Thing 16 – Collaboration tools

A particularly interesting thing as digital media has made a huge difference in the way we collaborate.  When I first started working in libraries you would have to hold a meeting, send documents by royal mail and use the telephone if you wanted to do anything collaboratively.  As you can guess this made it very slow and tedious.  Then we moved on to the wonders of telex and later fax.  I remember having to send faxes back to the UK from Cyprus and watching as the whole system crashed as you were half way through the process, never mind the occasion a colleague dialed the wrong code and sent the document to somewhere in Japan.

Of the methods listed on the RUDAI blog site I have used DOODLE and I  really must get to grips with Google docs, usually I use Dropbox if I want to share documents with people .  I like the fact that you have templates on the  Google docs site which gives some help when starting something new.  There have definitely been times that I would have found this very useful and I think that a good use now would be when planning  YLG training days,as we all live some distance from each other and currently use email to check documents.

I am trying to think if I can come up with any other tools that I would use for collaboration and it what circumstance they would be used and nothing is really coming to mind.  Although I have just come up with another use for DOODLE.  I am a school governor and although the meetings are planned in advance we sometimes have to change or add in dates.  DOODLE might be a quick and easy way of finding out when people are available.  I would be very interested to hear what other people do and what suggestion they have for collaboration tools

Some new MOOCs for you

Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing. (Coursera)  This has proved to be a fascinating course which is basically about working with children with dyslexia.  As a non-teacher it is great to see how the basics of phonics are taught and also to see how children can be helped in their learning.  The course does include an element of observation but it can be completed without this if you are not looking to gain a certificate at the end.

Powerful tools for teaching and learning: digital storytelling. (Coursera)  This is not something that I had really thought of before, but I agree with the title in that it could be a very powerful way of putting information across.  I am hoping to complete a short film for this (no more that 5 mins) and will try and embed it in the blog or provide a link if possible.  We have looked at choosing the topic and creating storyboards   There are some extremely useful video clips showing examples and also techniques.  This week we are looking at audio recording and then we will have to put it all together.  It should be fun!??

Parenting in the Digital Age. (Canvas)

There has already been a course on Childhood in the Digital Age, so this makes a perfect addition to the list.  there is a high incidence of child safety material which is excellent and I particularly like finding a resource called “Common Sense Media” that I had not come across before.  This makes you think about the resources available on line, the gaming, social media and how much time our young people spend using technology.

Developing your research project  (Futurelearn)  As we speak this course has been running for one week and there are another seven to go; rather a long course by MOOC standards.  However I get the impression that I am about to actually undertake a small research project during this time.  I  hope to add to this post during the next few weeks to bring everyone up to date on the subject and what i manage to achieve.

 

Thing 15 – Library Advocacy

Thanks to Barbara Band, who highlighted this on School Librarians Network,  I did this course on advocacy earlier in the year.

University_of_TorontoX: LA101x Library Advocacy Unshushed

 This was a MOOC that I undertook earlier this year after it was mentioned by Barbara Band, who is one of the guest speakers during the course.  Whilst this was run by a Canadian university there was still a huge amount of interest to those of us in Europe.  Perhaps some of the most important sections were when local politicians spoke about what gets through to them and what  they will give time to.

Advocacy is something that we have not been good at in the library profession.  we know what we do and how important it is, but we are terrible at letting others know.  We are also not good at saying how we can link in to the agendas that the power brokers have.  It always seemed to be “this is what we offer – take it or leave it”  Luckily we have moved on and are much more likely to work with colleagues in partner groups and organizations.  However I think many school librarians feel as if the struggle is still on to work with their teacher colleagues.

Maybe it is just me but since the advent of the world wide web it seems that everyone thinks they can be an expert. Of course if they put in enough time and effort then they can be experts, but I think  this thing of “anyone can do anything” can lead to all kinds of problems, not least being that libraries can be run by volunteers.  However that is one subject I am steering clear of today

One of the main things that the MOOC looked at was links to the community and this is also very much the central theme that David Lankes explores with his book “New Librarianship”, although it is old librarianship as far as I am concerned.  He has also produced a MOOC on the subject which uses his book as a framework, so it might be useful to people if it is run again in the future.

I am really looking forward to hearing other people’s views about advocacy as this is a topic relevant to all parts of the profession and hopefully we can all learn from each other.

Thing 14 – Augmented reality

I’ll admit this is something that I have not used before, although I did come across the concept in another course that I did last year.  My problem is that I am not a great user of mobile technology.  I have an iPad but my phone is just that.  I do not have a smart phone and cannot access the web from mine.  At some point in the past I decided that I wanted freedom from the shadow of the mobile phone.  My family will tell you that I am terrible about having the thing switched on and they can never get hold of me when I am out.  I do use my iPad quite a lot but it is for web searches, emails,  twitter, Facebook and taking pictures.  I have mentally assigned different uses for my various bits of technology and if I am using most digital tools then i prefer the laptop because of the bigger screen size.

I tried creating an ‘Aura’ yesterday and again today but I don’t think they were particularly successful.  Perhaps I need to see someone else creating them, or maybe it is just that I can’t see a use for the tool as far as my work is concerned.  Something for later, I think.