TL Under Construction

McKenzie (1999, section 2) describes the planning phase as the time to consider –

The best way to find pertinent and reliable information that will help to construct answers to subsidiary questions.

My thoughts on the best ways to obtain information for my first subsidiary question – “what are my information needs?”

As I worked through the VELS standards and the written assignment pages from the History teacher I can certainly see why collaborative planning would be a far more desirable arrangement than this making up of an electronic pathfinder from an already planned unit/assignment. I’ve had to guess at some of the purposes, combing through the VELS to see what matches. I’ve also had to think about how to dovetail the info literacy skills into the flow of the assignment. The only mention of Information Literacy is a reference to the school planner/diary for notes regarding the layout of bibliographies and footnotes! This part of the curriculum is still be under-valued and under-addressed.

While ideally I would seek to work with the teacher, this is in fact an assignment from the local secondary school and I don’t work there. It is term break as well so no hope of interviewing the teacher. =) I decided to tackle the secondary school assignment after having done my first CRT work in a highschool library this year. I had a bit of experience with the information needs of the students doing this assignment as they came to the library.

I’ve also worked through some of the pages of the IMPACT documentation tool and like the organization of it but see some inflexibilities too -  mostly that it’s designed for American school use. Eg. dates can only be entered in American-style (mm/dd/yy) and the subject drop-down box doesn’t have some of the subject options offered in Australian schools and you can’t leave it blank etc.

My second subsidiary question is — “What are their information needs?”  “Where do I find the best resources to meet the students’ needs?”

They need:

• resources that shows different perspectives of the event
• resources that explain general background information/key terms and concepts
• statistics

I’ll be looking in:

• HS library OPAC
• HS library databases
• Trusted educational portals
• the Internet!

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Herring, J. E. (2004).  The internet and information skills. London: Facet.

Loertscher, D. V. (2000). Information literacy. In Taxonomies of the school library media program (2nd ed., pp. 157-182). Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research & Publishing.

McKenzie, J. (1999). The research cycle. FNO: The Educational Technology Journal, 9(4). Retrieved from http://questioning.org/rcycle.html