A Public Park for Your Brain

The closing session of the conference featured the founder of Blackplanet.com, Omar Wasow.

Before Wasow spoke, Julie Walker, the Executive Director of AASL and Ann Martin, AASL President-Elect, gave an overview of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, which is the subject of speaker Charles Fadel's presentation at the MSLA conference on November 11th.

The realities of the new global economy require that students be critical thinkers and problem solvers, globally aware, self-directed, good collaborators, and effective communicators. P21's Skills Framework includes themes that must be infused throughout all the core subjects:

• Global awareness
• Financial/economic literacy
• Civic literacy
• Health literacy
• Learning and innovation skills, which include Information and Media Literacy

On November 7th, the Partnership will unveil Route21, an online one-stop-shop for 21st century skills-related information and resources. The site will answer the question "What are 21st Century Skills?" and showcase standards, assessments, professional development, and teaching and learning resources. It will provide examples, models, best practices, and a user-generated database of resources for teaching 21st century skills. School librarians are invited to add content and tags on the Route21 site.

Next, Carl Harvey, conference co-chair, introduced Omar Wasow, who spoke about How Libraries Can Thrive in the Age of Google. He argued that school libraries must inform as well as transform.

• Libraries can continue to be successful by focusing on their unique strengths and core values
• Libraries must emphasize their distinct qualities as places to learn critical thinking and research skills and for individuals and groups to work and reflect amid fewer distractions

Wasow counseled that libraries must evolve from Service to Transformation. Being in a library can be as important to students as the information available in it. Two key steps to transformation:

• The physical experience must get better for individuals and groups who want to study together
• School libraries need to shift from primarily offering a service to helping others self-serve so that everyone can acquire the skills of a librarian

How does a library transform? The desired product is a changed person who:

• can better navigate oceans of information as a result of assistance and training
• has made progress on a vital task by finding peace from the hubbub outside
• has been energized about exciting ideas

Wasow challenged school librarians to envision what an MLIS-style curriculum would look like for grades K-12. How can school library programs become more tightly integrated into what kids learn? He contended that to succeed, school libraries must embrace the idea that they are Temples of Thought, containing not just published ideas, but living thoughts - a public park for your brain. They should be both sacred and worldly, fighting to democratize access to information.