The latest issue of Leading and Learning with Technology features an article by yours truly.
In it, I go toe to toe with a teacher librarian on the merits of using wikipedia as a research tool. You can take a wild guess on which side I take. There’s also a poll you can take after you read both sides.
Just so you know, I’m married to a teacher librarian so it’s nothing personal.
Entries (RSS)
December 20th, 2005 at 5:26 am
Nice job, Dean! You made the points well. What librarians fail to realize is that there can be no critical audience that a world of producers. As more consumers become producers, the level of analysis will increase. When Britannica made a mistake, most of us were ignorant and helpless to do anything short of writing the company. Those errors occurred in isolation and were only revealed by the company if they had integrity (assume they did).
Now, anyone can be critical and we ALL know the errors…and that’s the point of open source. As more of the community become involved, the more of us take responsibility for producing accurate information, the better off the end product will be.
I often think, perhaps unfairly, that librarians have had their cheese moved in a big way…and they are having trouble handling it. It’s all changed so quickly…in the space of a year or less, although it’s been building for a lot longer, than if they weren’t pushing information literacy and problem-solving before, they’re now obsolete.
Attrition, retirement…who said education wasn’t high stakes?