It’s been so energizing to watch the transformation sweeping through the campus and watching changes that perhaps it was hard for us to really envision until we saw it happening.

Suddenly, we can be almost paperless, the internet is everywhere in the building, and students can have the tools they need for the jobs they are doing.   They can work, explore, play, share, and study in a new way, as can the teachers.

It’s improved the workflow for everyone, since email is always accessible wherever we are(not to mention Facetime and other apps).   It’s creating a much more paperless environment, even within days, as teachers post their handouts and students read them online instead of printing them out.   It’s creating an organizational system for students as they keep their schedules on them and notes to themselves.   It’s created endless ways for them to create and collaborate and share.

As a librarian, I’ve played fly on the wall, and watched like a sociologist how students are using them in an unstructured environment, and so far, have been really pleased with what I’ve seen.   I’ve watched in two days the students put their iPads to a million different uses, from using Latin dictionaries, to studying their physics lab, to making a list of homework, to playing collaborative Scrabble, to photographing each other’s faces and using apps to play, to reading and highlighting a book, to playing games.

But also as a librarian, I’m really fascinated with how this might transform our library and what it looks like and is.    This really challenges my notion of what library is–stares it smack in the face.

We’re planning to purchase Overdrive, which will give us a small ($2,000 worth) collection of e-books that students can check out with the iPad app.   But what if I could provide most of the library that way?

We have lots of computers in our library, both in labs, and in the main library–what if the uses they were meant for before aren’t needed anymore?   We designed our space to be future proofed and flexible 3 years ago, but did we not see far enough ahead?  (I had asked for some walls to be sliding glass, but didn’t get as many of those as I had hoped–for that very reason–so we could open spaces up in the future if needed.)

We withdrew a huge section of literary criticism last week to make way for our iPad help desk in the library that will be staffed by students and because the information can be found in our databases.   A teacher just brought back a mobile laptop lab which she’d had in her room because “she doesn’t need it anymore.”

But libraries, though we are about a place to locate stuff, are really about being the guides to the “stuff.”   Being the “help desk” of sorts for questions, information seeking, serious research, project creation, and ideas.   Being the reader’s advisory–there are many good websites for that, but I know they can’t size up the student like the one I saw yesterday and in one minute know that Red Pyramid is the right book, and then watch the student exclaim Rick Riordan is my favorite author.

What I know for sure is that my head is still spinning thinking about what will change, and how to grab this change by the horns and create what our evolving library will be in the future.

So as I create iPad app recommendations and form app sharing groups, and still check out physical books, and navigate the 200 students who use our library every day at lunch, and help students navigate the information they need for papers and projects, this is what I will be thinking about.

But…what a difference one day has made.  And I know, as librarians, we all need to be thinking about this, because your library CAN change in just one day.

Teacher Anthony Cody(of Oakland, Ca)  has written an impassioned piece regarding this whole “packaged narrative” that  many of us find ourselves so frustrated about.

He writes:

“That narrative goes like this: Our schools are failing. The only way to save them is to expand charters, remove due process for teachers so they can be fired, and further raise the stakes on standardized test scores.

But ideologically driven projects like this have a way of over reaching, over-promising, and overestimating their strength. . . .

They begin with the fundamental problem the education reform movement faces. We are more than 10 years into a massive reform effort revolving around high stakes attached to standardized tests, and there is no significant growth in actual learning — even in terms of the test scores most valued by proponents.”

The rest of his article is well worth the read whatever your viewpoint and is both a great summary of the problem with this pre-packaged, already decided agenda, and a good call to action as well.

Perhaps what is bothering me most about what I’m hearing from Education Nation is that this narrative is what the summit seems to be built around.  I had my own hopes that a summit like this could be an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at something and perhaps with many varied voices, shift the paradigm and open up new insights.

There are things wrong in schools, but perhaps some of the things wrong aren’t going to be fixed by an increased focus on achievement tests and scores.  And if we are continuing to tell the story as everyone already knows it, then where is the new insight or understanding?

Take a look at Cody’s essay–what do you think?

 A recent post by Jon Becker, “Who are the Thought Leaders in Educational Leadership?” reminds me of that rarified space where two  entities mingle and create something new.

In his post, Jon challenged education leaders and scholars at the university level to connect with the social network of educators around the country.  

Partly why I haven’t been able to quit thinking about  his post was that I consider myself a pretty well-informed high school educator–I purchase professional books for our library all the time, attend ASCD occasionally, read incessantly and widely, and yet I didn’t know ONE name on his list of  influential education leaders.  

I think it stunned me because in “Twitterland” I find many of us working together or in separate strands loosely joined to change what education looks like.   We talk, share resources, read each other’s blogs, read articles when links are shared on Twitter, do our own research in our own spaces and bring that back to the collective forum.  It stunned me because I realized after reading his post how much ’we’ are leaders in education–grass-roots, collaborative, networked leaders.  And if we aren’t familiar with their work–and I warrant many of us are not, then there’s a disconnect.  

How can you be a leader in education when you are this disconnected from the very teachers who are “recipients” of your leadership–practitioners at the building level all over the globe?   Don’t you need to reach out and take a pulse of what is going on in classrooms?  and what better place to get a lead on that than listening in on blogs and Twitter or Plurk or Ning or whatever networks you might choose, short of visiting actual schools?  How much are these leaders missing out on by not being a part of and publishing in these grassroots forums?

And how much more enriched our own online networks would be and can be by having a variety of collaborators–from k-20.  How much are we missing from having these leaders participating with us on many of these networks?   I think of leaders like Alex Courosa and Scott McLeod, as well as Jon, who invite our networks into their classrooms and how much I have learned from them.   If we are all (whether networked or not) interested in understanding, changing, and improving what education looks like, isn’t it incumbent on all of us to meet each other in accessible spaces–in the “blur,” so to speak?

Following on the heels of Jon’s post, Will Richardson twittered the fascinating New York Times article, “Scholars Test Alternative to Peer Review.”    The article shared similar points raised in academia in terms of peer-reviewed journals and how the rapidly changing web environment is pushing at those walls. 

“Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”

As a high school librarian teaching students about peer-reviewed journals all the while seeing students’ visible confusion that academic sources are more “walled-in” than the sources they typically encounter on Google, this makes absolute sense.   Especially for leaders in the field of education, which stands on the brink of transformation because of the web 2.0 “revolution”, wouldn’t swift sharing of information and accessibility of new theories be important?

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

Again, these changes in publishing drive home the very point both Jon’s post and the New York Times article make–that for me as a librarian and educator, it’s critical for me to stay “connected” so that I am teaching my students the most current and relevant skills for their lives beyond our high school.    I wouldn’t have been introduced to these education leaders, nor seen the NYTimes article had it not been for my own network.

It’ll be fascinating to see what happens as these rarified environments become more openly a part of the ‘free web’ and what will result in the “blur” as we all mingle our ideas together.

Photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancesphotos/2286244078/sizes/z/in/photostream/

This is a key dilemma facing educational leaders, from Arne Duncan to campus level principals.  How do we step outside of what we know so we can experience it in a new way?   And how can we get new ideas when we are so immersed in day to day management of our own districts?  On Scott McLeod’s annual Leadership Day challenge, it’s about challenging the status quo just because it is the status quo.

I’ve been catching a few “guilty” pleasure episodes of “Wife Swap” this summer, a show where two wives change families for two weeks.  At first it takes time for the families to adjust to the eccentricities of another family but by the end of the two weeks, there’s frequently a great deal of paradigm shifting that occurs.

Now I’m not suggesting principals swap schools for two weeks(though perhaps that would be fascinating), but it brings to mind how important it is for leaders to truly step out of their own bubbles to gain some different perspectives and solutions.  And there is no area where this is more true than technology implementation at a transformative level.

Visiting other innovative schools very different from ones’ own is a really important way to step out of the bubble (schools like Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, or High Tech High in San Diego, or the Blue School in New York City, for example).   It’s hard to “rethink” school without seeing some sense of what that could look like.

Another way to “step out of the bubble” and see anew is to look outside the school “world” for ideas. In a recent article in American Libraries “10 Tips for Tracking Trends” Elizabeth Doucet demonstrates how looking outside for trends and then bringing them into your institution in another form is a very viable way of “seeing anew”.   You can use sites like Trendspotting’s blog to follow their “Trendoscope” or “list of Trends blogs“  to keep yourself aware of current trends, or set up custom keyword search Google alerts to email you trends and ideas.

Often we wait until we see inspiring presenters like Michael Wesch to “hear” about trends, but why not bring them to our doorstep ourselves?  Follow a “trends” site on Facebook, for example–find a way to have the information arrive on your doorstep and then read it.  Of course it’s not about the trends, it’s really about bringing new thinking in, and then considering–what does this mean for school?  What could a trend like this look like in practice?

When I was remodeling our library, I found that I started looking for examples of design everywhere–every storefront window, lighting fixture in a restaurant, color scheme in a store, accessory in Ikea spoke to me because I was looking at them differently.  I was looking through the merchandise and at the design itself.  My purpose changed my vision.

Take this sort of vision out into your regular “world” as regards technology–spend a weekend in public places just listening and watching how people are interacting with technology in their natural environments.  Thinking what your student/teacher interactions could be if they were functioning at that “natural” a level of technology use.   Walk in any Apple store and just watch what is going on.  What would it be like to bring that sort of excitement into your classrooms.  Go to a children’s museum or art museum and watch how people learn there.

Think of the best workshop experience you ever had and why it was engaging.  What if your school’s classrooms felt like that?  When you watch your favorite TED Talk, why does it engage you and enthuse you so much?  What about that can you bring onto your campus?

At your own campus or another one, be a student for a day or a teacher for a few days.  Walk in their shoes in terms of technology and just pay attention only to that aspect of the experience.  What are the frustrations, successes, and obstacles?  How are the “rules” obstructing experimentation, constructivist learning, or enthusiasm?

It’s daunting to think of changing a traditional school but it starts with daydreaming, envisioning, opening up to the possibilities.  It starts with loosening up the bonds that bind us and just allow ourselves to see.  And seeing anew breathes fresh enthusiasm into leadership that the whole school can feel and experience.

Think of any way that you can bring fresh eyes to what you do.  That’s the only way we can escape the “Curse of Knowledge” and really think about transformative school change.

photo credit:

Not only are we hearing this message from outside of the profession, but we are also hearing it in our own messaging within the profession.  I think my biggest objection to this line of thinking is that it doesn’t honestly reflect the complexity of changes going on inside libraries or information management today.

Our role in the new media

 An excellent article in the current issue of Harvard Magazine , Gutenberg 2.0 offers up fascinating insights into the  evolution of library services, as so many of us in the field try to look forward and consider what the future of library services for students and patrons might look like.  Changes in media are affecting all of our services, and the way we interact with print and with our patrons, as Dan Hazen of Harvard College points out.

“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

I love the wording he chooses here–that materials can be assembled to support and sustain meaningful inquiry.  When we are working with students, while we both acknowledge and value the contributions of Google to our ability to offer resources to students, we also know that it broadens their choices in a somewhat haphazard fashion with little structure or form.  (Which of course can be a good and a bad thing.)   As users, web 2.0 tools allow us to impose our own structure and organization to those materials, which is a plus in terms of flexibility.  But when working with  students whose ability to sort flotsam from jetsum is somewhat unsophisticated, this can be challenging.

Hazen puts it eloquently:

“Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. ‘What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,’ says Hazen, ‘is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’”

As school librarians, we see a tremendous need for helping students sort through that “universe at their fingertips” environment(as do their teachers).   How do students recognize signposts that something is a blog site or a biased think tank or a fradulent site?   How do they sort the ephemera from what’s important on topics they only understand at a surface level?   At the school level, students may be savvy at the tools themselves, but the thinking involved in really analyzing, evaluating and sorting through information are learned, not innate skills.

Hazen goes on to discuss another dilemma our students face as readers–in traditional print sources (newspapers, magazines, books) information was organized on the page in a purposeful way, often in context with other articles or chapters to build a sense of a whole work.

“When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with. . . .”

And where does this leave us as librarians trying to help students make sense of this environment?   Hazen  :  “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”

Embedded librarians?

Some of the Harvard libraries (as we all are) are trying to sort out what that future looks like, both in terms of dealing with the changing organization of the actual materials and in terms of the use of research materials and the librarian’s role in that.

For example, Isaac Kohane, director of the Medical Library at Harvard Medical School, sees a troubling weakness in the abilities of medical professionals to plumb the mounting amounts of information available to them primarily because they aren’t familiar with the ways to extract that information from databases designed to collect such specialized content and in some cases don’t even know these databases are there for them.  This realization has led to:

“growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.”

Embedding information searching abilities and knowledge of databases right into the core content of the field reflects a change in librarianship that Harvard is seeing in another areas as well.   Librarian and law professor John Palfrey “scrapped the entire organizational structure”  of the Law Library.  All the librarians turned in their resignations for new roles and the library started over, embedding librarians within the law school, some teaching research alongside professors, some developing new technologies to sort and organize legal data, etc.

Palfrey, who once headed up Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society comments:

“The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” (italics mine)     Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries.

It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”

The executive director of knowledge and libraries at Harvard Business School, Mary Kennedy “sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students.”  “We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”

During a Twitter discussion a few days ago, two of my education colleagues suggested a model of librarianship(and tech coordinator-ship) that were more embedded.

A model

This concept of embedding librarianship within departments is intriguing at best, but problematic from a pragmatic standpoint.  Because as Buffy Hamilton wisely illustrates in her blog post, If It’s Broken, Let’s Fix It, it’s hard to scale the kind of involvement with students it would require across all instructional areas.  

There are schools that have emulated a more workable model, however, like New Trier in the Chicago area.   New Trier has a bank of 8.2 FTE librarians(for over 4000 students at 2 campuses), who are embedded in various departments at the high school, explains librarian Judy Gressel.  Each librarian is considered faculty-librarian and develops “a liason relationship” to a particular department and attends department meetings, facilitating collaboration and working closely with teachers.

Now whether or not that is feasible funding wise for other schools, it is a best practices example of how more embedded librarianship could look at the high school level–where the teacher role and curriculum advisor role of the librarian is of primary importance.

These are issues all of us in the profession are having to consider deeply.  The question isn’t is our profession dying–the question is–what works, and how do we leverage what we do and what we know in the best interest of our students’ education and future information needs?

A conversation worth continuing to have….

Haiti.

Following the devastating earthquake, it has been social networking that has facilitated so much of the information and help that aid agencies needed to know to help survivors.

Amazing stories abound, from the man who saved his life during the earthquake with an iPhone, to the amazing photographs tweeted out by @photomorel in the first hours after the quake, to the posts to Twitter by @RAMHaiti each day, to the incredible work the self-organized Crisis Camps around the country are doing–bringing programmers together of all sorts to create apps that may be needed by relief agencies, to the sole librarian who used a blog and Youtube to collect over 20,000 in three days for relief efforts, to a wiki site Lisa Parisi organized to help children of Haiti for classes to participate in.

From large to small, the network has allowed all of us to be a part of the global community–offering aid, gathering news, and extending a hand.   This is why our students need to know how to use these tools, how to connect and communicate with others, and what/when is appropriate. 

It’s an amazing story that will be repeated in newspaper and magazine articles across the world, because once again it drives home the power of networking.   But even more so, it is a message to schools–our students need to be a part of this global community. 

We need to empower them by helping them build the knowledge and skills to truly become globally connected citizens.  And we need to do it now.  So they can know this:

RAMhaiti     “To drive around the whole city of PauP is too unbelievable. Destruction everywhere.”

When you hear it first hand, what a difference it will make for our students’ understanding that this is all one world, and that they are part of it. 

In the blogosphere, we often talk about the transformative power of assignments that ignite student passions and connect them to a global audience, and the importance a tool like blogging can play in that. 

In this case, Christian Long’s Alice Project  wasn’t just about blogging but allowing students to discover, write about, and share their ideas and understanding with one another.  What tremendous power in giving students the reins to discover their own understanding.   But who can describe the power of it better than students who have experienced that personally? 

In her post, “Time to Wake Up,“  Melissa, a student in Christian Long’s Alice Project reflects on the end of their blogging assignment, and the poignancy of her feelings about it are palpable:

“What’s going to happen days from now when we don’t spend all our time thinking of new ideas for blogs, or disagreeing/agreeing with people on their blogs?

It’s time to get back to the same 10th grade English class like the beginning of the year. Hey I didn’t say anything was wrong with it, it’s just going to take awhile to get back in the way of things. . . “

What a transformation blogging has made for this class.   So much so that a student who has been in a traditional classroom for 10 years is struggling to adjust back to a regular class structure.

She continues,

“Blogging has now become one of my favorite things to do. I love that I can express my feelings on the internet rather than in person because I feel a lot more comfortable and confident. I usually don’t like speaking out in class just in a case I say something wrong and look not so smart. Other classmates and people all over the world can read my blog entries and have their opinions over my thoughts and then I can read how they feel about what I’ve written and if I didn’t see it from their point of view.”

When people ask, why have students blog?  Or how does the technology make a difference? –I think Melissa has given an effective answer to these questions.

Carl K. at Not Your Average Wonderland   shares this insight:

“I see this new way of teaching becoming more universal in the near future. I’m glad I could be one of the first to be a part of it.” 

That sort of observation astounds me.  This student clearly felt he was at the beginning of something really different in terms of his education.  Again, how do you go back to the regular “sit and get” routine after an experience as rich as this?

Lastly, Brendon eloquently summarizes the mind-changing part of this classroom experience in his post at Welcome to Wonderland  aptly entitled “This is Only the Beginning:”

“We found out what happens on the ‘twelfth day’ of school. We start teaching the teacher. We became independent minds with our own voice.”

Isn’t it time we help all our students start the “twelfth day” of school and find their independent voices?

On Will Richardson’s recent blog post, I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…) there was a great deal of  debate about the changes technology is bringing to our classrooms, and the particulars of how that might happen. 

But Will was asking a more fundamental question–

“And finally, the big kahuna, are we in the process of transforming (not just revising) our curriculum to work in a world that looks like this[this being a photo of a classroom of students all on laptops].  

As I said in a previous post (“What’s Are We Really Fighting For,” ) and as I know Will believes, it’s not all about the technology. It is about our students learning to communicate honestly, beautifully and expressively.

That world Will shows us is already here, not down some rabbit hole, but here in classrooms like Christian’s.  So I echo, are we in the process of transforming our curriculum to work in this world?    If not, how long are we going to debate about it?

“Our research suggests that they expect to choose where and when they work; they use technology to escape traditional office space and hours; and they integrate their home and social lives with work life.  More than half of the Net Geners we surveyed online in North America say they want to be able to work in places other than an office. . . .They prefer flexible hours and compensation that is based on their performance and market value–not based on face time in the office.”   Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tapscott’s comments about this particular expectation of Net Gen workers, because I believe that not only are we seeing Net Gen students in our classrooms and libraries, we are seeing Net Gen employees in our new(and sometimes in our experienced) staff as well.

After a fascinating coffee discussion with a colleague(both of us older than a Net Gener but sharing the characteristics of one) about our struggle with the transition from summer to “work”/school time,  I realized that as I spend more time online working with colleagues and as I have more experience, I am both more interested in how work can be “play” and also in the flexibility issue.

I wonder if we are losing the “creative set” of teachers from the classroom, as young Net Geners, (or older ones of us) who thrive on this sort of play, creativity, flexibility–but are still intensely committed employees–seek other opportunities.

And it’s a sad thought to me, thinking of the energies and talents that slip  away from education because the system isn’t all that flexible or playful.

I wonder if within existing schools what can be done about that.  Can libraries play a role in providing a time/space for ‘playfulness?”  What we can do would only be a drop in the bucket, possibly, but at least it is a start.  Yet in most schools, teachers don’t necessarily feel like they have that “Google-time”–that creative time to play and innovate–in fact, if “forced to play” teachers somewhat resent not having that time to use in their classroom or grading papers.  So what do you do if you want to foster some of that inventiveness and creativity yet have it be a meaningful part of the workplace?

Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have a job as a “creativity consultant” where your role was to bring in those creative energies and opportunities into a district?   Or the “innovation agent?”

It’s something we should be thinking about–because not only are we teaching Net Gen students, who crave this kind of flexible, playful, time shifting environment in our schools/classrooms, but we are employing Net Geners who crave these same things.  And don’t we want them to stay?

How are we really supporting their true needs?  Because I think Net Geners bring a whole range of skill sets that we need to work with “Net Gen” students.

Are we creating flexible work times?  Are we allowing some work to be done online?  Are we time shifting the idea of traditional classroom schedules?  Are we holding meetings online sometimes?  Are we building in some opportunity for creative growth or play?  And what does “play” for a teacher even look like and is this even possible with job demands/time pressures?  Are we creating open internet policies (like access to sites?–Tapscott posits that ten minutes knocking around on Facebook is like the old “coffee breaks” or “smoke breaks” of yore–time for relaxing/recharging).  Are we creating playful/flexible environments for students and staff alike?  (because some day soon, our entire staff and student body will be “Net Gen”.

Maybe we can only change the little circle of our own world at first(our classroom, our library, our department meetings, our workshops, our own workday schedule)–but maybe we should start somewhere?

When we fail to utilize what we know about our own employees and our own students, the divide between what is, and what the customer wants grows.   How can we utilize what we know, think outside the proverbial “box” and reinvigorate the concept of school in a Net Gen future?

Demise of library services as we know them? Will people still want to go to a place if they can get the item via their mailbox? (of course, it’s not free, you have a monthly fee, so the library is still a better deal !)

Similarly, I read in the NYTimes several articles relating to the demise of newspapers and/or magazines, including a touching one about the importance Bostonians have placed on their beloved and threatened Boston Globe, one about magazines raising their prices, and one about “hyperlocal” websites that bring aggregated local news to you customized for your location, and lastly a very telling one about newspapers and the AP attempting to control online content. Wes Fryer has been writing about this as well.

An armload of signs that are all pointing in the same direction–major change is on the horizon, driven by the economy as the tipping point. What will be telling is what communities fight to save–like the Boston Globe, and what things we let go. It will say something about us as a culture.

But more pertinent to this post is what is all of this going to mean for libraries? We are really at a tipping point? How much print content do we embrace and how much digital? When are our customers ready for what? What should we be willing to pay for if our students/staff mainly use “Google”? What will all this move to digital look like from a profit standpoint from publishers and providers that have excellent content?

So, renting books online….should we be mailing books to our students instead of them coming to us? sending them digital books via email? Only subscribing to magazines and newspapers online and not buying print ones? buying Kindles?

Yet students flock to our doors, check out more books than before, and use digital and books interchangeably. There is some need for a “campfire” to circle around for students. A place to be, to interact with books and knowledge and information….and to talk and hang out and do homework and get help when they need it.

On the other hand, I’ve found the teachers are somewhat more sequestered in their rooms with their own computers, so how do we reach them as well?

This is a mixed-up post which reflects the confusion over what direction to take.  It should be an interesting next few years.

I’d be really interested in views from my online learning community about these questions! What do you think?  Which way DO we go?

There are several ventures considering various types of e-readers that would download magazines onto tablets or paper-thin devices.

The article raises several questions, with which I concur, such as whether or not readers would want to purchase another separate device just to read magazines.  Seems like it would be a much more reliable business venture to create magazines readable on the Kindle or iPhone.

As the article also questions, I wonder if consumers would actually pay for an e-magazine in the first place, when currently you can get so much magazine content online for free, which makes me wonder how periodicals would change their financial paradigm.

After reading the article, though I love all things tech, I realized I would really miss magazines that you can touch, hold, and browse through.  E-reading seems so much more purposeful than the way I read magazines.   A page loads one at a time , and its not something you can “flip” through, or tear a page out and post it on your bulletin board, or read by the pool and get the pages wet.  For purposeful journal reading, such a device might work well–but for magazine “browsing” that many readers do, it seems ill-suited.

All of which brought to mind a very prescient speech I heard Molly Ivins give at the University of Texas.  She described the real difficulties facing print newspapers and wondered how they could remain financially viable, and the perils for our society if they do not.

I think in this economic market we are going to see some real shifts, and we really do need to consider how to support those media that are significant and important to education and our society.

The economy may be the tipping point that Malcolm Gladwell writes about that will finally drive changes from print to online.   It’s interesting that e-readers have taken so long to appear on the scene, actually.  I recall hearing about these from Jenny Levine at Internet Librarian a number of years ago. It seems economic issues are accelerating these technologies.

But my question is–is this tipping point really what is best for our democracy?

If we lose print newspapers and/or magazines due to economic pressures, what have we lost?  I’m all for e-reporting and blogs, but excellent newspapers and magazines really do unfold a story in a different way–both with their investigative abilities and the abilities of good print journalists to pull a story together well.

I have to wonder how this will evolve?  And how will we as a society will respond?  Will we continue to have side by side technologies for a long time?  (like printed books which show no sign of having sales slow down alongside e-readers?  Print magazines alongside electronic ones?  What will the world feel like when/if everything is on a screen rather than on paper?   Will our students notice?