Lit vs. Technology People

Although my current attendance at the monthly COLG (Canyon Owyhee Library Group) meetings is shameful and embarrassing, I am still reaping the rewards of our group’s resource sharing, profession development, and camaraderie.

A few years ago, while meeting at Vallivue High School Library, Marlene shared a copy of Library Media Connection (LMC) The Magazine for School Library Media and Technology Specialists and I have been a faithful subscriber every since. Thanks Marlene!

In the November/December 2008 article, The Other Shoe Redux, Doug Johnson clearly explains the great divide (schizophrenia) between teacher/librarians. We are split between the children’s/young adult lit people and the research skills/technology people. He explains that the lit people are in control and that our profession is more concerned with students’ access to Harry Potter books than to Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs and wikis.

Now, I am passionate about children’s/young adult literature but as a teacher/librarian it is secondary to my responsibility to teach ICT (Information and Communication Technology skills.)

I agree with Doug’s warning, “Until our profession sees its primary instruction focus as teaching information and technology literacy skills, we will lack both credibility and voice in technology implementation efforts.”

Teacher/librarians are the natural link between students, classroom teachers, and 21st century learning skills. This is the message we need to send to administrators throughout Idaho, but first we must follow Doug’s advice and “have some hard conversations about who we are, what we do, and how we do it.” Sounds like a great round table discussion for the next ILA (Idaho Library Association) annual conference.

Which type of teacher/librarian are you? Lit or technology?

LMC is also available online at Lili.org in Gale’s Academic OneFile database. Unfortunately, the online version is an issue behind the print copy.