Showing my age.
Written on November 2, 2008 – 9:55 am | by erniec
As the coffee brews this morning I’m already thinking about enjoying my birthday cake this evening. My father-in-law and his fiancee have come down from Delaware with arm loads of great food, drink, and print materials. Print materials? Yes, print materials. One of the many reasons I love these folks is for their fondness of magazines, newspapers, and books. I also splurged by resubscribing to the the New York Times Sunday edition (because they are running a cheap offer). Here is where I show my age. I don’t think the sensation of walking out into a frost covered morning and heaving that blue bag full of great reporting into my arms will ever be replaced by web-based news content. As I unfurl the paper from it’s bag the headlines greet me. I glance over the front page items in their entirety. Then I do the shuffle. I organize all of the sections into the order I will read them. Off I go into reading the variety of information covered in these sections, magazines, and of course the book review. Ah, the book review! Well I could continue to gush about the pleasures of the printed news but my concern is just that, that I am enthusiastic about it. Have you asked the children and young adults you work or interact with what they think of the print news?
My guess is you get blank looks. That newspaper on the periodicals stand looks as foreign to them as many of the other resources in the library. Soon, through a combination of economics, technology, and user demographics, that physical newspaper is going to disappear. After 100 years of print publication the Christian Science Monitor recently ceased daily print production and migrated most of their news reporting to the web. They are the first major national newspaper to make this move but they will not be the last. When we are teaching about the news and biases, opinion, editorials, we have to start teaching about the differences between news sites, such as http://www.csmonitor.com/, and personal blogs etc. Part of that teaching will involve how to navigate these sites, subscribe to RSS feeds, search archives, and more. Teaching the parts of a print newspaper may serve your students for a few more years but it doesn’t relate much to their personal preferences or the future realities of news reporting.
How about these topics? Do they show our age?
- how to read a clock face
- how to write in cursive
- how to use 3×5 notecards
Can you think of other things that we teach mostly because they are relevant to us as adults?
4 Responses to “Showing my age.”
I LOVE reading the Sunday paper. and after a hiatus of hummmm a while, I tried to get the Washington Post for a little political dialog. Not delivered to the area. Sigh.
Unfortunately, I fear we teacher-librarians will become as anachronistic as the printed newspaper if we (and our teachers) don’t teach note taking on the word processor without copying and pasting. The 3 X 5 card is and should be an item from the past, used to make name cards for projects on display.
Karen – we use Noodle Tools with our Middle Schools students. This web-based tool can be used for the creation of bibliographies and it has a note taking feature.
http://www.noodletools.com/index.php
Yeah, I’m getting to be an old codger, or coot — not sure which. If hadn’t become a librarian in 1993 I’d probably be a Luddite. As it is, I’m happily living with one foot in each century. When I was at UNC-CH-SILS, I was about the only person who still took notes by hand. To me, it’s the best.. I use lined paper, not notecatds. I truly believe that the act of writing by hand, seeing what you write, and thinking it aloud as you write, helps us learn more than all this high-lighting.
But I know that times are always changing and that we’re not going back. ever, to some of the old ways of doing things. I LOVE “printed matter” and grew up surrounded by it. I love the daily newspapers, so tactile (and inky, yes) and easily browseable. I also love the Web. But sometimes I think about one old medium that has NOT gone away but has become increasingly important in daily life: RADIO. I don’t really see any particular comparison with print newspapers, but the example of radio is heartening, as no matter what new media arise, radio is going strong, because it has qualities you don’t find elsewhere.
Like your blog. If I could just combine mine into one big blog, maybe I’d mention it here, but I feel the need to keep my home and work lives separate. But Doug Johnson doesn\n’t, and he’s a fine blogger
While working on time the other day with my third graders we came across a question that asked about how long it takes for film to be processed!! Even I had to think how long it used to take and the kids had no frame of reference to the question at all.
I also think about Amazon’s Kindle. I’ve never actually seen one but I can not imagine how that could take the place of a book. There’s nothing like a great read and looking forward to turning that page to find out what happens next. The mere physical act of starting on new pages is so thrilling sometimes- I can’t even conceive of using an electronic device to replicate that!