Where's the Librarian? Discussion Post

Richard Baraniuk’s TED Talk was very revolutionary for a speech given in 2006.  The idea of open-source is not new, but has not seemed to apply to K-12 school levels until very recently.  Because of the graduate classes I have taken in library science, I now see the librarian as the center of the informational storm swirling around a school.  The librarian has the education and knowledge to decipher accurate information from the millions and millions of webpages on every topic known to man—they truly are the “quality control” for the school.  With open source education comes the fact that anyone—and they mean anyone—can contribute information to the masses, and some of this information can be hurtful, incorrect, or damaging.  Teachers have long trusted their printed textbooks to relay information to their students, and the idea of creating textbooks that are tailored to specific students in terms of language and educational level can be a daunting proposition.  This is a perfect example of where a librarian can be the “person of reason”.  The librarian probably has the most knowledge of open source in the first place, and he or she can provide accurate information to the teachers so that teachers know how to use the sources productively.  It doesn’t matter how amazing a source is for students if the teachers don’t know how to use it or refuse to use it.

As a science teacher who is using ten year old textbooks, I can tell you that my books are out of date the minute they are published.  So many new scientific discoveries are made every year that the textbook cannot keep up with the information and no school district can afford to replace their textbooks yearly.  Open-source textbooks would help eliminate that lag time in scientific information.  A science teacher could choose to use a new textbook every year, provide several different sources to her students, or choose to not use a textbook at all.  My colleagues and I rely more on current scientific articles and websites to find current information for our students than the textbook.  In fact, I rarely use the textbook other than as a resource for basic background information.