Group items tagged

'Beginnings are important. They are your fishing lure, your bling, your spider's web, your black hole from which there is no return until series end. It is what a new reader will judge you on, an editor will judge you on, an agent will judge you on. Frankly anyone who can read, and is looking at your book will judge you on it. No pressure.'

What's more, we're *drowning* in information. Pre-Internet librarianship was like pre-Internet newspaper publishing: "select, then publish." That is, all the unfiltered items are presented to a gatekeeper, who selects the best of them, and puts them in front of the rest of the world. Now we live in a "publish, then select" world: everyone can reach everything, all the time, and the job of experts is to collect and annotate that material, to help others navigate its worth and truthfulness. That is to say that society has never needed its librarians, and its libraries, more. The major life-skill of the information age is information literacy, and no one's better at that than librarians. It's what they train for. It's what they live for.

"No one can say that writing a particular section of an academic essay is easy, but all students agree that the hardest part of the essay writing process is the beginning itself."

Key Challenges in Integrating ICTs in Education Although valuable lessons may be learned from best practices around the world, there is no one formula for determining the optimal level of ICT integration in the educational system. Significant challenges that policymakers and planners, educators, education administrators, and other stakeholders need to consider include educational policy and planning, infrastructure, language and content, capacity building, and financing.

From Library to Learning Commons Printed books still play a critical role in supporting learners, but digital technologies offer additional pathways to learning and content acquisition. Students and teachers no longer need a library simply for access. Instead, they require a place that encourages participatory learning and allows for co-construction of understanding from a variety of sources. In other words, instead of being an archive, libraries are becoming a learning commons.

Libraries have done a world of good for schools. They provide a self-directed learning environment and a quiet place to work and study - not to mention the wealth of carefully organized stories, articles, reference materials and other information for students to use whenever they need it. It's no secret that the library is essentially a campus warehouse for media products. Trouble is, media is changing....

I heard that a lot of school libraries closed recently. That's too bad. Maybe this could help school libraries alive.