I had not seen before but can see its usefulness when you have a number of resources located in different areas. I can see its potential in my library as it works like Google searching and that is how the students are used to searching.

I thought the literacy program at the Australian National University was interesting and could see its potential in my school library. The literacy program provides IT and research skills through training seminars. I liked their survey tool 'Toast' which access a student’s prior knowledge and then can see what is lacking and recommend a certain training course. I think my school and the school library could add this type of service for students and its staff. A training program that students and teachers could sign up to when the time suits them would I think is preferred.

What I have learnt overall is that libraries come in many different shapes and sizes with many different roles and responsibilities, and they are essentially to their community and Australian history and culture. It was a great study visit to see the best libraries in Australia and to learn of libraries that I did not know existed.  I did find that even these significant libraries still have to face an uphill battle in being recognised as valuable to their cliental, even the parliamentary library that plays such an important role to politicians.

I have learnt of the different possibilities I can have as a career in libraries. I enjoyed the visit as I could observe other libraries from schools to professional government libraries and take away some fantastic ideas and new knowledge that I can take back to my high school library

Library 2.0: Social networking for libraries

From the A to Z list on the Social Networking for Libraries blog

A for Active
The library has a webpage that is not updated regularly. The library looks unprofessional and disorganised when it has old news on its homepage. To use social media the library needs to remain active with regular updates to keep people interested. Social media is a tool to connect to the staff and students of the school but to have continued followers the library needs to stay interesting with regular updates. The library also needs to stay active for teaching purposes, to create a learning environment with social media that students are engaged with.

B for Blog
The library could use a blog to communicate with its patrons and to allow patrons to communicate with the library and other patrons. Library news and information of interest could be posted on the blog and students and staff could post their reviews of books they have read. The blog could be used for teaching purposes with students posting their reflections on their learning. Also a professional blog for staff to use to post about articles, websites, web 2.0 tools, books that they would recommend to their colleagues and their applications in class.

C for Content
Using social network allows the library to connect with its patrons but the content of the social media has to be relevant to keep the students and staff interested. The content would need to cover the different interests of the users from top ten fiction books, to professional development resources. The library must know it’s cliental to cater for their needs and wants if using social media is to be successful.

D for Direction
The use of social networking for the library is to allow its users to communicate with the library and its other users to create a since of a school library community. Using social networks are to also attract potential users with platforms that they are familiar with and comfortable using to connect. The library can also use these platforms for classroom use, to engage the students and for students to use social media as a learning tool.

G for Good Reads
Good Reads is a social media site that allows the sharing of books. The social media site allows users to share what they are reading and create reading lists. The library could use this social network site to create reading lists for its patrons, for example genre lists, related texts, and specific topics. Good Reads can be a platform where the library users can interact with each other.

RSS

RSS feeds are about sharing and delivering information. RSS feeds inform of new updates from websites.  A fantastic tool for the library to use to as a service for its users.

Sites of interest to me that use RSS.

·         ALIA  http://www.alia.org.au/rss/ . "The Australian Library and Information Association [ALIA] is the professional organisation for the Australian library and information services sector. It seeks to empower the profession in the development, promotion and delivery of quality library and information services to the nation, through leadership, advocacy and mutual support". I would be interested in receiving media releases from ALIA as a professional tool.

·         Bright Ideas  http://slav.global2.vic.edu.au/ . A blog "by the School Libraries Association of Victoria (SLAV) and the State Library of Victoria (SLV). Its aim is to encourage teacher librarians and educators to actively engage with ICT, to share tools and experiences, to network on a global scale, and to embrace dynamic teaching and learning opportunities". I enjoy this blog as it has some interesting ideas that I can learn from and implement in my teaching as a teacher librarian.

RSS feeds that could be implemented in my school library.

·         New fiction books. A RSS feed for Students and Staff

·         New non-fiction books. For students and staff. Staff can be done by subject area for the different departments

·         Library news and events updated on the library website

·         News of interest from blogs, articles, websites, etc., concerning library, literacy, education, media releases, technology. 

The RSS feeds from the library can enhance the information needs of the students and staff by updating staff and students on new resources and library news. The RSS feeds can inform staff on resources for their department and resources for professional development. Students can find out the new fiction and events in the library. The school library could have RSS feeds that will be areas of interest to library users that would link them to information that would be of benefit to them.

Delicious

   I have been using Delicious for the last two months and with any program there are some pros and cons. Creating the account was not difficult, what I found challenging was finding others accounts so I could follow them. The search function didn’t work as I thought it would. I was typing in “sissocialmedia”, which was the tag we were to use for the subject, but it found nothing.  Searching for “INF506 social media” I was able to find others who are doing the subject through their stacks and follow their feeds and links to people they were following that I found appropriate. I found the feeds to be a good way of seeing what is new and would be of related to my subject as well as of professional and personal interest. My feeds got full very quickly, as I don't go back to delicious regularly to check what is new, I used it as more of a place to store my own links. I was concerned about sharing my links as I wondered how I assess what are my best links to share. Perhaps people would not be interested in my bookmarks.

   My favourite is the stack function, a great way to organise your links. I liked that you can publish your stack and was really interested in checking out other people’s stacks. I believe the stack function would be a good tool for classroom use. Looking through other peoples stack collections I have seen some that have been created for a particular topic in class. I love the idea of being able to use this in the library to help with student assignments as a type of pathfinder. The stack function could also be used for collecting professional links for staff within all departments of the school, they could share bookmarks for specific topics and subjects or professional development links.

   Adding bookmarks and tags is a simple process. What I couldn’t do was copy over my large collection of bookmarks on my computer in one go, instead I had to copy and paste. The tags were you add search terms or subject terms, are useful when searching delicious and you own collection of links. Delicious is good way to collect bookmarks, so when your computer crashes or needs updating you still have all your important bookmarks stored in your delicious account.

   I will continue to use Delicious to store my personal bookmarks and will use it to collect bookmarks in subjects’ stacks for use by students. I will also consider creating a library stack to share with my library staff colleagues.

But I love books

A Harvard Study has found that on facebook people make friends over gender and socioeconomic status, music and films over books. Not fare I love books.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/you-dont-make-facebook-friends-with-books-study-finds/story-e6frfro0-1226238042185
Link to the study
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/1/68.short?rss=1
and to one of the researchers on what this means for marketing on social media as it found that friends don't always like the same things.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/immune-to-viral-marketing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Using social media to tell your side of the story

Watching reruns of Landline in the holidays, thought this was perfect for a case study in INF506, but alas had already chosen Egypt and its revolution through social media.
Episode intro "One of the telling lessons of the live export controversy was just how effectively opponents of the trade used social media to whip up support for their campaign. By comparison, the beef industry was caught flat-footed trying to counter-punch from remote and regional areas using traditional print and broadcast media. Former NFF boss David Crombie believes the loss of trust and damage to the industry's social contract with consumers is so serious that agriculture's reputation is on the line. In the US, farmers are battling much the same issues, but increasingly, they're returning fire by using the same social media platforms to counter anti-farming campaigns".
Here is the link if you are intrested so you can check out American farmers teaching Aussie farmers how to have their say and be heard using free social media. And yes I am biased I grew up on a farm.

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2010/s3293020.htm