Librarians and the changing education landscape...

After much discussion and research with Fran Skilton and Donna Salmon, on Wednesday May 13th a group of groundbreaking librarians met at Unitec NZ to delve more into what the learners of today could potentially be using for their research.

We started with an overview and introduction to the Moodle site that had been developed, and then moved into an icebreaker which included discussion around favourite food types (given that we were heading toward lunchtime) - there seemed to be a majority vote for chocolate!

After discussing Web 2.0 and what it is, we moved into the scenario of Susie, and then heard an excerpt from David Lankes "You are the Future of Libraries: No Pressure" who speaks about the future of libraries and the changing 'shape' of information literacy.

After some discussion about Susie and the video, the participants then organised themselves into groups of between 2 and 4, with a laptop per group and logged into Mindmeister. The remit was to mindmap issues, concerns, opportunities, potentials, required support around the library and meeting the needs of students such as Susie. After some initial hiccups with setting up Mindmeister accounts, everyone got up and running, and soon the mindmap started to take shape on the screen in front of us as people edited synchronously. It was superb to walk around and listen to the discussions that were happening around the mindmapping exercise, and also see what happened as people gained confidence – both in skills with the tools and communication within their group.

After a quick overview of the minmap, each group logged into the Libraries of the Future Ning community.

Summarising some of the key themes from the mindmap, people summarised their thoughts and added discussions, and then went on to add to other people’s discussions and started to answer some of the questions that had been posed. Hopefully, some of the other people in the international Ning community will also add to the discussions.

There are now discussions around a day-long retreat (with chocolate on tap) to explore the Web 2.0 tools, and to discuss potential initiatives for Unitec NZ library.