From Face-to-Face to Distance Education: The Story of Two Canadian School Library Educators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the story of two Canadian school library educators and their experiences in one online program over the past ten years. Beginning with stories from the authors own school library experiences and teacher-librarianship education, the paper moves on to explore the successes and challenges of an online teacher-librarianship program. The authors discuss the impact of technology on the learning and teaching experiences. They also highlight some tensions and challenges and opportunities for the future of school library education in Canada.IntroductionOnce upon a time, two little girls loved their school libraries and their teacher-librarians. But did they live happily ever after?Jennifer's StoryThe 1970s and 80s were the hey dy of school librarianship in Canada. Jennifer was able to learn from a wonderful teacher-librarian working full-time in her Kindergarten to Grade 8 Elementary School. In preparation for university, her teacher-librarian at Park Street Collegiate Institute in Orillia, Ontario, taught all students how to find articles in the Green Books (Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature), select relevant information, organize an essay, paraphrase, and correctly cite sources. While she didn't realize she wanted to be a teacher-librarian until after her education degree, Jennifer had wonderful experiences learning in well staffed, well-stocked, flexibly scheduled school libraries. Jennifer completed a Bachelor of Education degree in 1988 and spent two years teaching in remote Northern Ontario communities before deciding she wanted to be a teacher-librarian. To that end, Jennifer enrolled in the MLIS program in 1990 at the University of Western Ontario. If you wanted to do graduate work in 1990, you needed to leave your job and go to university full time. The Library School was a distinct entity (a faculty) within the university and there was no apparent collaboration between the Faculty of Education and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.The MLIS program prepared her for work in libraries in general but there were very few elective courses in the area of children's services and resources and no courses that spoke specifically to the role of the teacher-librarian. After graduating in 1991, Jennifer accepted a position as the teacher-librarian in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. It took only a few days to realize that she was unprepared for the collaborative program planning and teaching role of the teacher-librarian.To learn more about the role of the teacher-librarian, she enrolled in an additional qualification course (School Library Specialist) in Ontario. Teacher-librarians in Ontario take three courses (Part 1, Part 2 and Specialist) to become teacher-librarians. This one course, while interesting and more focused on teacher-librarianship and research in the field, did little to prepare her for building a quality school library program.Her interest in learning more about school libraries led her to begin a PhD program in 1995 in Aberdeen, Scotland and she completed her PhD in Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta in 2000. While a PhD student in Edmonton, she took her first online class in the fall of 2008 in the new Teacher-Librarianship by Distance Learning program and taught her first course (School Library Information Materials) in the summer of 1999 for the same program.Her first academic position (2000-2001) was at the State University of New York at Albany where she was hired to work with students who wanted to be school library media specialists. Many of the students in this specialization were not teachers. They were students who had a first degree (a Bachelor of Arts for many of them) who loved children's literature and wanted to be librarians in school libraries. Certification for school library media specialists required them to do a practicum in a school library for a semester and Jennifer was responsible for supervision of these placements. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".