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Diana Rendina

You Say "Library", I Say "Learning Commons": What's the Big Diff? | Knowledge Quest - 0 views

  • When you look at your space, does it… motivate learners? promote learning? support collaborative and formal practice? provide a personalized and inclusive environment? adapt to the changing needs of the school community?
  • lexible use, with everything on wheels to easily create smaller group work areas for social learning with lots of different seating options, including special desks that can raise up for students who prefer to stand while working.
  • creating a relevant learning space is not just about investing in expensive technologies
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  • “students are drawn to spaces that are open, inviting and stimulating: spaces where they become fully engaged in the conversation and in the excitement of sharing new ideas”(JISC).
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    What you call your space doesn't matter as much as whether or not your space is flexible, relevant and supports the needs of your students.
Bright Ideas

Library - Learning Futures / Learning Spaces Forum - 10 views

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    The Learning Futures / Learning Spaces Forum focused on the changes to the physical and online learning spaces in Australian schools. 
Nancy Prentice

21st-Century Libraries: The Learning Commons | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Libraries are reinventing themselves as content becomes more accessible online and their role becomes less about housing tomes and more about connecting learners and constructing knowledge.
  • Libraries are reinventing themselves as content becomes more accessible online and their role becomes less about housing tomes and more about connecting learners and constructing knowledge
  • Printed books still play a critical role in supporting learners, but digital technologies offer additional pathways to learning and content acquisition. Students and teachers no longer need a library simply for access. Instead, they require a place that encourages participatory learning and allows for co-construction of understanding from a variety of sources.
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  • the space does include paper books and physical artifacts, as well as flexible furniture and an open environment, digital content encourages students to explore, play, and delve deeper into subjects they may not otherwise experience
  • a flexible space with moveable chairs, desks, and even bookshelves. Small rooms can be opened up to allow for group projects, and the circulation desk as well as the sides of the stacks are writeable with dry-erase markers to encourage the collaboration and sharing that the previous space had discouraged.
  • the role of the coffeehouse in the birth of the Enlightenment -- it provided "a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share."
  • interact with the content, the technology, the space, and each other in order to gain context and increase their knowledge.
  • Students and teachers no longer need a library simply for access. Instead, they require a place that encourages participatory learning and allows for co-construction of understanding from a variety of sources.
Cathy Oxley

Free Technology for Teachers: Beyond Google - Improve Your Search Results - 20 views

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    " Beyond Google - AddThis Posted by Mr. Byrne at 2:12 PM Labels: Google, Internet search, teaching technology, Teaching With Technology, Technology Integration, web search, web search strategies 5 comments: SIS Media Specialist said... Geesh Richard, another great resource; like your posts are not enough. Many, many thanks. I have followed your blog for about a year and have learned SO MUCH. I understand you are from CT. Any chance we can get you to the joint annual CASL/CECA (Connecticut Association of School Librarians and Connecticut Educators Computer Association) conference next year? October 24, 2009 10:35 PM Mr. Byrne said... Yes, I am originally from Connecticut. In fact, I went to CCSU for freshman year. I'd like to come to CASL/CECA. Can you send me an email? richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers Thanks. October 25, 2009 6:47 AM Linux and Friends said... Thanks for the amazing document. I am aware of a few of the resources listed in the document. However, many of the others are new to me. I will definitely check them out. November 2, 2009 9:45 PM dunnes said... I visited and bookmarked four sites from this post! Thank you for the great resource. Students want to use Google rather than stick to the school library catalog, but they need more instruction on how to do this. I have seen too many children search with ineffective terms, and then waste time clicking on their random results. November 8, 2009 12:38 PM Lois said... Beyond Google is a great resource. I wish I had your skills for taking what you learn and putting it together as you do. I love reading your daily blog. November 15, 2009 10:04 AM Post a Comment Links to this post Beyond Google: Improve Your Search Results http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/10/beyond-google-improve-your-search.html While working with some of my colleagues in a workshop earlier this week, I was reminded that a lot of people aren't familiar with tools
Katy Vance

Flip This Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution - 4 views

  • If we want to connect with the latest generation of learners and teachers, we have to totally redesign the library from the vantage point of our users—our thinking has to do a 180-degree flip.
  • This learning commons is both a physical and a virtual space that’s staffed not just by teacher-librarians but also by other school specialists who, like us, are having trouble getting into the classroom and getting kids’ attention.
  • specialists such as literacy coaches, teacher technologists, teacher-librarians, art teachers, music teachers, and P.E. teachers
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  • experimental learning center,
  • In the physical space, we enter a room that’s totally flexible, where furnishings can be moved about to accommodate different functions and groupings.
  • the learning commons is both a giant, ongoing conversation and a warehouse of digital materials
  • —from ebooks to databases to student-generated content—all available 24/7 yea
  • Imagine a learning environment in which the multimedia world of information fed individual students’ needs, and where on-demand digital textbooks/multimedia/databases are available 24/7 and under the control of the user.
  • examples of one-way communication.
  • But in the new learning commons, homework assignments and library Web sites offer two-way communication.
  • Directive adults have been transformed into coaches; direct teaching has been transformed into collaborative inquiry.
  • On another day, parents may be invited to the learning commons to observe a jointly designed medieval art fair created by a classroom teacher, the art teacher, and the teacher-librarian.
  • The experimental learning center aims to improve teaching and learning by offering professional development sessions and resources that are tailor-made to each school’s greatest needs.
  • The teacher posts assignments on a blog that’s linked through an RSS feed to individual students in the class, each of whom can access the blog through an iGoogle page or another personal home page.
Cathy Oxley

iPad Space Science Portal - 12 views

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    This is a wiki set up as a student-directed learning portal for Year 8s learning about space. It includes compulsory and free-choice activities. Students must accumulate 100 points. Analysis showed that student results improved significantly.
Katy Vance

What does a school library look like in the digital age? | Teacher Network | Guardian P... - 0 views

  • What interests me is not just the explosion of the printed word but the inspirational library spaces created to curate them.
  • As a space, it is about inspiring young people.
  • The senior school library continues the journey. Here we aim to combine the power of the story with a concept premised on the Cabinet of Curiosities. Curiosity in its purest sense where a student's learning is entirely unrelated to examination specifications and is encouraging learning for its own sake. The first cabinet being mooted relates to an evening next term where the films of Charlie Chaplin will provide both entertainment and a cultural reference point. Our Curator of the Cabinet of Curiosities is tasked with supporting this with the curation of a range of objects which will stimulate interest and encourage inquiry. Our approach is unashamedly about inspiring a love of learning.
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    What interests me is not just the explosion of the printed word but the inspirational library spaces created to curate them.
Allison Burrell

TeachLibrary - home - 1 views

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    "This space is for teacher-librarians to share their lesson plans and otherwise collaborate with each other. This space has been set up to follow the chapter headings from "Information Literacy for Life-Long Learning," the K-12 Library Scope and Sequence developed by the teacher-librarians of the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PA). (Please note that we begin here with Chapter 3, as chapters 1 & 2 do not require lesson plans.)"
Donna Baumbach

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (... - 3 views

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    "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States. Integrating twenty-three different case studies-which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups-in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis."
beth gourley

The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.
  • around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.
  • the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity
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  • second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
  • eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces
  • other reader's aids
  • codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
  • technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
  • fourth great change, electronic communication
  • movable type to the Internet, 524 years;
  • writing to the codex, 4,300 years;
  • codex to movable type, 1,150 years;
  • would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
  • Internet to search engines, nineteen years
  • search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years;
  • continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
  • continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
  • every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
    • beth gourley
       
      premise
  • pace of change seems breathtaking:
  • news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
  • News is not what happened but a story about what happened.
  • aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
  • newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
  • We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
  • as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission
  • Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
  • Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
  • When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
  • eighteen of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio had never before been printed
  • only two were reprinted without change from earlier quarto editions
  • extual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.
  • Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
  • They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
  • question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
  • o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
  • We have come to the problems posed by Google Book Search.
  • Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
  • will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
  • Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford
  • scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
  • notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
  • will make research libraries obsolete
  • 2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
  • 1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
  • If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
  • On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
  • For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
  • 3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
  • But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
  • Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
  • it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
  • Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
  • 5. Google will make mistakes.
  • Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better.
  • 6. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google's copies will last.
  • all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species
  • 7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
  • 4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology.
  • No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
  • 8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
  • ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
  • Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
  • Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library.
  • I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
  • he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
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    The library as citadel and as the open internet both play an important and distinguishable role.
beth gourley

Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010 - 10 views

  • Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
  • It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”
  • Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
    • beth gourley
       
      Good summary of differentiating library services and the need to accommodate staffing. Ultimatley makes for the teaching partnership.
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  • “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.” 
  • But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days. 
  • (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)
  • We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.” 
  • Libraries are also being used as social spaces,
  • In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian.
  • On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.
  • it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”
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    "This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information." "How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?"
Katy Vance

Learning Commons | NCSU Libraries - 0 views

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    Great example of a Learning Commons space on a university level
kathleen johnson

Ideal Library - 14 views

I am working on something similar, a potential article for SLJ. I can send a draft in about a week if you are interested.

beth gourley

"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" - 0 views

  • Social media is the latest buzzword
  • Web2.0 means different things to different people
  • Web2.0 was about the perpetual beta
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  • For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends
  • typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
  • ACT ONE : NETWORK EFFECTS
  • Friendster was designed as to be an online dating site.
  • MySpace aimed to attract all of those being ejected from Friendster
  • Facebook had launched as a Harvard-only site before expanding to other elite institutions
  • And only in 2006, did they open to all.
  • in the 2006-2007 school year, a split amongst American teens occurred
  • college-bound kids from wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook
  • urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and opted to stay with MySpace
  • At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site
  • the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout.
  • do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users
  • all fine and well if everyone can get access to the same platform, but when that's not the case, new problems emerge.
  • ACT TWO : YOUTH VS. ADULTS
  • showcases the ways in which some tools are used differently by different groups.
  • For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls
  • Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
  • dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena.
  • Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.
  • Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no.
  • many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue
  • We design social media for an intended audience but aren't always prepared for network effects or the different use cases that emerge when people decide to repurpose their technology.
  • The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users.
  • you are probably even aware of how inaccurate the public portrait of risk is
  • ACT THREE : RESHAPING PUBLICS
  • I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the crux of what makes the phenomena we're seeing so different from unmediated phenomena.
  • 1. Persistence.
  • The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.
  • You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it
  • 2. Replicability.
  • much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.
  • 3. Searchability.
  • Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips
  • 4. Scalability.
  • Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school
  • 5. (de)locatability.
  • This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.
  • Those five properties are intertwined, but their implications have to do with the ways in which they alter social dynamics.
  • 1. Invisible Audiences.
  • lurkers who are present at the moment
  • visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment
  • having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience
  • 2. Collapsed Contexts
  • Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
  • 3. Blurring of Public and Private
  • As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.
  • One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem.
  • Social media is not new. M
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    Important summary of how social media works for youth and adults, and how five properties and three dynamics have a systematic affect that we all must deal with.
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    Diigo in education
Katie Silva

Learning Commons - It's Not An Add On | Educational Leadership in the 21st Century - 0 views

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    Will be interesting to follow how this pilot project goes.
Robin Cicchetti

Do School Libraries Need Books? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • constant need to acquire new books
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Still need to acquire digital versions. The spending doesn't disappear with the paper.
  • more efficient to work online
  • went beyond stacks and stacks of underutilized books.
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  • Our library is now the most-used space on campus, with collaborative learning areas, classrooms with smart boards, study sections, screens for data feeds from research sites, a cyber cafe, and increased reference and circulation stations for our librarians. It has become a hub where students and faculty gather, learn and explore together.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      This is a perfect description of a learning commons.
  • But they need more help from librarians to navigate these resources, so we have also increased our library staff by 25 percent.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Relevance is what saves and builds programs and protects budgets.
  • Cushing Academy today is awash in books of all formats. Many classes continue to use printed books, while others use laptops or e-readers. It is immaterial to us whether students use print or electronic forms to read Chaucer and Shakespeare. In fact, Cushing students are checking out more books than before, making extensive use of e-readers in our library collection. Cushing’s success could inspire other schools to think about new approaches to education in this century.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Diversity of format, open access, increased reading.
  • Holding a book in our hands, we orient ourselves within a larger system.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Strong sensory and nostalgic connections to books and the idea of reading.
  • Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? How is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Is critical thinking enhanced by one format over another? I think these skills apply to all formats.
  • knowledge is proximate
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Why is knowledge proximate? Global awareness is a goal for every student. What about POV?
  • The digital natives in our schools need to have the experience of getting lost in a physical book, not only for the pure pleasure but also as a way to develop their attention spans, ability to concentrate, and the skill of engaging with a complex issue or idea for an uninterrupted period of time.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      It is possible to get lost in text, no matter the format. We see it every day. Students engrossed reading off their iTouch, desktops, laptops, Kindles and Nooks.
  • The printed word long ago lost its position of eminence in the American library.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      Studies indicate people are reading more than ever - but not from paper.
  • The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.
    • Robin Cicchetti
       
      So many references to the tangible experience of paper. Nobody comments on how heavy a book is, how you can't take that many on your suitcase for vacation because of the weight, or holding it in bed at night. If we are going sensory, I'd rather pack/hold a Kindle.
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    Debate on traditional vs. digital reading continues.
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