First day of lectures

The first full day of presentations at IFLA setellite at the premises of Tampere University took of on Thursday morning. The day was sunny but cooler that a regular August morning. If there has been something that has been helpful is that the librarians and teacher librarians world wide are strugling with similar problems. Good or bad?

The day started of with Elizabeth Stone Memorial Lecture held by professor Kirsti Lonka from the University of Helsinki. Her lecture was very inspiring. She was talking from university perspective but many of these things apply to earlier educational levels as well. She brought up that the learning models has to change as the learning environment has changed so dramatically. Not only the information environment but the physical learning environments has been subjects to change. We also have to adapt the ways of collective learning. That comes up also in the Finland's national curriulum. Blended learning in many different arenas is usual and we are in my own opinion creating physical/virtual learning commons for the whole school community. She also took up epistemic agency by Scardamalia 2002. Need to study on that to understand.

Interest is something that drives the students. It is not an emotion but a state of mind. According to a study by Alexander & Jetton & Kullikowich (1995), prior knowledge of an issue is related to interest experience. Students that show more interest are also more persistent. But is instruction promoting interest (Tsai et al, 2008)? Often the more control, the less positive the emotion. She said that cognitive autonomy support gives students an enhanced sence of control. This is very much related to Kuhlthau's ideas of giving room to students to develop these skills, not spoon feeding. Autonomy, agency and identity building are the subjects that has strongly risen this week and they came up in Kirsti Lonka's presentation as well.

Loertscher and Woolls in their presentation took up the subject of "invisible librarians". They had in their studies found out that librarians are often taken for granted and therefore also forgtten in a way. They see a way to get visible to become an actor in school virtual learning environments with a Knowledge Building Centers.

Elizabeth Greef has done research also in Finland. An Australian with strong Finnish roots was in Finland last year inspired by the PISA results. Her paper on Finnish school libraries and PISA is not yet ready but will be interesting reading when the paper is out. In Tampere she delivered a presentation and has a paper in the proceedings. Her presentation was about how to develop the collabotarion between librarians and the school community. She is building her study to the research done by Montiel-Overall. Things also discussed in the article include: pedagogical issues in collaboration(constructivism, IL, technology), mindset and different roles, micro and macro strategies.



 

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