First of all, I want to thank everyone I have talked with this week. This conference has been an amazingly rich learning experience for me, and I haven’t seen a single presentation yet. I have learned from conversations with many very smart people.
Yesterday morning, I road to the conference center with a woman who is a school librarian in San Francisco. She was telling me how most librarians there serve several schools. It seems that they are lucky to have so many librarians, because San Francisco is funding many of them because of an explicit decision to serve student needs beyond reading, math, and science. In the rest of California, libraries are almost disappearing. And I know that this goes way beyond one state.
It’s easy to understand why. The library that people remember from their school experience (decades ago) seems to have less meaning when we have access to a global library of information with a mouse-click. But this logical piece of visionary budgeting misses an essential point in where education is evolving. When the child graduates, the teacher will be gone. The classroom will be gone. The textbooks will be gone. But for the first time in history, continual learning will be the ONLY road to prosperity. Teacher and classroom as the model for continual learning will be meaningless. Far more relevant will be the library and the skills that a talented librarian will help patrons to develop.
I’m not saying that classrooms and teachers are obsolete — BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT. Students should learn together. They should be guided, by the hand, into their future by caring and creative adults. But they should be equipped with the eternal skills required to continue to teach themselves. And the library is challenged to reinvent itself into a learning experience that is more relevant to today’s information landscape.
But anyone who believes that teaching reading, math, and science in a classroom is all that education is about — IS CHEATING A GENERATION. They should be banished from government in shame.
2¢ worth!
Technorati Tags: education, necc, necc06, necc06prep, necc2006, libraries, warlick
Finally, I got how to post on this. I’m copying what I wrote on my Many Hats blog:
I thought this quote was quite interesting:
“And the library is challenged to reinvent itself into a learning experience that is more relevant to today’s information landscape.”
Amazing how truthful this seems to be. As I said in an earlier post (on my site), I’m having to reinvent myself in order to justify my existence, even to get a budget. The library of the past is gone, but just as our teachers can’t teach in the same way that they did 10 years ago neither can the library stay the same. I’ve read and heard about the different roles that were outlined in Information Power and while those are a start, we need to really beef up on providing a coaching role for kids and technology. Even coaching our teachers. In David Warlick’s book Redifining Literacy for the 21st Century, he tells a story at the beginning about the changing face of literacy and education. The librarian in this story is a coach/teacher with the technology as well as a repository of information and such. It is quite a change from what I grew up with as a student. As a librarian, I feel that I have to reach outside my box. Just as the classroom is expanding beyond the walls of the building, I have to expand outside of my library. I have one teacher that asks me what I’m going to do when all the books in my library are replaced by computers. I keep telling him that my job changes. It shifts beyond the walls. So far, I think I’m doing a good job of redefining what a librarian does just within my building.
As a school librarian, the stories, about Google scanning into their databases the information from 6 major libraries, cause me to take a few seconds to pause and think each time that I hear it. As information becomes more easily obtainable, and the acquisition of information becomes more and more intuitive, I, of course, wonder what will become of my profession. It is perhaps worth noting that while educational systems seem to be reducing their use of school librarians, Google has initiated a newsletter for librarians. Google seems to recognize that librarian still has something to offer.
However, ironically, the constraints, placed upon librarians by school boards revolving around the issues of safety and appropriate viewing, place a serious handicap upon a librarian’s ability to teach the new skills required to mine and evaluate the evolving and readily available information. Students are bared from using real world search tools such as Google, and their searches are confined to safe reference sources approved by the school systems. While it is hard to fault the reasoning behind these prohibitive directives, they do seriously limit the librarian’s ability to instruct the students in the skills required to find information. Even more significant since the sources provided already contain information evaluated to be of value, the librarian’s ability to teach evaluative skills is greatly limited.
As digital replaces paper and search engines replace indices and much vaster amounts of information are provided with even a simply search, it will become more and more important to be able to teach information skills with the tools that will most generally be used to gather the information. Not only do school librarians need to change their instructional focus with regard to acquisition tools, but they also need to develop an approved approach that will permit them to teach the evaluative skills necessary to weed through the amazingly vast and diverse amounts of information provided.
After 25 years as a computer consultant, I returned to public education as the K-3 Library Media Specialist for the Grandview Elementary School in the East Ramapo School District, Rockland County, New York. After presenting a vision and goals for the library to the administration, I was given the freedom to overhaul the space and program. The library website tells it all — it’s my control center (www.grandviewlibrary.org). This summer I was awarded dollars for two grants. The dollars will be used to push technology into classrooms – Smart Boards, Digital recorders etc. We have 24 laptops for the building — but I will be getting another 24 for library use — no more dead batteries! I’ve never had so much fun — the kids are amazing, the teachers eager to collaborate, and the administration couldn’t be more supportive. This is a win-win-win situation.