Taking a Side-trip…
…to Berlin, to attend the triannual ECIS Librarians’ Conference here. I’ve always wanted to catch an ECIS conference, having spent twenty years seeing many of the same faces at various conferences in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Ross Todd http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~rtodd/ is the keynote speaker here, on the topic of Inquiry Learning, and I’m thrilled to say that he’s lived up to all advanced billing. In the all-day preconference, Dr. Todd called us to account for historically abandoning students to their own devices at the key point in their research! For too long, he says, we’ve obsessed about providing “Collections of Stuff” which our students can access, retrieve and excerpt from, but have NOT helped them with the really important work of “creating their own understandings”. Libraries need to become involved in Transformational vs. Informational work.
If we DON’T move beyond the Scope and Sequence information literacy to a mindset of moving from “information to knowledge”, we do ourselves, and our profession, a great disservice. In the end, we put not only our own relevance at risk, but we denigrate the importance of libraries - and reading itself - and when reading is at risk, knowledge itself is at risk!
In the report I’m preparing to take back home with me next week, I’ve highlighted some of the “Rossisms” that I’m bringing back with me. In a nutshell, Ross has convinced me that if I’m going to stay the course, I need to;
- Get off the
InformationBandwagon! - STOP obsessing over “found” items (locating, accessing, finding, evaluating “stuff”)
- Start helping kids Transform Information and Create New Ideas instead of just “finding stuff”
- Have my library be(come) an Intellectual Center, rather than the “Collection” Center I’ve so carefully built over the past 10 years…
And finally, Ross reminded me, keeping in mind that not everyone is ready to jump on this runaway train at exactly the same point I have now rejoined it. Ross lets me off the hook a bit here, and I’ll have to remember this one.
- Don’t Water Rocks!!! (work with the kids, teachers and parents that are ready to join the Adventure)
Powerful exhortations indeed! Now just to get back home, catch up on the work I’ve missed in the past week, and Start the Process. ONWARD!!!
