ETL 401 Assessment 2 Reflection

As with many of those who have posted forum comments I'm happy with the result. I also agree that my marker's feedback was clear and helpful. There are two comments that I would make for the interest of those attempting this task in the future. The first is that two observations that I made about the practical use of the Information Literacy Models were questioned for not having a supporting reference. These were observations from my experience as a teacher. Obviously, I couldn't say, "From my experience ..." in such an assignment (it wouldn't be in the third person) but it appears that, even at this level, a scholarly paper must have more received wisdom than original thought and that critical analysis must carry the authority of published research rather than first-hand observation. I wonder if it would have been more acceptable if I had found the time to conduct my own research, following the advice of Ross Todd. One small postscript is that I used the term aspirational to describe the ASLA twelve standards, the later found an article in which the author of the standards used exactly the same term, so I added the reference. Does this make the observation any more valid?

I would, therefore suggest, that students select three Information Literacy models for which they can find published critical analysis. Obviously the ones that spring to mind are the Big6, Kulthau's Model and the Herring PLUS model. The Alberta model is another that falls into this category and is one of three that I chose. I obviously needed to make more of the studies of this and the Big6 (another of my choices) and less of my own critical analysis.

The second piece of feedback is that it's important to include specific curriculum-related observations in the analysis of the ASLA twelve standards. If these aren't apparent from the readings, then use the SCAN periodical which makes practical suggestions about teacher librarians and curriculum in just about every issue. In hindsight I would have said more about the collaboration of teacher librarian and class teacher in design, implementation and assessment of curriculum programming.

As always, I hope these reflections may assist others.