TL Under Construction

I ran across this excellent UK-based site this morning in my ‘web wandering’ and thought I’d post it as others may also find it of use especially teachers working in the areas of debate and issues.

TrueTube

TrueTube explains itself as:

a free website which uses real-life stories and issues to encourage teenagers to explore and debate the world of morality, ethics, politics and religion. TrueTube brings to life the subjects at the heart of Secondary Education using short-form web-based video and multimedia technology. The site encourages teenagers to find their voice as they explore their own value systems and those of their peers around the corner and across the world.

I’ve had a little look around on the site and am very impressed. The contributions are monitored so the quality is good. Videos are down-loadable in case this site is blocked so teachers can still use them. There’s a tab at the top of the homepage on how to use the site – comments, videos can be uploaded as well as downloaded. The link below is to an article about the site.

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article1205

One of this semester’s subjects in my course is ETL505 – Organising Access to Information – what many refer to as Cataloguing. Some say “DRY”. I think, “Tell me more, I’m drowning out here”.

And that is probably why this quote in our textbook caught my attention –

cataloguing and the kind of imposition of order on the flow of knowledge and information that it represents may be all that separates up from becoming electronic neanderthals … (Gorman in Hider & Harvey, 2008, p. 8 )

This really rang true for me as I reflected on my increasing frustration in trying to organise and keep track of my own resources for study and professional learning. The common practices of tagging and word clouds in wikis, blogs and book-marking tools such as delicious.com are such a flabby ways of organising access to these resources. I may start saving articles for an assignment one day with certain tags but three weeks later I may be saving under some variation and not even realise it. Access becomes more difficult the greater the number of things saved/bookmarked. Like a squirrel running around hiding nuts for winter, I don’t always remember where I’ve put them later.

Electronic Neanderthals or Electronic squirrels – neither is a pretty picture when it comes to taking on the huge job of making digital information accessible. There really needs to be some standards to bring about better order for better access.

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Creative Commons flickr photo by: Kalense Kid

Hider, P., & Harvey, R. (2008). Definitions and introductory concepts. In Organising knowledge in a global society: Principles and practice in libraries and information centres. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies.

Still working on my holiday reading of Anstey and Bull’s Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies.

Multiliteracies means being cognitively and socially literate with paper, live and electronic texts. It also means being strategic, that is, being able to recognise what is required in a given context, examine what is already known, and then, if necessary, modify that knowledge to develop a strategy that suits the context and situation. (Anstey and Bull, 2006, p.23)

So we need to understand/be understood:

• when writing/reading;
• in speeches, interviews or performances
• using computer/phone.

We need to understand/project the right level of formality/respect for a given situation

• when writing/reading;
• in speeches, interviews or performances
• using computer/phone

This is terribly important in today’s world where you are dealing with such a diverse population. Heck, even excluding diversity, things can go terribly wrong – think how the crew at Chaser’s War on Everything got it so wrong with their skit on terminally-ill children. Somehow the people doing the strategic thinking did not accurately predict the level of disapproval that would be provoked.

Anstey and Bull (p.23) point out that every form of text is created with a purpose (no text is neutral). In order to be fully literate we need to be aware of that fact and to understand how text is constructed to influence.

So what are the implications for teaching our students? Well first they need to understand about text, all kinds of them. Astley and Bull have compiled common understandings about text from the body of literature about multiliteracies. They are:

• text may be paper, live or electronic
• may be made up of one or more than one sets of signs and symbols (eg. words + emoticons)
• are consciously constructed
• are actively constructed
• may have several possible meanings
• may be built from other texts (or refer to them to have meaning)
• may be multimodal, interactive, linear or non-linear

The authors recommend that any mulitliteracy programs planned need to use these understandings as outcomes for student understanding (Anstey and Bull, 2006, p. 24-25).

This got me thinking about how I was taught to ‘read’ various forms of text in my daily life. I wasn’t taught any multiliteracies in school. I had no education in this … or had I?

As children we were read to … a lot and we had wonderful records of stories told by masters like Danny Kaye. Stories told well involved ‘voices’ -tones of voice, colour within those voices to denote children or evil villains or wise old folk. There were levels of sound and patterns of speech repeated in many of the stories. And we heard the stories over and over until we’d learned them off by heart.

We learned to understand/read the language of music when we listened to wonderful recordings like Peter and the Wolf, the Nutcracker Suite and The Carnival of the Animals. Each instrument had a unique voice, each piece told a story.

We watched puppet shows and saw mime artists on TV like the wonderful Marcel Marceau who spoke to us through gesture. The stories were simple, the language was crystal clear.

We were taken to art galleries and our parents talked about the paintings. We watched cartoons like Bugs Bunny with dialogue that held several possible meanings (and British adult comedy full double entendre if we weren’t caught!).

We played with code rings and rebus messages, we learned about using tracking symbols in Scouts/Guides in case we got lost when hiking.

Perhaps like any things multiliteracies were around in our day, we just didn’t have the name for it.

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Photo from flickr by phoenixdiaz through the cc licence

This animated video was created by Pete Foley, with sound and music by Chris Perren. The project was co-ordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia at QUT.

TLs all over the world are most generous. One of the other Teacher Librarians on the OZTL_forum just recently posted a link to this video that explains in a most entertaining way all about Creative Commons and lists some excellent resources that are available through them.

Best of all Creative Commons have a search engine I’d not heard of until I watched this. What a valuable resource for students wishing to create new and exciting works or to enhance projects they’re working on. Be sure to watch the demo video on how this search engine works. And have fun!

Future Lab just emailed their latest newsletter and I’ve been exploring one of their resources called Vision Mapper. This site is an Aladdin’s cave of resources, activities and tools to assist schools (or a school library) to exercise their ‘what if’ skills.

There is so much happening on the educational reform front in Australia that it seems hard to lift our heads from the paperwork at the best of times but when we do get that chance then what? How do we clear our heads to vision forward, what should we focus on? Well this site offers many directions. I’ve been particularly looking from a TLs point of view and thought the Future Day activity could be a powerful one for collaboratively rethinking the school library. It encourages the participants to ‘ build new ideas and identify new practices and resources’ by focussing on current routines then re-imagining routines for an ideal typical day.

Imagine your library staff undertaking this exercise together, thinking though changes and ‘play[ing] out’ decisions to see how they might affect typical days’. The chance to stand back and look at what you’re doing on a really basic level could open up missed opportunities of all kinds – services, resources, environmental aspects.

Vision Mapping offers much to explore and to share with your principal and colleagues, I’ll definitely be bookmarking this site.

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Photo: Visions by Jerry Leandera from flickr