Facing the challenges

It has been a slow week. Finding it hard to keep the motivation levels up at this stage, especially with weekends filled with travelling and weddings at the moment. Falling back into my old habits, spending too long doing things that I don't need to be doing, and finding any kind of distraction from what I should be doing. Hoping to get my brain back on topic by focusing it in this blog post.

I finally finished the readings for topic 1. At this stage I am not going to search for other relevant readings, and I feel that I have some catching up to do, and I need to make sure I am organised for my assignments as next week is going to be very challening, trying to study away from home (well, my current home, and I'll have my family around to distract me, and no James to keep me on task).

I am finding it a little difficult at this stage to directly apply what I am learning, to make comparisons and see what impact what I am learning will have. This is because I am not working in a library, and have not found the time this year to really get involved with one. I will now try to specifically apply what I have learned about digital citizenship so far to what I will do as a teacher librarian.

There are some particular things that I have learned about that I will cover here:

- Transliteracy: I will need to support students in applying literacy skills and learning to different kinds of texts and technologies. I expect to do this by:
+ Encouraging both students and teachers to try, and apply, new technologies/programs/Web tools.
+ Ensuring I have an up to date knowledge of these technologies.
+ Set a good example by showing my own transliteracy skills.

- Digital Citizenship: This is more than just participating in the digital world, it is participating responsibly. I expect to be a good digital citizen, and to encourage my students to be the same, by:
+ Adhering to, and advocating, the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship as outlined in Digital Citizenship in Schools. These could be advocated with posters, within lessons/units of work, and in discussions with students in groups or individually as issues arise.
+ Always showing my respect for others when online - thinking about how what I write/do may affect others, and making this thought process clear to students.

Forseeable challenges in the role as promoter of these things:
- Amount of time spent with each student - Would I have classes of students at specific times? What would be the focus in these lessons? How would digital citizenship skills and understandings be portrayed to those students who do not get regular library time?
- Teacher attitudes - Will the other staff in the school in which I work understand the importance of digital citizenship and transliteracy? Would they see it as something for the TL to deal with on her own, or would it be a whole school issue with the TL the leader to turn to for support and ideas? Ultimately I would aim for this, and would work towards it by educating staff over time if necessary.
- Facilities - What technologies will be available to students, and where? Will they have computer access in the classroom as well as the library? What will the student:computer ratio be? Laptops are a great way to combat this, especially as the become more affordable, and I would encourage this as an option, but obviously would have to find ways to work around this challenge depending on the situation.

This has been helpful - starting to apply what I am learning to what I may encounter in the future. I shall try to do this more in my blogs. Application helps the learning process.

Now, to move on to the next step and get some more reading under control.

References:

The Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. (2007). Digital Citizenship in Schools (pp. 13-37). International Society for Technology in Education.

Transliteracy

Quite the new buzz word. Or is it? The impression I got from the readings is that it has the potential to become one. It is a new word, for what seems to be an old concept. A concept that has taken place for years, but perhaps has not been put in a box like the term transliteracy tries to do. It is something that we do without realising, to different extremes, and is now coming to the fore because of the myriads of new platforms that we are using as a society, and thus the vast range of things we apply our literacy skills to.

Thomas et al describe transliteracy as:

“the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks”

So as you can see, only recently has 'transliteracy' become so widely relevant, and perhaps this has made it worth pulling apart and creating a word to describe it.

It is relevant to teacher librarians because it is something that we can support with our knowledge, resources and skills. Meredith Farkas writes of fears that it will become a buzz word that is only associated with teacher librarians, when in fact it needs to be applied school wide so that students are gaining transliteracy skills for life. I can see her logic, and feel that as teacher librarians we must make sure we are promoting these things (the important concepts we learn about, information literacy being a prime example, as well as transliteracy) as school wide endeavors where we are there to support everyone, but are the leader of a school wide team, rather than the only instigator.

It does seem a lot to think about, but then really transliteracy involves things we already do (or plan to do in my case) - ensuring that students have access to a range of literacies as listed in the description above, and supporting them in gaining the skills to tranfer their understandings between these different platforms.


References:

Farkas, M. (2010). Transliteracy from the perspective of an information literacy advocate. In Information wants to be free blog.

Thomas, S., Joseph, C., Laccetti, J., Mason, B., Mills, S., Perril, S., and Pullinger, K. (2007). Transliteracy: Crossing Divides. First Monday, 12 (12)