| The Musings of a Future Librarian |
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I just found a nice simple way to describe today's library. "...libraries are no longer "grocery stores" where students can go to pick up ingredients, but "kitchens," where they have the resources necessary to create a finished product" (Valenza in Ash, 2010).
Ash, K. (2010). School Libraries Seek Relevance Through Virtual Access. Education Week, 29(21), 10-11.
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This is an imitation of the Common Craft "in Plain English" videos. Very clever!
In reading about collection management for my ETL503 class, and in combination with some of the research topics proposed by students in EER500, I've come across a few thoughts on the topic of eBooks and young readers. There's no denying the increased amount of digital resources available through the internet and through our libraries today. The question for many right now is, are we losing our physical paper resources? Are digital resources taking over?
Personally, I think about this too. We have a ton of physical books on our personal bookshelf. However, I rarely read them. We've purchased a Kindle from Amazon and use that quite a bit. With my studies at CSU, I rely exclusively on digital materials... well, aside from textbooks I'm required to purchase. If I can get them digitally, I would do that instead. I read all of my articles online (pdfs), so finding a good pdf reader that I can mark up as if it were paper is particularly useful (I use an application called Skim right now). However, I depend on my laptop to read my course studies. It's not always convenient. I'm still looking for a better solution. Transferring my pdfs to my Kindle is not worth it. The text is just miniature and difficult to work with. Not an ideal study solution. I tend to believe that libraries will go more and more digital. Will they rid themselves entirely of books? Some libraries are. My instincts tell me that we might be able to go more digital (I think we will), but I'm not sure if this is a good idea for young readers (children under about 10 years old). I think digital reading should be phased in around 8-9-10 years old, and that they might not need physical books as much, say around middle school or high school. However, for young students, I think that being able to navigate the whole page, flip pages, feel the pages, point at the words, etc. is very important. eReaders lack some of the things that books have. Fuzzy images, colorful illustrations. My 1 year old loves to touch the fuzzy snowflakes and open the flap books she has. We can't do away with that. I'm curious to know what some of the research says out there. There are some fellow students in my EER500 class (research methodologies) who are interested in that topic. I am too, but I am choosing a different topic (I think). One of my classmates in ETL503 asked: "would it really matter if your child sat on your knee and shared beautiful illustrations and rich language that happened to be on a Kindle? Do literacy practices really require real books or could the same be achieved using an electronic device?" (Gilchrist, S., ETL503 forum posting to Module 2 on Nov. 24, 2010) Something I've said in response was: "When asked to think about eBooks, I am not entirely convinced that going electronic is best for our youngest readers. I have a 1 year old and she gets enjoyment out of touching and feeling (remember the texture books too) her books. For older and capable readers, I think ebooks might be okay though. eBooks are just so new... I think a Kindle is blaaahhhh for little kids (I have one). However, something as colorful and sharp as the iPad might be a better alternative. But yes, access is such an important issue. It's still in its infancy and constantly changing. I don't think we're very close to a standardized ebook format yet either. That's yet another hurdle. There are some people in EER500 looking further into the research on eBooks and young readers. I'm curious to learn about the information they find." Having watched the video 21st Century Learning Matters, it has made me think about what I have been doing as a classroom teacher at my most recent school. While I still have a lot of room for improvement, the video has helped me realize that my teaching has been going in the right direction.
I have been teaching the Primary Years Program (PYP) of the IB (International Baccalaureate) in grade 4, and the skills for 21CL (21st Century Learning) are a core part of the PYP. We have worked hard to focus on what we call transdisciplinary skills that fall into categories such as social skills, thinking skills, communication skills and so on. What I have especially learned to be more valuable is the fact that we focus on key concepts for a central idea or central theme. These concepts push the learner to extend his/her learning. Generally, the key concepts are things such as connection, responsibility, or perspective, which encompass higher level thinking skills than simply gaining knowledge and facts. All of this is embedded into the PYP, but it is a challenging process. I feel that having had this experience as a classroom teacher gives me a strong edge into seeing how the teacher-librarian can contribute to this educational challenge. In the video, Randy De Hoff said, "We can't do it all the way we've been doing it." I wholeheartedly agree, but it still raises the question, "so how do we do it?" |
