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I find the question of how my views, knowledge, and understanding of my work as an education professional in digital environments incredibly hard to answer with any sort of clarity. I’ve been a teacher-librarian for more than 30 years now. Fads come and go. Education ministers make changes to curriculum and funding that rarely benefits learning. Technology changes. And changes and changes. A good T-L is learning, changing, and growing all the time but the changes are often small – a tweak here, a nudge there. I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know already about digital environments. I did get to think a little bit more deeply about some aspects of my job, but, as usual, there just isn’t enough time to do the subject justice and really dig deeply into each module. Something I’ve come to realise from doing this subject (and from the whole course) is that the online subjects for the Master of Education, Teacher-Librarianship have way too many readings, which encourages skimming the information rather than really digesting it. This has translated into my work as an educational professional through a critical examination of the amount of content we provide in schools. There is a lot of pressure to read novels and research and ebooks and audiobooks and analyse and examine and critique and write and speak and … I realise that I’d rather my students enjoyed reading for pleasure and got to really practice it, to focus on a single text and really understand it, to be shown some skills and have a chance to really hone them, than stuff their heads full of content and hope some of it ‘sticks’.
The feedback from my blog about my digital storytelling proposal (Farquharson, 2022) was generally encouraging rather than critical. One question from Daniel in relationship to the audience and the content: “…, we might want a little older audience than year 3.” (comment 2), reminded me that I needed to more explicitly explain the framework of the IB MYP and how it applies in the Australian context, specifically that “Year 3” is a stage not an age, and relates most closely to Year 7 & 8 in Australia.
On the same blog post, Emma suggested investigating Google Slides as a possible platform (comment 1). This comment turned out to be somewhat prescient. As I was frantically trying to get the digital story I had constructed using PowerPoint software owned by my school to “share” (and work properly!) for this assignment, and finding it extremely frustrating because my work OneDrive is entirely restricted from outside access, there was a definitely part of me that was cursing my choice to stick with PowerPoint. I did eventually find a way to make it ‘play’ correctly – I hope! – which was to embed the file code in a blog post: a neat solution in the end as it collected all parts of this assessment into a single platform. And ultimately, having a ‘best’ version that works the right way every time for my students in my situation is optimum in the long run. As previously noted, in a content-heavy curriculum, having resources that work first time every time allows deep understanding to flourish appropriately.
Which brings me to the reliance on functioning digital devices and platforms that education has developed, for better or worse. The ability of computer failure to significantly affect the flow of and access to learning was no more starkly apparent to me than when my laptop virus checking software decided to block access to all websites regardless of ownership, location, domain, or security during the final weeks of ETL533. Trotter (2000) discusses TCO or “total cost of ownership” and the downtime lost to under-performing hardware and software and to a failure on the part of organisations to plan effectively for redundancy and innovation. It follows that, when evaluating any resource, the TCO should be taken into consideration. Purchasing a book has a well-known and easily quantifiable TCO – locate and purchase the resource, process it for access and longevity (time and materials), ongoing maintenance, for example repairs and shelving, and eventual replacement. The ‘platform’ by which a book is delivered to users as a resource is stable and reliable and library staff understand this.
When it comes to digital resources, however, things are not so predictable, and library staff will continue to grapple with this into the future. Very often, library staff do not have the skills or understanding of the total cost of owning digital resources and, in some cases, are actively excluded from decisions about laptops, software, and platforms at a whole school level. Without collaborative discussions and investigations into the architecture of the digital resource, library and IT staff may make decisions that will prove costly in the short- and long-term, and which can also prevent great resources from being shared with learners and teachers. It is imperative that library staff work in collaboration with IT professionals to make resourcing decisions that can be delivered seamlessly to the learning community.
Farquharson, M. (2022, 9 Oct). ETL533 Assessment 3 – Digital Storytelling Topic Proposal. Libraries for Life: A Learning Journey. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/miffyf/2022/09/05/etl533-assessment-3-digital-storytelling-topic-proposal/
MYP: From principles into practice. (2014). International Baccalaureate Organization (UK).
Ramesh, R. D. (2019). What is Enterprise Architecture (EA) and why is it important? YouTube. https://youtu.be/9TVc32M_gIY
Searle, S. (2018). The Benefits of Enterprise Architecture for Library Technology Management: An Exploratory Case Study. Information technology and libraries, 37(4), 27-46. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v37i4.10437
Trotter, A. (2000). With Greater Reliance on Computers Comes Bigger Questions [Article]. Education Week, 19(25), 14. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=2893350&site=ehost-live