News & Views, January 2009 (mp3 file; 6.72 MB;7:09 min.)Coming Up; Family Literacy; Story Kits for Winter Days
At the top of the 'cast today: Coming Up--in two ways.
First, the generation coming up--or that is here, really. I picked up a book entitled 'Grown Up Digital" at the airport last month, and had most of it read by the time I finally found my way home. The author is reporting on changes and his observations of them since his previous book, "Growing Up Digital," that he wrote 10 years ago. His kids are not 10 years older, the world is 10 years older, and things continue to change. His observations about how this generation--the first that was born into a digital world--works, plays, and interacts in this world have a great deal to say to us in libraries. Many of us are boomers, and the way we do things and look at the world is quite different from the digital generations. That is not to say that one is good and the other isn't, but we're living on the same planet and it would behoove us to have a better understanding--and appreciation--of each other. I particularly like this book's approach, looking at and talking with the teens and twenty-somethings of these digital natives, and dispelling some of the myths and assumptions we too often make about them. And one of my favorite observations is that something is only thought of as "technology" if it didn't exist when you were born. So, we don't think of refrigerators as "technology," though they certainly were when they first began to be introduced into people's lives. By the same token, computers and the Internet and Web aren't technology to this generation--it's like, well, AIR to them--it's just there, a part of their lives and how they live.
(And, if you'd like to see an interesting piece about students today and how they learn, and how the way we learned just doesn't work for them, take a look at a video called 'A Vision of Students Today " on YouTube.
Secondly--another thing coming up: The Iowa Small Libraries Online Conference on January 28. This conference, held entirely online--including the exhibit hall--features Meredith Farkas and Pat Wagner as keynote speakers, and nine concurrent sessions on everything from free and inexpensive databases that libraries should have. to teens producing videos for the library, to early childhood literacy in story times. (Saroj Ghoting says she's going to drop in on that one...) You can find more information on the conference website, and you can register in the CE catalog.
Links from today's podcast:
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