Feb 26 2009
Transforming school libraries – Day 7
This is my response to the thoughts going through my head after reading Ken Eustace’s Web3.0 presentation and Judith Comfort’s post. I am copying it across from Sosius as I am really tired today and I need to do something else!
If I feel up to it, I will try to sort out my ideas a little better.
I need to sort out a lot of my own feelings as I go through this course – my head feels like some kind of “ping-pong” game inside as everything bounces around in there. So some of this will be random:
Personally, I am becoming addicted to trying out new technologies – I feel that I am like a bee, buzzing from flower to flower, tasting what is there, but not lingering for long. Like the bee, I return “home” and try to create something out of what I have gathered – but unlike the bee, I am not sure how successful I am being. Most of this is working for me on a personal level, but I am not able in my present working circumstances to put any of what I am gathering and learning into a teaching context.
So, I have made a website – which I enjoy developing and using – but the majority of visitors are librarian colleagues. It is very early days as yet, so I should not really be too concerned, but I need to get it used by the school community. Am I responding to what they want/what is needed or am I trying to impose what I want to do on them?
On Meebo last night, I watched “A vision of students today” – video on YouTube. My son, who is 16, watched it with me. I thought about my own schooling. Did teachers worry so much about *how* I learned or how I spent my own time? Or did they help me to learn in a way they thought best? Did I learn a lot and leave school and university reasonably educated and ready for a life spent constantly learning? Was I able to read, find out, concentrate, think etc?
People describe today’s students working in the library – listening to iPods, accessing Facebook, texting – and oh yes, trying to write an assignment. They say we should be tapping into this way of working in order to reach students. I am not so sure. Are we going to create a generation of people who cannot concentrate on one thing long enough to actually develop their own understanding? Can they actually do any sustained reading when all around them is “chatter”?
So I come back to myself – I said that I am becoming like the students – I have so many websites open at the moment in the browser and I flit from one to the other, in between doing other aspects of my work. But, I had the grounding in the days before all of this technology. Our students are growing up in this world.
And then I look around my present library – soon to be re-furbished – and watch the students here who are using books to learn (as we don’t have any ICT in here as yet). And I talk to the staff, who, for the most part, do not even use email. So what do I do next? What kind of library do I want to create and what kinds of things will happen in it?
So, I have rambled on and asked questions rather than answering the ones I was supposed to! Sorry, but my mind is full of questions this morning…
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
I know what you mean by the ping pong head, full of ideas.
I was soothed a bit by your verbal snapshot of students working in a school library without ICT – I love the internet and use it every day, but I find it sad at school that so many secondary students (including my own children) now regard the library more as an additional computer room than anything else. So often the kids sit in front of a computer, bamboozled by thousands of sites thrown up by a search engine, when there is a book on the same topic within metres of them; containing the information they want, carefully researched, verified and synthesised by someone who really cares about a particular subject.
I will be fascinated to see how student information-seeking evolves. I can’t work out whether to be envious of the enormous world of information that today’s children have access to, or to be sympathetic with regard to the challenge of sifting through it. Both perhaps. Either way, school librarians have an amazing role to play.