Hands on Literacy 2012 conference, November 17, Singapore

Almost 300 delegates; 46 workshop presenters; two amazing keynotes and a great team effort. It was fantastic to network with colleagues from all over Asia and to be joined by librarians from The School Library Association of Victoria and elsewhere in Australia.
Workshops  catered for early years through to Diploma/senior years; catered for mainstream English to ESL and Special Needs; and of course Libraries.

 
Joyce Valenza as keynote cast a broad net of issues facing librarians and educators in a networked world - transliteracy and the need to be literate across different media; digital citizenship; the world of web 2.0 tools for active and engaged learners; digital curation and student-curators as well as educator-curators. What a generous and inspiring role model she is. Here is a link to her presentation.

Two things have happened this week in response to Joyce's presentation.

• 1. I have finally curated my favourite links in my Personal Learning Network, using a tool mentioned by Joyce - Bundlr. Here it is - My PLN.  I chose Bundlr because it has the layout I want to use to access my contacts, and also because it is social. So Denise in the Junior Library here is going to start one too, and as we share common professional interests, we can easily share what we find and like.

• 2. On Monday morning a colleague enthusiastically asked me to help her senior English class with a collaborative curation tool they could use to curate resources for their English task. Not all curation tools are collaborative, and again I used one recommended by Joyce - Mightybell. (our site is closed). She has enthused her colleagues in the English faculty, and now others want to join in.

I was really excited about this because I had tried earlier in the year to set up an online reading/responding space for my senior students using Ning. It didn't take off, despite my presentations and encouragement of faculty. One thing I learnt from this was that it's not about my timing, it's about my colleagues' timing.

 One of our Committee's goals was to provide a strong library strand for our ISLN network members. So,  two library-based keynotes that have broad teacher appeal, and a strong response to call-for-papers that addressed the uses of ICT, ways to engage boys (and girls) with reading, information literacy, library design, curation.
Here's a link to the programme.

Judy O'Connell's "Digital curation" presentation provided an excellent close to the conference, sweeping her audience to the future of web 3.0, the semantic web and grounded them with a conclusion that was a call-for-action - to embrace opportunities for new ways of engaging with learning technologies, the re-invention of learning.

 

Image courtesy Dimitrios journeys.

 Here is a link to Judy's presentation.