Thing 15 continued

I had to jump up and go somewhere and never really wrote about Library 4.0. And now to jump from there to School Library 4.0 and I guess School 4.0. A big part of the question for me about the future of school libraries concerns the future of schools. Let's face it, schools have not really changed in over a century. I mean our picture of a classroom with individual desks and a teacher in the front of the room. Lots is pushing against that including cooperative learning, unschooling & homeschooling, but particularly the students themselves and the workplaces they will one day inhabit. What is school when you have a cell phone (that takes pictures) in your pocket, a laptop in your bookbag, and an ipod with a microphone? Or, more to the point, what is a student whose ability to access, capture, and create knowledge has now been amplified by these tools? And where is equity between that child and the one in the seat next to her who doesn't have those tools? How will schools be relevant to both those students?

I really find myself moving towards a view of education that looks a lot more like a library than a classroom. A salon where people meet and share ideas. Where information is accessible and organized but now augmented by the user. Where the comfort and the interests of the user are taken into consideration. A space that recognizes not all users have equal resources and strives to correct that with free access. Instead of a teacher in the front and in charge, a professional (librarian) who advocates for the user, who builds a collection for the user, who provides access for the user, who guides, who answers questions.

In the meantime, I'm not sure we can take it for granted that others will see the library this way, as the classroom of the future. I think we need to be moving our services outside our physical space, into classrooms and homes, into cyberspace. Our services are needed more than ever but if we do not move away from our shelves and push our services outward, we will be replaced.