I often hear people ask, “If we have the internet, why do we still need librarians?”
This is something I’ve heard since the days of dial-up and continue to hear right now. It misses the vital role that librarians play in our students’ lives. It’s true that the information landscape has changed. It is easier than ever to create a work and publish it to the world and with a tap of a button, we access information from anywhere at any time.
But actually, that’s why librarians are more vital than ever. Here are some of the things librarians do:
For a long time, I’ve been a list-maker and a note-taker. You should see my desk. It can get littered with them pretty easily. The worst is when I would take down some valuable details and then leave the paper sitting on my desk at school. I have literally driven to school late at night…
Cognitive biases are systematic ways in which people deviate from rationality in making judgements. Wikipedia maintains a list such biases and one example is survivorship bias, the tendency to focus on those things or people which succeed in an endeavor and discount the experiences of those which did not. Source: A cognitive bias cheat sheet It’s all too…
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to…
Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks—research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Source: Take notes by hand for better long-term comprehension I…
As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer…
I know. We’re already many years into the 21st Century. And I know there’s a chance that the term “21st Century” might rub you the wrong way. But we’re here, and teaching and learning look very different. At least they have the potential to. When I started teaching in 2004, there was one computer in the…
