Mental Health survey and Information Literacy presentation thoughts
Thought some of you might be interested in this latest from the ABS blog, Statistically speaking - http://abs4libraries.blogspot.com/2008/10/mental-health-wellbeing.html
- has a link to the survey report, as well as a few findings. Latest overall view is that one in five Australians aged 16-85 years had a mental disorder in 2007.
In other news, I went to my first VALA meeting last night, and was treated to a fascinating presentation from Ilana Snyder - Literacy and Education in the Digital Age - in which she revealed she was a hardcore William Gibson fan (my interpretation of her words there), pointed out that the media has a tendency to either glorify or demonise new technologies, and queried the vices and virtues of ubiquitous computing.
She talked about using technology in teaching, and how difficult it is to find time to keep up with technology/education literature and strategies and teach the actual curriculum, and the value of teaching texts like "The ATSIC website" and critically evaluating it.
Maybe part of the problem is that the technology kids use at home is often (not always - there is still a 'digital divide') far more advanced than what is available at school. The kids who are interested in learning about technology may have already taught themselves more than the teacher can possibly manage with a whole classroom, even if they have made the effort to keep up personally.
Part of the point was that we need to teach critical evaluation of internet sources - not let Google spoonfeed us - and that the role of librarians as intermediary is being swallowed by this seemingly shallow google answers, wikipedia knowledge etc - and that the danger is not only are the sources of information not necessarily being quality checked, but the motivation of the provider is potentially not in the information-seeker's best interests.
Some of the audience considered that knowledge that did not come out of a written, physical text was unable to be synthesised, absorbed and considered in depth. That young people, because they are constantly connected, and absorbing information from little snippets, twitters, google first sentences, and so on, that they will be incapable of producing considered, critical thought later. Certainly some of the anecdotes in the audience suggested it was true (some of the 'live, it happened to me' anecdotes, not the 'i read somewhere...' ones). Of some students.
I was reluctant to interrupt and so didn't wind up saying much, but I was a bit ...offended I think, that these other professionals thought that someone like me (ok, so I'm 10-15 years older than the school students Ilana talked about, and 8 years older than the law students someone else mentioned) - but someone who lives their life as much on the web as off, who _does_ communicate with texts and instant messages and "blogs" couldn't possibly be absorbing any knowledge from them, let alone think critically about what I am learning.
VALA is the TECHNOLOGY group, for goodness sake. Do you think I subscribe to all those library blogs and newsfeeds for eye candy? I like to think I'm learning, and can synthesise my knowledge when required, but I also don't feel obliged to 'read deeply' when I'm reading a novel, like someone suggested we were also incapable of. (and by we, I mean Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives", people who use technology as a matter of course, everyday life, grew up with it rather than are challenged by it.
It may be that the lack of dissent about that general claim was some kind of group dynamics, or caused by other shy people, rather than a consensus among the others in the room that kids who use technology can't put two thoughts together to make a coherent phrase, but it was a bit...annoying.
Another point that was raised was that to engage a student's attention, we need to take lessons from video games, which are obviously very good at engaging the attention. Someone used a ludicrous example ('read somewhere') of how a few 14 year old boys were in a public library doing in-depth research into medieval weapons "because they needed to know that stuff to play ...World of Warcraft..." (bollocks) - but the counter-argument was that sure, they were researching stuff out-of-game which was good, but anything they learn in game would only affect a small part of the brain, not the 'deeper-thought' capable section. I bit my tongue. The literacies of WoW have no doubt been studied in depth by others, but off the top of my head, it requires reading (and encourages involvement in short snappy stories), map-reading, written communication with peers, and an understanding of group dynamics and responsibilities. At higher levels, geeks out there have done _hours_ of mathematics, independent in game research and testing to improve their in-game skills - you can't tell me all of that knowledge, all of that experience doesn't affect long-term skills in some way - and if you can't communicate with these kids any other way, why don't we use it more?
(Incidentally, mjdart bought a Wii last Friday, which I didn't know til Saturday night after speaking to sols_light about the possibility of trying out his first...got home and was told the boxes were next to the TV...heh. He wasn't allowed to buy it til my assignments were finished. so it's still in the box. I am quite surprised at this - I didn't expect that to last, but he's being good)
Hm. That got long. I was thinking hard all the way home last night, and then I vented it all out at mjdart I thought, but apparently I still had more. Oh well, hopefully some of you are interested in that too.
- has a link to the survey report, as well as a few findings. Latest overall view is that one in five Australians aged 16-85 years had a mental disorder in 2007.
In other news, I went to my first VALA meeting last night, and was treated to a fascinating presentation from Ilana Snyder - Literacy and Education in the Digital Age - in which she revealed she was a hardcore William Gibson fan (my interpretation of her words there), pointed out that the media has a tendency to either glorify or demonise new technologies, and queried the vices and virtues of ubiquitous computing.
She talked about using technology in teaching, and how difficult it is to find time to keep up with technology/education literature and strategies and teach the actual curriculum, and the value of teaching texts like "The ATSIC website" and critically evaluating it.
Maybe part of the problem is that the technology kids use at home is often (not always - there is still a 'digital divide') far more advanced than what is available at school. The kids who are interested in learning about technology may have already taught themselves more than the teacher can possibly manage with a whole classroom, even if they have made the effort to keep up personally.
Part of the point was that we need to teach critical evaluation of internet sources - not let Google spoonfeed us - and that the role of librarians as intermediary is being swallowed by this seemingly shallow google answers, wikipedia knowledge etc - and that the danger is not only are the sources of information not necessarily being quality checked, but the motivation of the provider is potentially not in the information-seeker's best interests.
Some of the audience considered that knowledge that did not come out of a written, physical text was unable to be synthesised, absorbed and considered in depth. That young people, because they are constantly connected, and absorbing information from little snippets, twitters, google first sentences, and so on, that they will be incapable of producing considered, critical thought later. Certainly some of the anecdotes in the audience suggested it was true (some of the 'live, it happened to me' anecdotes, not the 'i read somewhere...' ones). Of some students.
I was reluctant to interrupt and so didn't wind up saying much, but I was a bit ...offended I think, that these other professionals thought that someone like me (ok, so I'm 10-15 years older than the school students Ilana talked about, and 8 years older than the law students someone else mentioned) - but someone who lives their life as much on the web as off, who _does_ communicate with texts and instant messages and "blogs" couldn't possibly be absorbing any knowledge from them, let alone think critically about what I am learning.
VALA is the TECHNOLOGY group, for goodness sake. Do you think I subscribe to all those library blogs and newsfeeds for eye candy? I like to think I'm learning, and can synthesise my knowledge when required, but I also don't feel obliged to 'read deeply' when I'm reading a novel, like someone suggested we were also incapable of. (and by we, I mean Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives", people who use technology as a matter of course, everyday life, grew up with it rather than are challenged by it.
It may be that the lack of dissent about that general claim was some kind of group dynamics, or caused by other shy people, rather than a consensus among the others in the room that kids who use technology can't put two thoughts together to make a coherent phrase, but it was a bit...annoying.
Another point that was raised was that to engage a student's attention, we need to take lessons from video games, which are obviously very good at engaging the attention. Someone used a ludicrous example ('read somewhere') of how a few 14 year old boys were in a public library doing in-depth research into medieval weapons "because they needed to know that stuff to play ...World of Warcraft..." (bollocks) - but the counter-argument was that sure, they were researching stuff out-of-game which was good, but anything they learn in game would only affect a small part of the brain, not the 'deeper-thought' capable section. I bit my tongue. The literacies of WoW have no doubt been studied in depth by others, but off the top of my head, it requires reading (and encourages involvement in short snappy stories), map-reading, written communication with peers, and an understanding of group dynamics and responsibilities. At higher levels, geeks out there have done _hours_ of mathematics, independent in game research and testing to improve their in-game skills - you can't tell me all of that knowledge, all of that experience doesn't affect long-term skills in some way - and if you can't communicate with these kids any other way, why don't we use it more?
(Incidentally, mjdart bought a Wii last Friday, which I didn't know til Saturday night after speaking to sols_light about the possibility of trying out his first...got home and was told the boxes were next to the TV...heh. He wasn't allowed to buy it til my assignments were finished. so it's still in the box. I am quite surprised at this - I didn't expect that to last, but he's being good)
Hm. That got long. I was thinking hard all the way home last night, and then I vented it all out at mjdart I thought, but apparently I still had more. Oh well, hopefully some of you are interested in that too.