/ 25 April 2005

Don’t stuff your mind. Activate it

The International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) held its annual conference in South Africa in July.

The title of the conference was School Libraries: Breaking Down Barriers. This conference was particularly pertinent to the South African context where only 27% of schools have library facilities.

For many delegates, the highlight of the conference was having Jamie McKenzie there and being able to attend the variety of sessions that he presented. I must admit, as school libraries are not my field, I had never heard of him and so I was anxious to see what all the fuss was about.

McKenzie was a teacher, principal and director of libraries, media and technology in the Bellingham District in Washington. He has since moved on to support technology planning and professional development for school districts across North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

He is the editor of From Now On, an educational technology journal that has been published on the web since 1991. This journal focuses on how information technologies need to be used to support learner-centred practices that encourage young people to ‘wrestle thoughtfully and skilfully with difficult questions, problems and decisions”.

To achieve this goal, McKenzie argues, we have to aim to create ‘information-literate school communities”. He points out that giving learners laptops and having schools networked is not sufficient in itself, as it doesn’t necessarily promote information literacy and enhance learner performance.

He suggests that information literacy has three major components:

o Prospecting – identifying pertinent information. This requires navigation skills, as well as the ability to sort, sift and select relevant and reliable data.

o Interpreting – translating data and information into knowledge, insight and understanding.

o Creating new good ideas – avoiding plagiarism or rehashing the ideas of others and developing new insights.

All three of these components depend on developing the questioning skills of learners. According to McKenzie, ‘Questioning may be the most powerful technology we have ever invented … Questions are the tools required for us to make up our minds and develop meaning.”

Although South Africa has a long way to go before all schools are networked, we can benefit from paying attention to the problems that are being experienced in other, better resourced contexts.

The key lessons seem to be that it is essential to follow the supply of computer technology to schools with designing clear learning goals. It is also essential to provide professional development aimed at making teachers information literate. As McKenzie puts it, ‘If all teachers could develop their own information literacy, they might … nurture the same skills in their students.”

Hearing McKenzie speak and reading some of his books brought to mind the reflections of Edward Said, professor of literature at Columbia University in the USA, at a conference in Cape Town on

Values, Democracy and Education in 2001.

Said spoke of the power and importance of the book. He described how many people today take for granted the access the Internet gives them to newspapers, books and magazines and an infinite number of websites. No longer does it seem necessary to make the effort to get hold of a book, read it from cover to cover and spend time interpreting it.

‘If the activation rather than the stuffing of the mind is the main business of education, then an invigorated book culture must remain central to it,” claimed Said. Said believes that the development of the ability to think critically – one of the cornerstones of Curriculum 2005 – can only come from the ongoing experience of the process of reading and interpretation.

He warned against the danger of regarding reading as a luxury in a curriculum that is likely to be focused on such urgent concerns as providing the country with people well-trained in science and

technology, medicine and engineering.

My contribution to the IASL Conference was to talk about the crisis that schools are facing, with fewer learners than ever before choosing to do History. My view is that History, probably more than any other discipline, develops the information-processing skills that are essential for developing information literacy in learners.

It is in this regard, I believe, that librarians have a key role to play as schools increasingly become networked. They are well-placed to spearhead the battle to create information-literate schools.

It was wonderful to be part of a group of educators from all corners of the globe so passionate about developing in learners a love of books and literature in the face of the onslaught of computer technology and the Age of Information.

You can access From Now On, McKenzie’s journal on educational

technology at http://fno.org