Chat Room-Information Leader-acy

If you've ever written grant proposals or tried to get reluctant city, county, or school district bean counters to fund a cool project, you know that it helps to point to "studies" that prove your proposal will help the community's kids. If you've done much reading about technology on education over the last decade, you know that Elliot Soloway's name appears regularly in academic projects dealing with kids and technology. At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Chicago, we had an opportunity to talk about technology and the current generation of K–12 students.

Soloway is a funny and incisive guy. He's a professor at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering; he works in the university's Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HICE, pronounced "Hi-C"); and he specializes in how young people interact with computers and other devices. He began his career researching artificial intelligence at Yale 15 years ago, but during the course of one project in which he studied how children interacted with computer interfaces, he says that he decided that "making kids smarter would be better than making machines smarter."

Soloway likes using technology with kids because "it's malleable and suits the diversity of their learning styles. Kids learn differently," he says, "and with the right technology, kids can learn and there's a wonderful synergy going on." His group at HICE is creating a family of K–12 software products for handhelds that use the Palm operating system, ranging from a simple word processor to PiCoMap, a concept-mapping program that allows students to explore how ideas relate to one another. The Palm software is free to download at www.handheld.hice-dev.org.

Soloway believes that the time has come for the handheld (the Palm and other models such as the Handspring) because "they're kid-sized and kids are fascinated by them. The Palm isn't a computer for them—it's a media device." He acknowledges that you can't do everything on a handheld that you can on a desktop or laptop PC, but the Palm is something that desktops and laptops aren't: it's cheap enough that every student can have one to use in the classroom. "A Palm is the price of a pair of tennis shoes," Soloway says. "I'll trade off functionality for access any day."

He also believes that young people in 2001 are media fanatics, and that this strong orientation to multimedia makes print books less appealing to them. Soloway believes that the libraries of the future will be digital libraries, and he thinks that students of the future will read not only their texts and reference works, but novels, poetry, and nonfiction on handheld devices instead of as books on paper. He says that print books as we know them are the preference of a previous generation. "Kids appropriate whatever's around them and whatever speaks to them personally," says Soloway. "What is personal to kids these days is technology." When I expressed some skepticism that technology is always the correct solution to kids' learning, he said that guidance from teachers and other adult educators is essential. "You can't just turn kids loose on the Internet. A program of learning needs to have a structure that's age-appropriate," Soloway says. "Adults should provide the scaffolds young learners need."

And what about the role of the librarian if the print book is to pass from the educational scene? He responded enthusiastically: "In the past, the school library has been the hub of the school, or should be the hub. In the future that will be even more important. Librarians have always specialized in access to content, and technology's now changing to make access to the right content even more important." His advice to school librarians? "Take a bigger leadership role in your school, and work to make knowledge more accessible. Be the information technology leader and help others get up to speed. It's not the teacher's role to be a technology leader." He stresses that librarians need to see themselves as leaders in using and evaluating content—more and more of which is digital—rather than promoters and defenders of books, and that librarians continually sharpen their skills working with hardware and software. "Use technology yourself and be on the cutting edge," Soloway advises. "Work with your library community to learn from the best in the field."