Six Researchers from Texas

My favorite session at the 3Ts conference yesterday was presented by six women (most of who were doctoral students) from Texas who came all the way to NY State to present their initial findings and future plans for studying the use of technology with K-12 students. I suppose I should confess right now that what I was most interested in was how they had decided to work as a team in addition to their own doctoral work. I think working as a team would be a great addition to my own doctoral program.

They described how they had been meeting monthly to discuss ideas during which they realized their shared research interests in technology and literacy. Eventually this developed into a collaborative research team. I thought, this is how it is supposed to be. I also liked how the presenters personal views & observations were intertwined with their research. On my way out I asked Merry Boggs (I just had a suspicion) if she was supervising some of the other women's dissertation work. She said yes, but in this situation they were all just members of the team. Nice!

I think we'll be hearing more from these folks.Session: First Contact: Working to Build Transliteracy Spaces in Classrooms
Presenters: Merry Boggs; Texas A&M-Commerce & Melissa Brumfield; Mesquite Independent School District, with Leslie Haas, Carrie Manning, Maribeth Nottingham, and Susan Williams; Texas A&M-Commerce

Transliteracy Conference

Today I attended 3 T's: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology and Transliteracy, a 1-day conference at the Fulton Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, NY. It was an interesting day, and the folks who arranged this deserve huge kudos for planning an event to explore transliteracy, which seems so potentially important to librarianship.

What I find the most interesting about transliteracy is that it plausibly explains how we engage with information in our distributed information landscape. I was a little concerned with how many of the conference presentations described literacy as outfitting one's toolkit with skills & abilities. Whereas it seems to me that we need to learn to use information and associated technologies in context - meaning in connection with what we are learning about (content). Teaching people to use information in context is necessary if we are to get discipline faculty to "get it" and to collaborate with librarians and others to help their students achieve it.

In one session, the concept of content was downplayed and processes and skills that enable one to "learn to learn" were emphasized. I don't disagree that we need to focus on process (I suppose I've made that clear in past posts), but I also think that content and process need to share the stage when designing learning activities.

Although I am sure I would disagree about the specifics, I thought the keynote speaker's (Dr. Thomas Mackey from Empire State College) recasting of information literacy as an overarching "metaliteracy" made a good deal of sense.

Now I am off to bed, for tomorrow holds the exciting promise of getting to analyze pilot data.

Informed Learning & the 6 Frames Workshop

Glynis Asu from Hamilton College and I had a great workshop introducing informed learning and the 6 frames to a group at Hamilton on Tuesday this week (3/22). I think it was made more interesting by the mix of librarians and instruction technologists that attended. Everyone was from Hamilton except for three librarians from other local institutions. I explained in an earlier post that the workshop was adapted from Hilary Hughes' workshop at Colgate. In the workshop, we asked folks to design learning scenarios that tie together learning to use information with learning new content (informed learning). The six frames then gave us a way of thinking about our own approaches to teaching as well as the pedagogic approaches of the teachers with whom we collaborate. We examined what the different approaches would mean for informed learning.

Best of all was the fantastic conversation we had at our working lunch during which people really started to delve into different ways of thinking about information, e.g., objective, scientific method, subjective, intersubjective, qualitative vs. quantitative, and so on. There seemed to be agreement that our students need to consider different ways that information can be understood. Another recurring theme was the need for students to use different sorts of information to more comprehensively understand and explain whatever they are examining.

At the end of the day, the group discussed the possibility of continuing to have meetings to discuss pedagogy and theory. I am really hoping we can make this happen! I think we do a lot of this kind of thing at Colgate, but I would relish the chance to continue building connections with my colleagues from Hamilton. They have this way of always making me think about things in a new way. My other Hamilton colleague & friend, Janet Simons, was for once not the first to say that we should have teachers at these events as well. I agree, of course - just like what we wish for our students, the more perspectives at the table the better chance we have of understanding things in new & better ways.

PS. I like the above photo one of my colleagues took at the workshop because of how it brings me, informed learning (the slide), and an ipad together in the same shot. A nice metaphor for what we talked about across the day, i.e., developing pedagogy that simultaneously focuses on people, ideas and technologies.