[LM_NET] SHARE: Is the book as we know it dead - a podcast worth listening to

[Barbara Braxton <barbara.288@BIGPOND.COM>]

Australia is blessed with a man who sometimes signs himself as a "feral word 
herder" but who is
really a genuine and genius wordsmith. He is a teacher, a scientist, and a huge 
supporter of our
profession.  On our national radio this morning he spoke about the future of the 
book and how
technology plays such a critical role in their entire production. The transcript 
(and soon the
podcast) is available through 
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2151433.htm 

Amongst the gems were these ...

"Today, the Internet and the computer tempt many to predict the Death of the Book 
as we know it.
They say we will store text in digital form to carry around or download at whim, to 
be searched,
rummaged through, annotated, re-ordered and generally treated in ways that wouldn't 
impress an
old-fashioned book-lover ... But what of the format? My book was written, revised, 
edited, designed,
proofed and edited yet again, to within an inch of its life. Yet we are told books 
are useless, that
'we can get all we need from the Internet'.

True, we can get the raw materials there, but like the poison cycad seeds that 
nearly killed Joseph
Banks, some kitchen-work needs to be done to make them palatable and nutritious. 
Far from killing
the book, the new technology offers us new ways of making books live, but showing 
people how to do
this demands a new form of information literacy. Fact fossicking isn't easy, clever 
fact fossicking
is downright hard.. 

The vapid politicians who carry on about Australian history, meaning 
dead-white-male history, are
also the ones who most commonly bleat about 'literacy', by which they mean 
simplistic reading and
writing skills that can be tested. These enemies of education with their foolish 
lists are
yesterday's men. True literacy bubbles and froths with joy, even when a dead 
political hand is
placed on it, and the new literacy will, teachers willing, sweep their foolishness 
away.

But who will teach this new sort of literacy? Not the teachers of English or 
computing or science:
they lack the skills and the time. Among the professionals of education, only one 
group can do it.
Oddly enough, they are the very people most at threat from those who say the Book 
is Dead.

Some call them school librarians, but they're really teacher-librarians, people 
trained both as
teachers and as librarians. Rather than getting rid of them and their libraries, we 
need to fund
them better, far better. We need more, not fewer, libraries, more, not fewer, 
teacher-librarians.

I care about remembering and transmitting Australia's story. The explorers weren't 
the sort of
people who learned lists of dates, they were people who questioned things and 
chased a brighter
future. If Australia is to have a future worthy of the explorers, we must educate 
our young.

Testing doesn't improve literacy, teaching does, and our teacher-librarians sit at 
the heart of
inspirational teaching. Politicians who don't understand that are selling our 
future short."

In his response to the Australian teacher librarian list he said, "My intention in 
that final
portion was to give people a stick with which to beat the illiterati, or a perch to 
stand on to make
a delivery of their own." and so now the teacher librarians need to continue their 
advocacy. Read
what a small group (growing bigger daily) is doing at http://hubinfo.wordpress.com/

Barbara

Barbara Braxton
Teacher Librarian
COOMA NSW 2630
AUSTRALIA

E. barbara.288@bigpond.com
Together we learn from each other 

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