Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

Education; Technology; Digital Transformation; Information & Knowledge Management; Librarianship; Digital Leadership

Pleased to see a piece I wrote, looking back at the last year and looking forward to next year from an FE College Library perspective, has been published in the December issue of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals journal, Update. Unfortunately it is not one of the parts of the Update journal that is made available online – but I have reproduced a snippet of it here (presuming I hold my own copyright), without the misprints!

“The key document Leitch Review of Skills – Prosperity for All in a Global Economy – World Class Skills, published December 2006, very much shaped the thinking within FE colleges for the duration of 2007 and, it is likely to do so for many years to come.

While these policy level adjustments continue the librarian operating typically at a level once or twice removed struggles with the familiar problems of resourcing and promoting the library or learning resource centre. Structural changes to the organisation may or may not be appropriate, while the need for cultural change seems always necessary. The challenges presented by rapid technological progress are having greater impacts on service delivery. Yet librarians within the sector seem capable and keen to claim new territories. For example the ownership of the virtual learning environment, a key resource within a college, seems to fit best with the library, once the IT people get bored with it! This boredom often coincides with the realisation that VLEs need to be maintained and populated with learning materials. In the hands of innovative librarians the VLE can be developed rapidly and aligned with a growing range of electronic information sources.

With Facebook, together with YouTube, attracting much attention this year, the promised lands of Second Life are, for many in FE, still a curiosity and one can only speculate how such technologies will embed. There are serious issues associated with how such social networking tools might be deployed in an educational environment. Moreover their acceptance and recognition as tools for learning seems yet to be established. Early anecdotal evidence suggests that potential opportunities offered by these technologies may be missed due to traditional concepts of what the college library or learning resource centre “should be”.

With greater emphasis on independent learning, virtual learning and the proliferation of media sources those with good information literacy skills will succeed more readily in learning. The challenge for the librarian in FE for the coming year and probably far beyond is not only to provide the resource but also to ensure that the learner has the information literacy skills to access those resources in order to learn effectively.

Thanks to those Central Media Services people I have had the pleasure to play with this easy to use, sleek, very slim black number from PocketSurfer 2.

It claims to be the fastest handheld surfing device – and it is pretty nifty, that’s because it uses Quad Band GPRS -(mobile phone technology). The qwerty keyboard does take a little time to get used to but once youve overcome this it works a treat. About 5 hours battery life if you use it always-on and about 5 days on standby.

I used it effectively to browse to our college’s Virtual Campus and to check my emails, and although one would need to be  fairly nimble-fingered to write long sections of text using this keyboard, it does do the trick.

I think this, or its successor would be a good candidate for a pilot with a group of students perhaps those in a work-based learning environment where conventional web access may be restricted. Anyone with any further ideas or if you wish to trial the PocketSurfer2,  just contact me.