Miracle Workers
by Renée Olson, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 4/1/1999
To get a degree, will librarians soon have to resort to wizardry?
Harry Potter has it easy. At 10, after discovering that he's a wizard in the enchanting novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Scholastic, 1998), Harry is whisked off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Harvard for wizards-in-training. Except for picking out the perfect wand, Harry's educational decision making is behind him.
Librarians-to-be, on the other hand, have more to worry about, due to concerns about the state of library education today. These have grown numerous enough to cause the American Library Association to dispatch troops -- some 150 people from all walks of libraries -- to Washington, D.C., later this month for the Congress on Professional Education.
Their charge will be to start probing the problems that bedevil library education, everything from high tuition costs to a dearth of new professors to a trend gaining momentum: the jettisoning of traditional library curricula in favor of programs that turn out Web heads and database jockeys, as in the case of the revamped School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley.
Before we bash the tech heads, however, we may be pleasantly surprised in a few years to find that technology has become the savior of education for library media specialists and children's librarians -- in the form of distance education offered via the Internet.
Frankly, the idea of attending library school by staring at a glowing screen is odd. Distance education does, however, show promise in allowing students with children and those unenthused by the prospect of driving eight hours to the nearest campus to earn an otherwise unattainable master's degree.
Like freshly planted seeds, distance-education courses are sprouting up at graduate library schools around the country. And while several professors I've spoken to were unconvinced at the onset that teaching online would be effective, they are now believers. "I'm finding that I'm getting far more in-depth work from students [online]," says Dr. Kay Vandergrift, associate dean of the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies at Rutgers University. Students, she says, can't hide from her online the way they can in a class with 40 students.
Still, Web-based learning isn't ideal for everything. "You can't teach storytelling [online]," notes Dr. Christine Jenkins, an assistant professor who teaches courses in LEEP, the distance education program at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Can you learn how to booktalk online? "No, you can't," says Dr. Keith Swigger, dean of the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University, which offers in-state video courses. "When we need to teach people to interact with others, then they'll have to come to campus."
To learn more about whether distance education has potential, Dr. Ellen Jay, president-elect of the American Association of School Librarians, later this year expects to establish a task force of library instructors who teach online to share their experiences.
The task of reinventing library education is a daunting one. "I wish there could be a magic wand or a quick fix," writes Jay. She couldn't know that I, too, was pondering wizardry. But instead of supernatural intervention, we need ALA's Congress on Professional Education to eschew turf battles and calcified thinking, and consider unorthodox, innovative solutions -- such as distance learning -- that neatly braid together core library values and technology. That would be magic enough.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
