Quiet reading for a hot day

Fire conditions across much of Australia are at extreme or catastrophic today, so if you are set for an indoors day keeping cool and safe, here are some articles posted in various places that you might like to read. Perhaps share your responses as comments.

Concentrating Class: Learning in the Age of Digital Distractions

The “Are Machines Making Us Stupid?” course challenged students to explore technology’s impact on their learning and their lives — and also taught the instructors a few lessons in the process.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention

There is a renaissance of interest in the catalog and catalog data. Yet it comes at a time when the catalog itself is being reconfigured in ways which may result in its disappearance as an individually identifiable component of library service.1 It is being subsumed within larger library discovery environments and catalog data is flowing into other systems and services. This article discusses the position of the catalog and uses it to illustrate more general discovery and workflow directions

Personal Learning Networks: Knowledge Sharing as Democracy

Are we more isolated despite our increasing connectedness through technology?

Comparing school library perspectives – Principal’s versus Librarian’s

An Australian perspective on an important article How Does Your Boss See You?: Proof That Principals Value Librarians Given the principal is one of the most important targets of TL advocacy this is a must-read-and-act piece.

“How well do young people deal with contradictory and unreliable information on line? What the PISA digital reading assessment tells us”

OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) National and International Surveys
“Results for the sample presented here, and for the similar tasks which were included .. show that tasks demanding any kind of disinterested evaluation are relatively challenging for 15-year-olds, and, those demanding the critical appraisal of texts for credibility or trustworthiness are particularly difficult ..”