Reflections on librarians

Moving at the speed of creativity | Reflections on librarians, web 2.0 and educational change

...I really enjoy hanging out with librarians and listening to the issues they care about, because librarians really are at the center of the technologically-wrought changes our educational systems seem to be chafing under. Like classroom teachers, I perceive many librarians are not aware of some things that may be taken for granted here in the edublogosphere– WikiPedia, wiki technology, RSS, etc. The key is that the librarians here are LEARNERS and they’ve come to expand their ideas and instructional repertoire.

The discussions I’ve had online and offline the past few weeks regarding the digital native / digital immigrant dichotomy have definitely changed some of my perceptions and the messages I am sharing in presentations like those I gave today. It is not very helpful to convince an audience they are “digital immigrants,” while the students we teach are “digital natives,” because this often does become an excuse for not attempting to be fluent in new digital technologies. The key is that we are all LEARNERS, and we all have the capacity to grow and learn together in the use of digital technologies as well as anything else....