Week 6 - Thing 15

Been giving LOTS of thought to Thing 15. I read most of the postings, looked around on my own, and have been thinking about this off and on for two, maybe three days. Well, I did go see Get Smart, Indiana Jones and the Nuked Refrigerator, and read The Pretty One, but I was thinking about this too. And what it made me realize is that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

The kids I work with have no concept of life without a computer. Our grandson, at two, turned on the TV and DVD player using the remote, put in the DVD, and pressed play to watch Miss Spider. Can he read? No, but he seems hard-wired to anything technological. The world these kids live in requires them to be technologically competent. We need to prepare them for their future, whatever that may look like, but it certainly is not going to look like our past. Earlier this summer I read the book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink. To summarize this book quickly, school and society, have celebrated the left-brainers and the right-brainers have been overlooked for too long. If his supposition is correct, and I do think it is, we have to radically change education, and the library along with it to prepare these students for their future by stimulating and promoting creativity, collaboration, communication, and computing skills.

Which lead me to the conclusion - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. For years I have been beating my head against the wall to have teachers schedule time in the library for research. Visions of showing the databases and the students preferring them over the internet and having wonderful, meaningful, relevant projects with real learning occur just never happened...often. What happened was I gave myself a bloody head, alienated some staff, and the kids kept using the internet. If you were at PSLA, Allison Zmuda annoyed many in the audience with her keynote address, if I remember correctly, by saying something to the effect of "Don't waste time stressing over working with the teachers. Work with the kids." When she said it, I was annoyed because we have worked so long to be seen as teacher-librarians and now what?

Well, the now what is teach the kids to survive in their world by preparing them to evaluate information. Try as we want, we are not going to have them stop using the internet. The important skill I am going to focus on is information fluency - author's purpose, accuracy, relevancy, currency. Sure, I can create links, provide databases, and buy books for projects, but does that really help them in real life? As Rick Anderson said, we cannot buy enough of books (they don't use them anyway), there is one of us (usually, if we are lucky), and they may or may not come (or their teachers don't require it).

Last year I had some conversations with darling seventh graders and asked them how I could improve the library for them. They looked around, and in that voice of a 13 year old girl, one of them said, "I don't know. There is so much woooood." Truer words were never spoken. As we brainstormed, they suggested that I move the fiction section to where the non-fiction section is because that is what they like to read, provide more comfy chairs for reading, and paint it lime green. (Building and grounds wasn't hot on the lime green) The rest I am going to do. I loved Dr. Wendy Schultz's comments after all of the technological changes, the library should be a retreat, a sanctuary, a pampered experience with information—subtle thoughts, fine words, ... rustle of pages.

Kids need a safe haven and someone to help them make sense of all the information with which they are bombarded daily. So much of what I now believe, and ultimately hope to implement and practice, is in this video from YouTube titled A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto.