School librarians are gathering in Greenville, SC and across the country this weekend to learn about, discuss, and reflect on transliteracy in the 2012 AASL Fall Forum: Transliteracy and the School Library Program.  I’m joining the Fall Forum from one of four satellite sites – Pittsburgh, PA, at the Allegheny Intermediate Unit.  With me here at the AIU are school librarians, school library educators and practicum supervisors, and district-level technology and school library coordinators.

So as the attendees in Greenville watched Henry Jenkins and Kristin Fontichiaro yesterday afternoon, we tuned in from afar, and shared some rich conversation, questions, and idea-making with each other.  We’re deepening our understanding of “transliteracy”; from Gail Bush’s “The Transliterate Learner” in the September-October issue of SLM (p.5-7),

The learner who is transliterate builds knowledge, communicates, and interacts across a range of platforms, tools, and media.

Here in Pittsburgh, our group talked about new ways of interpreting and building upon David Wiesner’s Flotsam in geography and science; we reflected on what it means to “transliterate” in our practice; and we started to consider what it looks like in the school library to balance the structure of formal learning with the engagement of more participatory, informal learning.

We continue our learning this morning, and I’m looking forward to reporting back to you here on the SLM Blog.  You can follow the Fall Forum on Twitter with the #AASL12 hashtag, and you can follow School Library Monthly at the Fall Forum @SLMonthly.

Image: Copyright American Association of School Librarians.

–Rebecca Morris

The back-to-school issue of School Library Monthly is here. These words jumped out at me from the issue’s first feature article, “The Transliterate Learner,” by Gail Bush:

“This is a time when there are dire challenges, obstacles, and barriers to learning — something like all other times, but yet a little bit different. And yet, students always have the habit of growing up around us without pushing the pause button. The beat goes on. The luxury to be static, to wait and see what sticks, to feel paralyzed at the compressed speed of change doesn’t exist” (p. 7).

Gail Bush is, in my mind, one of the most lyrical writers in our field. Her closing keynote at the Michigan Association for Media in Education’s closing conference wove together metaphors, poetry, and literature. It’s a pleasure to read what she writes.
Bush, Gail. 2012. “The Transliterate Learner.” School Library Monthly 29:1, Sept. – Oct., 5-7.

Image: “Molly’s New Hobby” by Deanwissing on Flickr, used with a CC BY-SA 2.0 license

On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS – To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!