Miles's Library - Part Three
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 06:28AM I have been asked to write a chapter on "future libraries" for a book being put together by an Australian colleague. While I had meant to write a short scenario to introduce the chapter, the scenario took over.
Below is the third of several parts of what a school library might look like in 2025 - the approximate year my youngest grandson, Miles, will graduate from high school (assuming one still graduates at the traditonal age of 18 - a big assumption.)
The ideas here are a combination of extrapolation of current happenings, wishful thinking and maybe a little dread. Your comments are always welcome.
Miles’s Library: A Day in the Life, 2025 - Part Three
9:25AM
Miles hurries toward the seminar room on the other side of the library for his class with Librarian Baxter. Cutting around dozens of students working individually or in small groups, Miles glances up at the latest ALA’s LISTEN campaign “poster” being displayed on one of the library’s LED monitors. It features Tammy Fox, daughter of first decade hottie Megan Fox, displaying her favorite audio-book cover. Another LED promotes an ALA PLAY poster showing popular cartoonist Brady Johnson with his favorite video game. (The READ campaign was discontinued in 2020, along with the paper versions of the posters.)
Only one thing seems to be missing in Miles’s school library – books, magazines or any paper information source. The last print books – school yearbooks and some local history publications - were sent to Ghana to be digitized five years earlier. All those materials are now available, of course, online.
Nearly 99.9%* of intellectual property in all formats – text, visual, audio, and programming code – is in the world IP DataBank. On submitting work to the DataBank, a small identifying script is inserted into each work. Each time the creation is accessed, a nominal payment is made to its creator. Content users can pay either a flat monthly fee for unlimited access to the DataBank or pay per petabyte of data. Miles’s school library does not own or lease any information sources. But it has built, using freeware APIs, a powerful portal and guide to the DataBank. And it allows its staff and students to customize that portal.
Miles enters the seminar room just as Mr. Baxter begins to outline the objective of the 90 minute lecture/demonstration/guided practice session on honing one’s understanding of semantic web searching skills, specifically dealing with language-specific idioms when doing multi-lingual searching with auto-translation tools. About ten students are attending in person and another 15 in library’s MUVE conference room. The virtual participants are not just from Miles’s school, but from other high schools, a university, and a home school. One participant is simply a retiree with an interest in the topic. The seminar will be recorded and added to the DataBank.
“Miles, what are you doing here?” Sergey backchannels using a primitive chat program. “You could be teaching this stuff!”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I heard Baxter just came back from an ALA conference with some beta code on idiom translation. I’m hoping that if I look interested enough, he’ll share.”
Mr. Baxter coughed. “Miles, would you GoogleJockey this seminar, just in case questions arise?” Miles nodded and made a mental note to find the etymology of that strange term.
*Only the 500 member American Library Association still refuses to place any of its materials in the DataBank, reflecting a long history of rejecting the Creative Commons approach to sharing its IP.
________________________________
11:00AM
Miles uses the time between the end of the seminar and his meeting with Dr. Li to grab a sandwich in the school cafeteria with Jenny and then take a quick nap in the library. Research on adolescent sleep needs convinced the library advisory committee that napping is a legitimate use of library resources and that library policies should reflect this. After Marian again awakens Miles, he checks his TwitFace account and then listens to two audio reports – one a real-voice podcast and the other a speech-synth conversion – recommended by Mr. Baxter in the earlier seminar. He reviews his progress on his senior thesis.
Miles’s school is one of several operating in his small community. It is based on a highly individualized, project-based, collaborative learning model that uses performance assessment only. “Developing creative problem-solvers with a conscience” is the articulated mission of the school. All required classes end when students are twelve and have passed the national reading/writing/math proficiency test. After age 12, each student works according to an IEP, written by the student, his parents, a team of teachers and school librarians, and the other members of his formal Personal Learning Network (PLN).
Another school in Miles’s community is entirely computer-based, with each student using a structured, game-based programmed curriculum designed for his individual educational program. And yet another school retains the “traditional” classroom, 50-minute period, teacher-led, core content model. Neither of these schools have either physical or virtual libraries or librarians. (Miles first podcast that earned him DataBank payments was a commentary arguing that sending children to traditional schools should be considered child abuse.) All families are given educational vouchers and are allowed to select which school to attend. Vouchers became politically feasible in 2017 when a law was passed that no school can charge more in tuition than the standard voucher amount and that all students, including those with special needs, are eligible for each school’s lottery that selects the incoming class.
To be continued...
Reader Comments (2)
LOVE the napping provision...a lot of interesting ideas in all three segments so far. I need to mull over it more to figure out my opinions on them!
Thanks, Libby. I've been a little disappointed in the reaction (or lack thereof). I guess I need to be more challenging!
All the best,
Doug