Exponential change;

News November 2, 2007 (mp3 file: 4.9MB,5:14 min.)
Exponential change; more thoughts about early literacy and reading to children

Change. I've talked about it in previous podcasts, and it continues to come up. Earlier this week Sharon sent me a link to a video, "Shift Happens" that one of her patrons (who is also on the library's long range planning committee) sent to her. It's a great video, illustrating the world in which our children are growing up, and in which they will be living--the ever-growing ubiquity of technology and these new (well, not so new anymore) methods of communication. The final point of the video is to urge parents (and presumably other adults who care about children) to make sure educators are preparing our children to live and work in the world that is evolving.

That's an important message, I agree completely. But it started me thinking....what about us, in my generation and older? Two things about us, actually. We are working in that wold NOW, and it's a bigger change for us than for the young people, who were born into that world and have been growing up with it. We have had to learn it outside of school, after we were already living and working in a different world. And I think this was Sharon's patron's point in referencing the video--lifelong learning is essential, not ony for all the reasons is always has been, but because the way we will be learning through the rest of our lives is different, the delivery mechanisms are changing. We have to be ready to learn how to learn with those new mechanisms.

AND we need to know about them because we can't expect the educational system and "someone else" to be the only ones preparing kids to live and work in the world. It's always been the responsibility of parents and caring adults to help children prepare for life in the world on their own. It's just that there has been, what seems to us, a huge change in the world and maybe we sometimes feel like we're sliding down the learning curve as we try to catch up to the technology comfort level kids have. They are comfortable using the technology, we need to help them with the pieces about good judgment and ethics and impact of decisions they make. That's what our parents passed on to us, after all. It's not so different--it's the context that is changing, and sometimes seems overwhelming to us. We have to understand that context in order to be able to give them what they REALLY need to operate in the world. We need to know how to operate in that same world--because we live in it, and it just isn't going to back to "the good old days" (whatever those were) and because our children need to learn how to live successfully in it in the future.

We have to learn the technology to communicate with the next generations if we want to pass on our experience and any wisdom we might have developed. It’s triply important for us, then, to learn about the changing world, or at least changing communications; we need it to live in the world that has embraced it, we need it to continue to learn about our world, and we need it to communicate to those who will be taking care of that world in the future.

Hang in there! We’ll get there together. --Karen