I've been thinking a lot lately about how librarians can encourage intellectual freedom when there are somewhat reasonable arguments against it. This comes up particularly with Internet access and safety issues where children are concerned. Laws like CIPA and others that have stood up better or worse to court scrutiny aim mainly to create better safety for children even though they do so by restricting access.
The best way I can think of to do that is to make sure that we are educating the public (both parents and kids) about how to be safe on the Internet and what are actual dangers versus hype. This excites me because I started on the path towards librarianship so that I could teach. I never wanted to tech high school or college and never really had an interest in wrangling younger kids everyday, what I wanted was to teach new things everyday to different kinds of people. General computer literacy and safety skills fit perfectly into this.
I see librarianship as essentially a super educator extravaganza (with lots of directing people to the restroom) most days. Sometimes we teach classes and sometimes we just open access to previously unknown resources.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment