First of all, I really found the video interesting. It made me think about how I am preparing my students for college and the real world. I plan on showing this to my students when we start to work through the college essay/application in the fall. I think it would open up a great discussion of goals for the year and the future, as well as get a good discourse started on "why do we bother learning this stuff?"
There were many things I agreed with in the perspectives that I hadn't thought about before. I am saddened by what will certainly one day be the loss of books and libraries as we now know them, but a few of the ideas I read about made me feel a little better about it. One thing was mentioned in "Into a New World of Librarianship," when the author stated that Library 2.0 "makes the library a social and emotionally engaging center for learning and experience." This made me think about the ideas on commenting found in one of the earlier "things"--the fact that many people are able to express themselves more openly and honestly online, oftentimes because of anonymity or an alias. While that does have some negative side effects, I suppose this is one very positive aspect of that trend. People can connect with one another from great distances and relay information very rapidly. I can't help but be happy with that. However, I am concerned about the fact that there is soooo much information out there--how will we able to determine its reliability or not? I suppose the end of Chip Nilges's perspective answered that somewhat when it talked about specialized databases and the indexing of information. I'm interested to see some of the policing that I believe will eventually have to be included in the online world. I also wonder where schools will find the money for the materials and training, and how long it will take to make technology something that everyone will use to enrich and present their information to students, not just use it to make things look prettier or more professional, which is what sometimes happens when technology is only used superficially. I think our school libraries would benefit greatly from adding more technology asap, to really help prepare our students for the world they will be entering in the next few years.
Well, I do, too, but this is the odd thing. I went to a workshop by a university librarian. The subject was how we could prepare our students to research when they get to college.I thought the focus would be on technology, but it wasn't. It was about using note cards, etc. When I asked if most students didn't cut and paste on a document and do that sort of thing, the professor said that many university professors were not technology literate and still insisted on actual note cards. On the other hand, my sister teaches at the college level, and her system wants everyone to put their class notes online, their tests online, etc., and she says their problem is that the students don't come from technology-rich backgrounds and that no one is teaching the students how to use an online system. So, I think the job is one we cannot afford to ignore--for our students' sake!
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