Special interest

At the MSBO (Michigan Association of School Business Officials) conference, where I just presented a session on ipad apps for administrators. I just spent some time wandering through the exhibits where I saw all kinds of vendors : accountants, architects, heating and cooling folks, food service people, sports field and flooring people. There are some many different people involved in the business of running schools. It's a good reminder that we librarians are just one part of the big picture: one special interest among many. One of the big things we need to do as school librarians is make sure that we are aware of all these others folks involved in running a school.

We need to be aware of how we connect with them, how we can help them and how they can help us, and make sure that we communicate and collaborate with them! We also really need to be aware of how they see us: If they see us as just one of many special interests clamoring for attention and money, that colors the way to work with us. Until we can learn to work with them and speak their lingo , they will continue to see us as some special interest group separate from them with our own jargon. We need always to find ways to connect and collaborate and move to " we" discussions of our common needs and interests. We need to help them see us as part of the group, part of the team, part of the solution. Too often we lose sight of that when we're fighting for our jobs, and sometimes it can be very hard to do.

I've got no magic answers -  Just saying we need to do it.

iBooks

Sitting in the mobile learning conference, listening to a great session in using the iPad in elementary language arts. http://usingipadsintheclassroom.weebly.com/  Among other things they are showing how they take advantage of some of the capabilities of iBooks.  Very good stuff! They are showing some of the new features related to textbooks within iBooks as well.

A few thoughts that come to mind:

1. What does it say about our profession that more people attend this mobile learning conference than attended our state school librarians conference? I like think that it's primarily because so many of us school librarians have had our positions eliminated and that schools don't value school librarianship enough to release or pay for conference attendance.
2. During their session they showed the way iBooks automatically links to Wikipedia.  When they did so, one of the attendees , a fellow librarian, said "Boo, Hiss!"  What does it say about our profession that we resist change ? I understand that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not the greatest or only reference tool, but it is a useful tool, and we need to embrace all tools and ways to access information.
3. ebooks are already radically changing our role as librarians, just as online databases have for our periodicals, and the internet has for our reference materials.  We need to grapple with these changes, try to understand them, and help our students and teachers make good choices.