Long overdue OLA post: part one

I attended the OLA Superconference and have been meaning to gather my thoughts, and post them for you, for a couple of days now. For those not in the biz, OLA is the Ontario Library Association, and the supercoference is huge, over 4500 attendees this year, all of whom have a connection to the library community.

The conference does maintain a website, where they will post the excellent powerpoint presentations from each session, however these are still in process.

So, here are my thoughts;

Wednesday - Day One:

I attended the all conference plenary with speaker Stephen Heppell, who was extremely engaging and had a lot to say about education reform and where libraries might fit.

He explained that he considers us to be at a crossroads between productivity based schooling and new approaches to education.

He cites the ability to personalize your educational experience as being essential to the creation of creative, innovative and inspired learners.

Libraries come in as a model of a user centered educational experience with features like open space, mixed age groups engaged in learning together and a project focus in mind when using the resources.

Heppell believes these ideas should be translated into the public school system and points to the innovations in the UK, which can be viewed in detail at: http://www.teachers.tv/

There you'll find online video and podcasts of what teachers and students are doing in modern classrooms. *Do a quick search for "library".

He also spoke of different learning tools, and asked 'what is the modern equivalent to writing a 1500 word essay?' (paraphrased)

He felt skills like creating and editing a 10 second video, managing an online discussion for a week or annotated 10 web links could be viable alternatives.

The basic question seems to be, What are we teaching our students and how do they learn?

Which he pointed out, is a question we have asked in libraries for quite some time.

He also spoke of his "Be Very Afraid" project. (link has been corrected)

This is an annual event, where he gathers students and teachers involved in digitally creative projects and lets them present their work to the media and government representatives.

Again, this is an example of customizing or personalizing education.

The rest of Mr. Heppell's projects can be found here on his website.

I was impressed by many of these ideas, as I have a strong interest in information literacy myself and I think the key idea here is to listen to your students.

Would this work in the province of Ontario...that remains to be seen.

Following the presentation, there was a reception, where I throughly enjoyed the selection of Hors D'orves and the company of a couple new librarians, like myself.