News from The Arthur Holt Library
This week, The Arthur Holt Library played host to a gallery walk for the Year 8s and their parents to help them choose their 25-hour electives for next year. The electives are a series of innovative, inquiry-based units that encourage creative and critical thinking and require the boys to work collaboratively. They range from designing a tiny house to videogame design and legal studies.
The library is responsible for both The Quest and Content Hub, both of which aim to improve students’ information literacy and independent research skills. In the Quest the boys move through the stages of the Trinity research wheel to develop a project entirely of their own choosing. The wheel is a visual representation of Carol Kulthau’s Information Search Process and helps to explain the stages involved in any research project, right up to the Extended Essay and the HSC Science Depth Studies.
Content Hub involves students compiling their own media site, which is then published and made available to their family and friends. The boys are invited to think of all the different media that are used to tell stories on modern news sites, and also to consider all the ways that news sites can manipulate and deceive us. The hope is that in learning how to create content, the boys also become more critical consumers of it.
Feel free to come in and ask our librarians about either course. We’d love to see more of you join us next year.
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” – Abraham Lincoln
