Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Well Said: Agility, Not Access
Librarian Sara Scribner on why in the digital age we still need librarians (and, I’d add, humanities professors):
An info-literate student can find the right bit of information amid the sea of irrelevance and misinformation. But any college librarian will tell you that freshman research skills are absolutely abysmal. Before they graduate from high school, students need to be able tounderstand the phenomenal number of information options at their fingertips, learn how to work with non-Google-style search queries, avoid plagiarism and judge whether the facts before them were culled by an expert in the field or tossed off by a crackpot in the basement.
As even struggling school districts manage to place computers in classrooms, it’s difficult to find a child without Internet access. But look closer at what happens when students undertake an academic task as simple as researching global warming — tens of millions of hits on Google — and it becomes clear that the so-called divide is not digital but informational. It’s not about access; it’s about agility.
Read the full essay “Saving the Google Students” at the LA Times.
