Day One behind

And a great day it was! The morning took some personal effort but the day won. First off Eero Sormunen and Eero Ropo presented the Know-Id research project that is two-fold: the first sub-project is "Information literacy and Social media in school and beyond" and the second sub project is "Identity construction in collaborative media environments". The project combines the pedagogical department and the information science so therefore basically all the presentations involved also pedagogical and learning point of view.

Carol Kuhlthau's presentation was something I had been waiting for. She took up how ISP research got started and how she eventually continued to guided inquiry. It was interesting that when doing the research for ISP, she had selected top students to see if she would via these top students find a way to teach the weeker students in information searching. She expected the top students to be instinctively good at it but she find out that they struggeled just as well, they just hadn't shown it.

Kuhlthau's presentation ended to her latest book, " Guided inquiry design". That book is taking guided inquiry to practical level and giving instructions to implement it in teaching situations and in lessons. The book also takes the reader to guided inquiry via ISP which is the grounds for guided inquiry.

My presentation was the first research-in-progress presentation. I got good feedback after the presentation. Something that I started to think was Eero Sormunen's comment about how to take a load off the teachers, how could the librarians or school librarians in Finland be of help or of assistance for the teachers. The most interesting issues for me in guided inquiry are the concepts of third space which is situated between student's own world and the curriculum. This reminds me of the concepts in-school and out-off-school literacies and how to find common ground between these two and use that information and understanding in lessons. The other interesting concept is the 'zone of intervention', taken from Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD). Challenging in practice and according to Kuhlthau it would need a information professional, a librarian or a teacher educated specifically to research skills.

A lot was discussed by the coffee and lunch. Where to put the research skills, to teacher education? They have a lot already but having these skills in the curriculum already would defend that view. And in that way there would be the possibility of these skills to become a daily practice, hopefully. Or then more intense cooperation would be needed between schoold and public libraries, and maybe even cooperation between these institutions even in lesson planning. And that is not easy either...

Tomorrow time for more presentations, first a video lecture by Curt Bonk in subjekti: "How web technology is revolutionizing the world".

 

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