St Patrick's Day at SIS

The craic was mighty at SIS for St Patrick's Day. There was cake, traditional music, at least one real live Irishman and even a splash of Irish whiskey in a few of the morning coffees.

Lyn Hay presents keynote and JH Lee Award at ASLANSW State Library Day

Photo: (from left to right) Anne Lockwood (2007 NSW Teacher Librarian of the Year), Westley Field (John H Lee Memorial Award), June Wall (ASLA NSW President), Jennifer Watts (John Hirst Award), Lyn Hay (School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University)

Each year the Australian School Library Association (New South Wales) hosts a Professional Learning Day in the month of February at the NSW State Library. The State Library Day has a reputation for being a great way to kick off the academic year for school library professionals in NSW. This year was no exception with over 150 participants arriving at the State Library on Saturday February 23 to attend a variety of sessions addressing the theme 'Leading Learning ...into the Research'. Sessions explored practice informed by research on Web 2.0, graphic novels, podcasting, wikis and collaborative learning, YA Literature and the 'heart' of questioning. The title of Lyn's keynote was 'Moving beyond the rhectoric: What the research tells us about Web 2.0 & student learning'. Lyn encouraged those TLs and teachers currently integrating Web 2.0 technologies with their students to seriously consider building in an action research component into the design, planning and evaluation of these curriculum units to help build research evidence that clearly demonstrates how Web 2.0 supports student learning outcomes.

This event also hosts ASLANSW's annual professional award ceremony, and Lyn had the honour of representing the School of Information Studies in awarding the John H Lee Memorial Award to Westley Field, the Director of Online Learning at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in Sydney, for his outstanding leadership in learning technologies, and in particular his innovative vision in establishing Skoolaborate.

The School of Information Studies at CSU has sponsored the John H Lee Memorial Award since its inception in 2003. John Lee was a professional colleague and friend of the Teacher Librarianship academic team at CSU, and in the 1990s he was a member of CSU's TL Courses Advisory Committee. John was a passionate advocate for teacher librarianship, an innovator in learning technologies and was very generous in sharing his insights with the teachers, TLs, principals and ICT coordinators alike. For more information about the ASLANSW awards ceremoney for 2008, see http://www.aslansw.org.au/awards/