By Peter Murgatroyd

The annual Learning@School Conference run by CORE Education was held in Hamilton 26-27 January. With a focus on integrating new technologies to empower learning and transform leadership, the Conference, while targeting school leaders, principals, teachers, and ICT and technology advisers, is an excellent professional learning opportunity for school librarians and one that I would encourage colleagues to consider in 2013.

With more than 1500 delegates, inspiring and challenging keynote speakers from New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, dozens of breakout sessions and workshops, a state-of-the-art conference venue with ultra-fast wireless access enabling a myriad of parallel conversations happening via social networks, Learning@School 2012 (#lats12) was both invigorating and exhausting.

Participation in the Conference was an invaluable opportunity to look at schools through the lens of teachers and school leaders to better understand their challenges in the face of what Mark Treadwell described as a perfect storm of change that is causing educators globally to rethink what education for today’s students should involve.

The themes of the Conference were:

• Develop leadership capability
• Foster creativity in thought and action
• Raise achievement for all learners
• Build school, whanau and community partnerships

There were a number of common threads that ran through all of the keynote addresses. Ideas and glimpses of new ways of thinking not just about the impacts of far reaching changes in technology but arguably more critically about changes in the way that students are learning and interacting with the world, deconstructing how we think about our learning environments, our relationships with our students and the notion of what it is to be a learner, a teacher, a librarian.

Common threads included:

• the shift to personalisedlearning environments
• a focus on building competence and confidence in learning how to learn
• empowerment of our students
• providing a supportive, inclusive environment for students that recognises and builds upon their strengths and abilities
• preparing learners to be agile, creative and able to respond to an ambiguous and rapidly changing world
• teachers as enablers and facilitators
• thinking beyond institutional and geographic barriers and embracing a global vision of collaboration and partnership

It struck me how closely the conversations reflected the dominant ideas and values at the forefront of transformational thinking about twenty first century libraries. There is much to be gained in engaging in conversations with our teaching colleagues to explore new models of collaboration and new ways that the library can support new and emerging teaching paradigms. There is a great deal we can learn from one another.

Conferences such as these often pose more questions than answers. Indeed Christian Long challenged delegates to embrace the notion that there are no clear answers and that all that we can really do is to foster a culture that encourages divergent thinking and an ability to test ideas in messier and messier ways.

Participation at Learning@School was also an invaluable opportunity to engage with our teaching colleagues on new ways of thinking about libraries and literacy. Five separate workshops and presentations were facilitated by National Library Services to Schools staff and there was a vibrant presence in the Exhibitors hall promoting EPIC, Any Questions and Curriculum Services.

It continues to be vitally important that librarians are visible and engaged in the wider education debates that are shaping our schools, that we articulate our visions and ideas, and that we seek to understand the key trends in education that are likely to impact on the work of New Zealand teachers and schools in 2012 and beyond.

• Learning@School 2012 Conference blog
• Learning@School 2012 video channel
• Presentation by Lisa Oldham: The connected school librarian
• Core-Eds Ten Trends 2012