OSLA Awards

Marilyn Kogon: OSLA Award for Exceptional Achievement

Hetty Smeathers, Teacher-Librarian of the Year, with James Saunders,
Michael Rosettis and Michelle Regina

OLA Distinguished Service Award recipient Bobbie Henley
with colleague and best friend Jo-Anne LaForty.

How can I miss the opportunity of using this blog to congratulate our OSLA award winners. Hetty Smeathers, Teacher-Librarian of the Year, congratulations for your exemplary library program and dedication to your students and your profession.

Marilyn Kogon, congratulations on your Award of Exceptional Achievement, for your years of dedication to negotiating licensing for the benefit of schools with COOL Sector and your contributions on our behalf to Resource Ontario.

And Bobbie Henley, a special congratulations for your OLA Distinguished Service Award. You led us through the darkest hours of school library advocacy, and never lost your fire. What a leader!

Information Stimulation

I overheard a conference attendee complaining of information overload yesterday. I think overload is an attitude. Yes, every year I come to the conference I hear about all sorts of new and sometimes mind-boggling ideas, and the synapses sparking away keep me awake at night. But instead of interpreting that as overload, I like to think of it as information stimulation. What I try to do is to take those big ideas home with me, investigate further, learn how, make the connections to school library programs, and do my best to help others put ideas into practice.

So, here's my information stimulation so far for this conference:

Stephen Heppell has me thinking about teaching and learning for the 21st century. He has me thinking about a constructivist approach to learning in a knowledge-based economy. He has me worried about how we can get there, when our school system was designed for a nineteenth and twentieth century farming and manufacturing economy. He has challenged me and all of us, who he says are perfectly positioned in the school library to achieve this, to go ahead and demonstrate to decision-makers that this huge shift is vital. Hmmmm.....

Glen Murray has me inspired about how he sees culture and knowledge as the economic engines of our global cities. He and Ben Heppell have me thinking about the design of learning spaces. And they have me hoping that sometime in the not-too-distant future knowledge and culture will be valued far more highly in our society - a welcome change for a clarinet-playing school library consultant!

Cory Doctorow has effected a huge lateral shift in my understanding of digital copyright issues, and has me trying to sort out how I'm possibly going to get my colleagues at work to understand all of this.

Michael Rosettis' session on hot issues in school libraries has me blown over by the momentum that continues to build for improvement in the Ontario situation. A couple of years ago in a moment of despair, I remember OSLA Council almost believing that we had lost the battle. Hard to believe now, with so many positive developments!

And then there's technology. Yahoo Answers, flickr, you name it, I'm thinking about it. I've been flirting with flickr for quite some time now, and have resolved to take the plunge. I'm fascinated that there are quite a few people, it seems, blogging the conference, putting conference photos in flickr, and otherwise engaging in Web 2.0 to converse about it all. I'm thinking about how social networking could be applied to libraries, and am excited at the thought of Knowledge Ontario's Connect Ontario project going in that direction.

All of this, and there's still the top tech trends session this morning. Don't think I'll be doing a lot of sleeping this week, with all of those firing synapses!

Stephen Heppell Wows the Crowd!

OSLA spotlight speaker Stephen Heppell (in black) with OSLA President Michael Rosettis and conference planning committee members Pat Elliott, Bobbie Henley and Lisa Teodosio.

At most conferences I can identify that aha moment, when someone's new ideas take hold of my imagination and stimulate all sorts of new thought processes. This SuperConference didn't let me down on this front - in fact, there was more than one aha over the course of today. Clearly, though, the OSLA spotlight speaker Stephen Heppell was the inspiration that will motivate my post-conference learning journey over the next year. And I know that I'm not alone. The crowd at this morning's spotlight session was transfixed by his ideas about learning in the 21st century, and how libraries are so well positioned to transform our students' learning experiences. The follow-up break-out session was filled to overflow, with people fetching chairs from neighbouring rooms and filling up all of the standing room. Astounding stuff.

Congratulations to the OSLA conference planning team, for bringing Stephen to us. I think we should spread the wealth, and invite Stephen back as an all-conference plenary speaker in the future.

Visit Stephen Heppell's website at http://www.heppell.net/

OSLA Pre-Conference

I had a great time today at OISE for the pre-conference sessions. There were a lot of people there to learn all about the new Knowledge Ontario resources from Thomson Gale and EBSCO. The OSLA had pre-conference sessions on webquests and TuLiP, the teacher-librarian's planner. I had a great time with a large group in my session on podcasting. We even discussed posting some of their podcast creations on this blog, but alas, the production quality control problems of recording in a lab full of other people recording overcame the merits of the content.

Just to let you know, Tim, the TDSB crowd were fully engaged and extremely productive! ;-)