Global e-literacy: leading the reinvention of learning

On Friday I attended the SLAV conference; I'm always impressed by the quality of these conferences and the great networking opportunity it allows.  Friday's event didn't disappoint.  The day kicked off with a keynote address from Judy O'Connell.  I'd been following Judy for sometime on Twitter and so it was nice to place a person to the tweet (@heyjudeonline).  Judy assisted me in understanding Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality

AR is looking at a real world picture and seeing a modified version of this through a device like a smartphone.  I've had a bit of a look and experiment with "Spotcrime", which detects different crime hot spot areas, "StarChart", for identifying constellations, "SnapShop Showroom" for visualising furniture in your own home and "Acrossair Augmented Reality Browser" which has a surprisingly broad amount of information with everything from nearby restaurants, historically significant buildings and traffic info.   AR is really exciting and I can envisage many ways to enhance teaching and learning.

Jenny Luca spoke next and I was eagerly anticipating her presentation, (yes, I follow her on Twitter too! @jennyluca).  Jenny was straight to the point; she asked her audience what we were doing to make meaningful change to ensure longevity for school libraries and teacher librarians.  Jenny's discussion reignited the vision and I know our library needs to make our next game plan with a big focus on information literacy.

The sessions that followed morning tea were fabulous; roundtable discussions that focused on a particular topic, for instance Twitter, screen casting or Evernote.  I picked up a few ideas from Cameron Hocking at the screen casting table and David Feighan at the ebook table.  

Following lunch there was a panel discussion that included everything from lib guides to apps, curation tools and library design.  It really did prove that there is so much great stuff happening in school libraries and made me really proud to be a part of SLAV.

My only criticism of the day; I'm told repeatedly that we have to move with technology, embrace it, make it a part of our lives and our teaching.  And I wonder, what if we are already on board?  What is the next message?

Things to check out - 

All the presentations from the day:

http://www.slav.schools.net.au/slav.html

Jane Hart's top 100 tools for learning:

http://c4lpt.co.uk/top-100-tools-for-learning-2011/

Horizon Report 2012:

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/2012-horizon-report