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21st Century Librarians

Also written in response to a colleague's critique of the Newark plan...

I was very surprised to find no librarian on the Instructional Technology Committee. This is a huge omission.

I agree. The district I worked for had made the same error, and as we ramped up for our 2005-2010 tech plan, we began meeting with the librarians. This partnership quickly became very powerful, as we discovered how many of the same goals both our departments were pursuing, particularly in the realm of information literacy. I'm not sure the articulation has continued in my absence, but assume it has (because it was my boss' idea in the first place) and because they were certainly off to a good start.

The truth is that any modern librarian (and this is not to say that all school librarians are modern) is an educational technologist. Here is one of my favorite, Jamie Knight, the Loud Librarian. (Actually this is a link to his old school, where he still serves if I'm not mistaken, but he now teaches in the Academy of Performing Arts (APA) in Huntington Beach... and presented with his students at the Computer Using Educator's conference earlier this month.)

-Mark