Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Ready or Not--New MLA


I'm not really sure that I'm ready for new changes in the newest edition of the MLA Handbook. We're not implementing them until the next school year, so that gives me a little lead time :) .

Joyce Valenza has just blogged on this topic, so I won't bore anyone (myself included) with the details here, but it looks like a combination of some very positive changes (no longer requiring writers to document the library from which they access subscription databases--yay! That is *such* a drag) and some less impressive ones (optional URLs? Not very practical for high school students and teachers--but optional sure beats eliminated...).

Anyway, here's the Purdue OWL's overview of the upcoming changes.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the database vendors change their citation content to reflect these developments.....

Monday, March 2, 2009

Glenbrook Institute Day

The institute day is only 1/2 over, and I already feel like posting about it. David Warlick was the keynote speaker. Inventing the incredible useful Citation Machine would have made him cool enough, in my book, but in addition, he is a very fine speaker. I was very impressed with his approach to teaching in the 21st century--focusing on skills rather than technology, per se. I think a lot of other educators believe the same thing but perhaps aren't as articulate (or engaging).

And he had a really gorgeous, really effective power point presentation, which unfortunately is all too rare, even with experienced presenters.

As a librarian, I was particularly interested in his assertion that one of the major components of literacy has to be evaluation of information. I felt it really drove home what I've been trying to share with students & teachers (and why). Having said that, I wonder if anyone else noticed the obvious library/information literacy tie-in ;).

Here's a link to David Warlick's blog.

Also, I enjoyed seeing the teachers playing Rock Band in the (beautiful) GBN lobby. Nice to see one's colleagues as "people".