Wednesday, July 19, 2006

IWIL 2006: Days 4-6

It's been a month since the workshop and I'm not yet done with my posts. I still have so much to write about but I simply don't have the luxury of time to post regularly.

Anyway, the last three days of the workshop were spent on developing informtaion litercay modules for the Malaysian secondary schools for the current school year nationwide. We were broken up into groups each with our own subject areas and I was grouped with Rajen from Singapore, Halida Yu a lecturer from UiTM, and Norsiah and Mashita from the Ministry of Education. We were assigned to develop a module on a topic covering Geography.

Comoing up with a module was really hardwork. We did a lot of thinking but it was a lot of fun because the textbook we were using was in Bahasa Malay and my groupmates had to translate the text for us. And I would have to thank Rajen, who is from the National Library of Singapore for his excellent facilitating.

We didn't use the Empowering 8 model but instead used a Malaysian one based largely on the Empowering 8 framework and other information literacy models presented earlier by Prof. Woolls.

After two days of wracking our brains coming up with a lesson, we were ready to present our finished products. And my contribution? I did all the encoding! I must admit I did not have much intellectual input because Geography happens to be my favorite subject (not!) so I just did what I do best, use the laptop to encode out outline for which I was appreciated.

There were still inputs from Dr. Diljit Singh and Assoc. Prof. Nor Exan Nasir both from the University of Malaya's Faculty of Information Management and Prof. Blache Woolls.

Dr. Singh presented an update on information literacy efforts all over the world particularly in the Asian region. Assoc. Prof. Nor Exan Nasir discussed researches on information literacy in Malaysia at the graduate level. The final input came from Prof. Woolls who shared some tips and strategies on implementing an information literacy program beginning with creating an awareness of IL to seeling an IL program by using rubrics.

After undergoing the workshop, my perception and understanding of information literacy has grown deeper and broader than just reading about it. I really hope that the leadership of the Philippine Association of Teacher of Library Science (PATLS) take on the challenge of coming up with a follow-up workshop this time for library educators.

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