Thing #15 Library 2.0

In a School Libray 2.0 article titled "Say good-bye to your mother’s school library" Christopher Harris speaks to school librarians about ways to engage Web 2.0 technology and apply it. I like ideas and he has some. I am personally overwhelmed with the tools, and I need help tranfoming them into my library to use with teachers and students. After reading all of the articles listed in Thing #15 I began to think about what I recently said to my principal during my evaluation: "I keep getting older but my students are always 14." This was a more profound statement than I realized at the time. My incoming students were born in 1995. They were 10 in 2005. Their experience with the world is digital. Much more so than the students I had even six or seven years ago. My library motto has always been that famous quote from an anonymous person: "Half the knowledge is knowing where to find it." Finding it is becoming increasingly easier with Web 2.0 and the interactive web based tools it is offering. Helping our students become information artisans is the challenge. Yes, we must say good-bye to our mother's library. A visit to the new Houston Public Library is proof of that statement. As Mr. Harris suggests, we must undergo a mental transformation if we are going to take on the responsibilities of helping our students become literate users of information and the tools that offer access to the information . The quest is the same but way we teach them to conduct the quest has changed. I particularly loved the statement in the article "Away From Icebergs" that stated that if our services require training for all of our users then the services need fixing." The article further stated that we need to integrate our services into our users' environment. I need a collection my students can download into their MP3 devices and this would be a good running start to serving and connecting. A few Kindles wouldn't hurt either.