From: Susan Daugherty <susaninaruba_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:18:04 -0800 (PST)

Got into the blog immediately, and wow, it's almost better than the article , although both are great.В  For the one dope who said why do grade sch ools need tradebooks, there are a slew of others who realize what's what. В  Go, readers!!В  After working with middle schoolers all day, who can be a bit blase about anything that isn't on Facebook, this article was a bit of a relief, I have to say!

Susan

Susan Daugherty, Middle School Librarian TASIS-England Coldharbour Lane Thorpe, SurreyВ В  TW20 8TE UK


--- On Thu, 2/11/10, Norma Jean Sawicki wrote:



From: Norma Jean Sawicki Subject: Re:
 School Libraries To: "Steward, Celeste" Cc: "CCBC" Date: Thursday, February 11, 2010, 11:58 AM

I am glad you found it interesting. Don't know if you can get to the articl e...there are about 90 comments to the piece and they keep coming. All and all...an interesting exchange. Try googling the name of the article/The New York Times and see if it gets you there...that's if you are interested! No rma Jean On Feb 11, 2010, at 12:51 PM, Steward, Celeste wrote: Norma—Thanks for passing this on—it’s very interest ing! В  В Celeste StewardCollection Development Librarian IVAlameda County Library2450 Stevenson Blvd.Fremont, CA 94538(510)745-1586 В В  В From:В Norma Jean Sawicki В

Sent:В Thursday, February 11, 2010 8:59 AM To:В CCBC Subject:В 
 School Libraries В From the New York Times...N orma Jean В February 10, 2010, 7:00 pmDo School Libraries Need Books?By В THE EDITORSAaron Houston for the New York TimesKeeping traditional sc hool libraries up to date is costly, with the constant need to acquire new books and to find space to store them. Yet for all that trouble, students r oam the stacks less and less because they find it so much more efficient to work online. One school, Cushing Academy, made news last fall when it anno unced that it wouldВ give away most of its 20,000 booksВ and transf orm its library into a digital center.Do schools need to maintain tradition al libraries? What are the educational consequences of havingВ students read less on the printed page and more on the Web? В James Tracy,В headmaster, Cushing AcademyMatthew G. Kirschenbaum,В English profess or, University of MarylandLiz Gray,В library director, Dana Hall School Nicholas Carr,В author, “The Big Switch”William Powers,В author, “H amlet’s Blac kBerry”Books in All FormatsJames TracyВ is headmaster ofВ C ushing Academy, a boarding and day school in Massachusetts for grades 9 to 12, with students from 28 countries and 28 states. He holds a doctorate in history from Stanford University.Cushing Academy’s decision to crea te a digital format for our library collection in no way signaled the end o f books at Cushing. Rather, it reflected the way students learn and conduct research today, as well as our belief that traditional libraries must be r eimagined to remain vital.It is immaterial to us whether students use print or electronic forms to read Chaucer and Shakespeare.Suzanne E. Thorin, the dean of libraries at Syracuse University, reached a similar conclusion whe n she said at theВ 2009 Educause Conference, “…we need to move on to a new concept of what the academic library is.” The l ast six months, with the explosion of e-readers and the rapid acceleration of digital technologies, have only validate d for us tha t we are ahead of a curve that will affect every institution of learning.A small collection of printed books no longer supports the type of research r equired by a 21st century curriculum. We wanted to create a library that re flected the reality of how students do research and fostered what they do, one that went beyond stacks and stacks of underutilized books. В We, th erefore, invited the chairmen of our academic departments to comb the stack s; books deemed worthy of retention were distributed to respective departme nts, while those not selected were donated to local nonprofits and public s chools.This freed up our beautiful library space to be used in a new way, a nd allowed us to rethink how a library for a 21st-century secondary school might be constituted. Some have mistakenly supposed that Cushing’s decision was intended to cut costs, but, quite the contrary, this was an investment of expanded resources to provide a new model of a learning comm ons at the center of an educationa l community.In planning this change, our key administrators traveled around the country to look at the best examples of how dynamic learning spaces work. Our library is now the most-used spac e on campus, with collaborative learning areas, classrooms with smart board s, study sections, screens for data feeds from research sites, a cyber cafe , and increased reference and circulation stations for our librarians. It h as become a hub where students and faculty gather, learn and explore togeth er.By reconceptualizing our library, our teachers and students now have bet ter access to vast digital resources for research and learning. But they ne ed more help from librarians to navigate these resources, so we have also i ncreased our library staff by 25 percent.Cushing Academy today is awash in books of all formats. Many classes continue to use printed books, while others use laptops or e-readers. It is immaterial to us whether stud ents use print or electronic forms to read Chaucer and Shakespeare. In fact , Cushi ng students are checking out more books than before, making extensiv e use of e-readers in our library collection. Cushing’s success cou ld inspire other schools to think about new approaches to education in this century.Proximate Knowledge, Online and in PrintMatthew G. KirschenbaumВ is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland and dire ctor of the campus honors program in Digital Cultures and Creativity. He is the author of “Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagina tion.”Do schools need libraries and do students need books? Of cour se they do. There are the predictable brickbats: Not everything is digitize d yet, nor soon will be. A screen is less conducive to deep concentration t han the stillness of the page. Bits are brittle.Walking the stacks can be l ike getting a glimpse of a Web site’s source code.I am among those who believe t hat in time, and maybe soon, these arguments will seem less damning than th ey do now. But I’m also aware of how deep ly books, and metaphors of books, have penetrated our design of digital documents and digital reading — whether we’re talking about Alan Kay’s vision of a “DynaBook” in the early 1970s, a Web “page†ќ (with its scroll bar), or the latest tablet device to hit the market.Bo oks and libraries are working (or living) models of knowledge formation. We need them for the same reason we need models of atoms and airplanes. They are hands-on. They are immersive. Holding a book in our hands, we orient ou rselves within a larger system.CloseWalking the stacks, following a footnot e or checking out what’s on the shelf above P96.T42K567 2007 is a b it like getting a glimpse at the ducts and plumbing behind the drywall. Or the Web site’s source code.Books, precisely because of their (literally) bounded limitations, teach us to ask questions that a re no less essential for the databases and deep archives of the online worl d: Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? Ho w is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?Even the grossest physical failings of books and libraries, the maddening frustration of the book that is lost or checked out just when you need it most can instill an important lesson: knowledge is proximate. In t he digital world, that proximity is less about geographical locale than abo ut licensing, digital rights management, and affordability; but all the mor e reason for students (and teachers) to know that not everything is always within reach of a mouse.21st Century LibrariansLiz Gray, a former English t eacher, is the library director atВ Dana Hall School, a girls’ school in Wellesley, Mass. She is the president of the board of the Association of Independent School Librarians.Just because there’s a lot of information online does not mean that students know how to find it , nor is the freely available information always the best information or th e right information. One of my pri mary responsibilities as a librarian is t o teach information literacy skills — defining research questions, selecting and evaluating sources, avoiding plagiarism, documenting sources — and in my experience this works best face to face with students.L ibraries need to hold on to things that work well even as they keep up with new technologies.That personal interaction is supported by the electronic availability of materials but is not replaced by it. Besides, no online col lection can replace the unique collection of resources that I have built ov er a period of years to serve the specific needs of my students, faculty an d curriculum.My other responsibility as a school librarian is to encourage reading, which all the research shows is crucial to student success. Focused, engag ed reading occurs with printed books, and far less with online material.Clo seUnlike a Kindle or a laptop, which may provide access to many books but i s limited to a single user, a printed book is a relatively inexpensive
 info rmation delivery system that is not dependent on equipment, power or bandwi dth for its use.Unlike Kindles or laptops, which are limited to single user s and depend on equipment and power, a printed book is an inexpensive infor mation delivery system.Research also shows that the brain functions differe ntly when reading online or reading a book. The digital natives in our scho ols need to have the experience of getting lost in a physical book, not onl y for the pure pleasure but also as a way to develop their attention spans, ability to concentrate, and the skill of engaging with a complex issue or idea for an uninterrupted period of time.Finally, we have many different kinds of learners in our schools, and we should be using many di fferent kinds of tools. The two Kindles that I purchased for my library are popular, but they have not taken the place of books, just as audio books a re not everyone’s cup of tea.That’s one of the beauties of libraries — we keep up with new technologies but we also hold on to the things that work well. Cushing Academy’s decision to dispose o f most of its library books unnecessarily deprives that community of an irr eplaceable resource. We don’t have to choose between technology and printed books, and we shouldn’t.The Medium MattersNicholas CarrВ is the author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.” His new book, “The Shallows: What t he Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” will be published in June.The printed word long ago lost its position of eminence in the American library . If you go into any branch of a public or school library today, you’ll almost certainly see more people staring into Internet term inals than flipping through the pages of books.RelatedNicholas Carr: Rough Type blogDepths and ShallowsThe Rapid Evolution of “Text”: Our Less-Literate Future (Encyclopedia Britannica blog)The Price of FreeIs Google Making Us Stupid? (The Atlantic)It’s hardly a surpri se, then , that some educators, librarians, and parents would begin to see books в Ђ” expensive, cumbersome, distressingly low-tech — as dispensab le. Once an oxymoron, the “bookless library” is becoming a reality.But if we care about the depth of our intellectual and cultural liv es, we’ll see that emptying our libraries of books is not an exampl e of progress. It’s an example of regress.The pages of a book shiel d us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging th e kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning.CloseWhen we read from the s creen of a multifunctional computing device, whether it’s a PC, a S martphone, a Kindle, or an iPad, we sacrifice that singlemindedness. Our at tention is scattered by all the distractions and interruptions that pour th rough our computers and digital networks. The result, a raft of psycho logic al and neurological studies show, is cursory reading, weak comprehension an d shallow learning.We may not want to admit it, but the medium matters. Whe n we tell ourselves that reading is the same whether done from a screen or a book, we’re kidding ourselves — and cheating our kids.A P lace to LearnWilliam PowersВ is the author of the forthcomingВ в ЂњHamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Go od Life in the Digital Age.” The book grew out of anВ essa yВ he wrote as a fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Cen ter on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.In times of rapid technological change, there’s a natural tendency to get caug ht up in the moment and believe the past is being completely swept away, al ong with all the technologies it produced. As one of the teachers at Cushin g Academy put it, “This is the start of a new era.”Books of fer a place away from the inbox, where we can go to quiet our minds and ref lect.Th is is indeed the start of a new era. Digital devices are transformin g how we live in all kinds of thrilling ways, and we’ve only begun to explore their potential. But embracing these new tools doesn’t r equire us to simultaneously throw out all the old ones, particularly those that continue to serve useful purposes. Who says it has to be an either-or decision?The idea that books are outdated is based on a common misconceptio n: the belief that new technologies automatically render existing ones obso lete, as the automobile did with the buggy whip. However, this isn’ t always the case. Old technologies often handily survive the introduction of new ones, and somet imes become useful in entirely new ways.CloseSeventy years ago, many believ ed the advent of television spelled the end of radio. Wrong. Likewise, the automobile didn’t kill off the passenger train. On this crowded, en vironmentally troubled planet, it turns out pulling up all those old rail l ines was short-sighted and dumb. So it goes with books. What are often consi dered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengt hs. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energ y just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the te xt. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to t ake over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.Moreover, I believe that in a hyper-connected a ge, the fact that books are not connected to the electronic grid is becomin g their greatest asset. They’re a space apart, a private place away from the inbox where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect. Isn†™t that the state in which the best kind of learning occurs?Copyright 201 0В The New York Times CompanyPrivacy PolicyNYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenu
Received on Thu 11 Feb 2010 10:18:04 AM CST