More Ross Todd on Transforming School Libraries
I spent some time tinkering with a personal summary of the “Big Ideas” on Guided Inquiry in the school library that Ross presented in his preconference session at the ECIS Librarians’ Conference in Berlin on February 28th. Unfortunately, I had initially marshalled my thoughts in a table form, and when I tried to import them to this blog, all sorts of things went wrong.
Fortunately, before I invested too heavily in trying to resolve the technical problems I was encountering, my colleague and co-attendee, Kim Cofino http://mscofino.edublogs.org/ posted an absolutely crystalline analysis of the conference.
More to the point, Kim proposes a number of strategies that are absolutely seminal to the teaching and learning issues at hand. Kim absolutely nails the rationale for Edtech Facilitators and Library/Media professionals (in whatever guise we see ourselves) to work together in a new model of collaboration which will marry the innovativeness and enthusiasm of the former with the experience and traditional expertise of the latter.
This frees me up to move in new directions with this blog. In the spirit of recent postings by Will Richardson URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First and ISB colleague Dennis Harter Is school curriculum still meaningful? I’m going to indulge in a bit of professional self-examination to see if I can develop a bit of that “network cred” that Will talks about. The question might be, “If a blog post exists in a blogosphere vaccum, do the ideas really matter?”
Meanwhild, a last note on Ross Todd. In addition to the Big Ideas noted in “A Side Trip…”, Ross went on to exhort School Libraries to:
- Offer effective alternatives to “cut ‘n pasting” strategies
- Move beyond the “scope & sequence” info literacy to “information to knowledge” strategies
- Develop Additive vs Integrative knowledge construction
- Be(come) zones of intellectual conflict, intellectual discontent, intellectual activism.
To get to the nub of the work on Guided Enquiry by Dr. Carol C. Kuhlthau & Dr. Ross J. Todd go to; http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided_inquiry/introduction.html .
All material presented at the Guided Inquiry site is copyright protected under Creative Commons
Rob, You would also be very interested (or maybe already know of this) in the wrtings of Jamie MacKenzie of From Now On (either fno.org or fromnowon.org. Google it. He write a lot about authentic assignments and the like.