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I can’t believe it has been 10 months since I last blogged here.

Back at it!

This is the first day of the rest of my life – or of the next six years as I work toward another sabbatical. It doesn’t really feel like I left – I have been working most days in the office since I came back from Japan so it doesn’t really feel any different.

For many of you, today is the start of your summer – Canada Day being a transition day from school to vacation. Enjoy your time. I long for the days when, at least for a few short weeks, I could feel like I was “done.” I wish someone had told me that I would never feel finished when I moved from my teaching job in a junior high/high school to the university.

Watch the blog for news about the program and general information about the goings on of the TLDL crew.

Congratulations to our Diploima Graduates -
Daniela Cauduro
Vivianne Fogarty
Elaine Foxgord
Jo-Anne Gibson
Thomas Irwin
Arlene Lipkewich
Jeannette Revet

and to our MEd graduates
Patti Grabowski
Robin Sacker-van Gessel
Carol Tonhauser
Janice Sundar
Andrea Langelaar
Janene Cornwallis-Bate
Ronda Heit
Lindsay Ross

More to come about my sabbatical trips – perhaps this weekend if I find a few minutes.

Read Joyce Valenza!!!!

Hi everyone,

If you haven’t subscribed to Joyce Valenza’s blog – you must!!!!  Here is a link to her latest post that I think everyone should read and think about.  Enjoy (savour) -

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/90032209.html?nid=3714

Joanne are meeting with the Alberta School Library Council at the UofA today.  We are thinking of you as you enjoy a long weekend before life gets really busy again.

Jenn

IASL in Berkeley

Hi all from Berkeley and the IASL conference.  Dianne, Joanne and I are checking email at the conference.  We just had a wonderful breakfast meeting with Ross Todd, Ray Doiron, and Marlene Asselin chatting about things that are happening internationally and ideas for collaboration across the country.  What exciting ideas.

Joanne will present our paper on public libraries/school libraries this afternoon and tomorrow we do our research paper and workshop on Web 2.0. 

Last night we went to Chez Panisse and the food was fantastic and the talk even more so with Karen Bonano who is the Executive Director of IASL, Ross Todd and Marcia Mardis (who we are hoping will come to us at UofA in October as a Fulbright Senior Specialist).

The weather has been lovely and the conference location is gorgeous with lovely inner courtyard with tropical plants and a waterfall. 

Next year’s conference will take place in Padua, Italy and we are hopeful that it will be virtual as well as f2f so you might all be able to register. 

More soon.

Textbook information for Fall

Here is the information for materials for Fall 2008.

LIS 518 – Instructor: Gail de Vos (gail.devos@gmail.com)

http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/404518outline.cfm

EDES 540 – Instructor: James Henri (sjhenri@gmail.com)

Everhart, N. (1998). Evaluating the school library media center: Analysis techniques and research practices.

I have a list of people who are willing to lend/share or sell the Everhart book. Please contact me if you need one.

Asselin, M., Branch, J., & Oberg, D. (Eds.). (2003). Achieving Information Literacy: Standards for School Library Programs in Canada. http://www.cla.ca/casl/ailbook.html

Champion, C., Loertscher, D., & Miller, N. (2007). Sharing the evidence.

http://accessola.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/9781933170352.html

EDES 501 Exploration of Web 2.0 Instructor: Joanne de Groot (degroot@ualberta.ca)

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts (there is a new second edition available now but first edition is fine if you can’t get the second)

http://www.amazon.ca/Blogs-Wikis-Podcasts-Powerful-Classrooms/dp/1412959721/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216398079&sr=8-2

EDES 547 Instructor: Richard Beaudry (rbeaudry@ireland.com)

Haynes, Elizabeth. Fountain, Joanna F. (2005). Unlocking the mysteries of Cataloguing: A workbook of Examples. Ct, Westport. Libraries Unlimited.

http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/LU0080.aspx

EDEL 561 Instructor: Susan Gibson (susan.e.gibson@ualberta.ca)

The Curriculum Studies Reader – Flinders and Thornton (at UofA bookstore or through an online bookstore, if you prefer)

IASL Conference in Berkeley, California

Long time no blog!  I am so bad but am trying to get back into my routine.

The Edmonton gang – Joanne, Dianne, Lois and others – are off to Berkeley this weekend for the IASL conference.  We are really looking forward to it.

Here is the program and you will see why.  Lots of great sessions and interesting people to meet.  I will blog about it while there or when we get home.

Hope you are having a great summer.

Great video

Spend a few minutes watching this video.  Perhaps you can use it to educate your staff or at least start a conversation about the “image of the librarian.”

http://henrico.k12.va.us/hcpstv/vv_library.html 

Intellectual Freedom

As some of you start making plans to attend our summer course here on campus, here is an editorial from the recent SLJ that may help to start you thinking about some of the issues that will be a part of this course.

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6526712.html

http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/statementsif/librarybillrights.htm 

The Library Bill of Rights link doesn’t open in the article so the correct link is above.

This is a great video – Stephen Heppell was the keynote at OLA Superconference and everyone is talking about him. Here is Stephen talking about technology in education.

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2YCOhljF6U ]

Asking questions

I was just reading David Warlick’s blog and came across this information. This comes from Stephen Heppell’s keynote at the OLA superconference.

Heppell asked a group of students what a literate teacher should be able to do, and they agreed that a teacher should be able to:

• upload to YouTube
• edit a Wikipedia article
• choose a safe online payments site
• subscribe to a podcast and un subscribe
• turn on and off predictive text
• manage a groups Flickr photos (and spell Flickr!)
• look after a community in Facebook

As someone working with pre-service teachers, I would like to ask them the same question and then compare the responses. How many of them see these as new teacher literacies? And are we developing these literacies in any way in pre-service teacher education or in professional development in most schools.

And are these the literacies that we want our teachers to have? What else should be on that list. Maybe we need to start asking this question to a few more groups of people and then talking about this when we are developing a teacher education program.

And for those of you who don’t text message – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_text

Growing Up Online

This is worth taking the time to view.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/