Debbie will be giving a keynote and conducting one session at the Ventura County Office of Education tomorrow, October 3rd. Then its on to Portland on Thursday, October 9th for the OASL/WLMA Conference, where she’ll be doing one of the extended sessions (9 am - 12 pm).

Who Knows What …and How Do I Know it?
Students make judgments about authority in their everyday lives, but don’t necessarily transfer this to evaluating online sources. We’ll look at the relationship between trust, expertise and authority in the real world, the academic world and in the new permeable Web where learners expect to create information and construct knowledge, not just consume it.

Beyond Cut-and-Paste: No More Cat and Mouse, Revisited
You’ve been telling your students not to cut-and-paste, but are you teaching the specific skills they need to avoid plagiarism? Do your students (and do you?) know the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing? Do they know how and when to quote a source directly? Do they recognize common knowledge? Do they understand how to develop their own opinions and voice? Constructivist, student-centered teaching ideas and documentation strategies for your information literacy curriculum.

Debbie will be presenting at IASL in Berkeley today (Sunday, Aug. 3) from 1-4 PM.

Seeding the Oyster: Leadership Through Dialogue
Marilyn Kimura and Debbie Abilock, Room 104
You’ll recognize the names of these discussion groups: Socratic seminar, Literary Club, Harkness Table, deliberative dialogue, professional study group. Yet few librarians have used them as advocacy tools to build learning communities in support of literacy and collaboration. We will provide an opportunity for you to experience several types of inquiry discussions using provocative texts, photographs and film clips. As you learn discussion, reflection, and facilitation skills, you will see how nurturing inquiry and intellectual dispositions can seed your leadership in the school community.

Debbie spoke in two AASL/ISS sponsored sessions at the ALA Annual Conference last week, one on visual information literacy and another about ethics in a Web 2.0 environment. Thanks for attending, and to those of you who came by to say hi!

Visual Literacy Ain’t Just Watching Ads: Decoders, fluent readers and finally expressive readers and writers — these stages apply to visual literacy as well as to reading print. In an image-drenched world, we’ll look at the rhetorical situation of an image, examine some signs and symbols, and see how point of view is created by interaction of the reader, audience, and medium. We’ll consider some emerging issues and teaching strategies for various types of images.

Ethics in the Age of Web 2.0: The ALA Code of Ethics for Librarians has served school and youth services librarians for almost 70 years. How has it supported the intellectual freedom of school and public library youthful users? Does it continue to offer us the guidance we need to face the new challenges and new roles we face in a socially networked, repaidly changing digital world? What needs updating? What’s missing? What has aged well? A panel of experts, library educators, and practitioners will discuss ethical issues associated with social technologies, privacy, intellectual property, cesorship, access to information, leveling and labeling a collection, and selection.

Debbie will be giving the keynote at this year’s Maryland Assoc. of School Librarians Conference, held on October 18th and 19th in Ocean City, MD.

http://www.mdedmedia.org/MASLConferenceFlyer2007Color.pdf

Debbie will also be presenting in a conference session: Beyond Cut and Paste (Session 2, conference room 5/6). In addition, Anita Anderson, media specialist at Thomas S. Wootton High School (MCPS), will be holding a session on… NoodleTools! That talk is being help during Session 3 in conference room 4.

Debbie will keynote this year’s NYCSLS Annual Fall Conference on Oct. 26th (Secondary) and Oct. 27th (Elementary) at Queens College.

Description: From Novice to Expert: Teaching Inquiry Research will identify some misconceptions about the research process that are common among naïve thinkers of all ages. Debbie will suggest ways to design learning experiences and develop student questioning skills so that novices confront their (mostly unexamined) ideas about research and develop a complex understanding of the process.

Debbie will also do a note-taking workshop on both days. For information, please see the link from the NYC Department of Education library services Web page. Hope to see you there!

Debbie will be presenting at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this Saturday, October 7th @ 9:00 AM.

Beyond Cut-and-Paste: No More Cat and Mouse, Revisited

Description: K-12 librarians teach note-taking as a discrete set of skills like learning to paraphrase or quote, and to document sources correctly. However, aligned with online and print reading comprehension strategies and inquiry learning, the teaching of note-taking and note-making offers rich opportunities for students to think critically and reflect across the entire information literacy process.

Conference Web site

Debbie presented to a packed room at NECC on Friday (”Beyond Acceptable Use: Developing and Implementing a Plagiarism Policy”). Click here for an overview and links to more information.

Update: A good summary has been written by Suzanne Porath on her blog.

At the Computers in Libraries (CIL) Conference in D.C. Carolyn Karis presented a case study of her school library at the Urban School of San Francisco and explored the challenges she faces and the success she is achieving in a 1:1 wireless laptop program. Then Debbie put this description into the larger context of the effect of ubiquitous computing on the school librarian’s role, the library’s physical and virtual “place” and programs.

• Powerpoint presentation (4.8 MB) — also available from Urban School
• Annotated handout (115 KB) — also available from Urban School

Debbie Abilock will be presenting at CIL on March 23, 2006 — come and introduce yourself!

School Libraries on the Move! Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Librarianship, and More
10:30 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. March 23, 2006
Debbie Abilock, Editor of AASL’s Knowledge Quest and Co-Creator of NoodleTools, Palo Alto, CA
Carolyn Karis, Teacher-Librarian, Urban School, San Francisco, CA

A wireless laptop is not the same as a pencil and paper. A 21st-century school library is not the same as a 1990s school library. Nor should it be. This session explores the impact of ubiquitous computing (iPods, wireless laptops, Wi-Fi, Google, handhelds, etc.) on the school library and librarian. Some of the underlying questions of the session include: What is a school library? What is the relationship between the physical facility and the virtual library services? What does the wireless laptop school look like? How does the school library function in this environment? What cutting-edge technology applications are emerging and how will the school library be impacted?

Link to conference program (PDF)

[tags]cil2006[/tags]

Just back from giving a general session keynote and two other presentations at the New Jersey Association of School Librarians Fall 2005 Conference, Debbie Abilock is now attending the Connecticut Educational Media Association Conference. She’ll be giving the keynote address on Monday, Nov. 7 @ 9:00 am (Doorstops, Elephants and Cheesecake). Then at 1:45 pm, she’ll be presenting Online Reading Strategies in an Information Rich Environment. Stop by and say hello if you’re attending!

Doorstops, Elephants and Cheesecake
If you find yourself facing elephants more often than creating cheesecake, it’s time to look into the collaboration refrigerator and identify what to throw out, what to snack on and what to take time to prepare well. A practical workshop on developing a strategic school wide plan for collaboration.

Online Reading Strategies in an Information Rich Environment
Our students and staff use the Internet daily to answer personal questions, solve practical problems, do their school work and accomplish goals. New technologies demand new literacy strategies from our students. Learn to teach the strategies that good readers use along with critical information literacy skills in order to help students construct meaning and analyze information in an online environment.