[youtube]6mCkbrYKQyI[/youtube]
Nothing else needs to be said…
Clay sums up his argument powerfully with the following statement:
What’s going to make the difference here is what Dean Kamen said, the inventor and entrepreneur. Kamen said, “Free cultures get what they celebrate.” We’ve got a choice before us. We’ve got this trillion hours a year. We can use it to crack each other up, and we’re going to do that. That, we get for free. But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we’re going to do that, to the degree we’re able to do that, we’ll be able to change society.
Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The title Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library is so appropriate that I simply had to repeat the Chronicle of Higher Education commentary post. Brian T. Sullivan is an instructional librarian at Alfred University and suggests that the Academic library has died and the autopsy report reveals the following factors that contributed to its death:
- Book collections became obsolete
- Library instruction was no longer necessary.
- Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum.
- Libraries and librarians were subsumed by information-technology departments.
- Reference services disappeared.
- Economics trumped quality.
Sulivan expands on these 6 points in the article. He also offers the following summary statement which is a very hard pill to swallow and even though Sullivan is an instructional librarian I am sure he has angered many of his professional peers:
…it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like “There will always be books and libraries” and “People will always need librarians to show them how to use information.”
PLEASE remember I am simply repeating what this library professional has written about.
Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Tend to view looking smart above all else;
- May sacrifice important opportunities to learn—even those that are important to their future academic success—if those opportunities require them to risk performing poorly or admitting deficiencies;
- Believe that if you have ability, everything should come naturally;
- Tell us that when they have to work hard, they feel dumb;
- Believe that setbacks call their intelligence into question, they become discouraged or defensive when they don’t succeed right away;
- May quickly withdraw their effort, blame others, lie about their scores, or consider cheating.
In contrast Dweck explains that students with a Growth Mindset believe that they can develop their intelligence over time and subsequently will:
- View challenging work as an opportunity to learn and grow;
- Meet difficult problems, ones they could not solve yet, with great relish;
- Say things like “I love a challenge,” “Mistakes are our friends,” and “I was hoping this would be informative!”
- Value effort; they realize that even geniuses have to work hard to develop their abilities and make their contributions;
- More likely to respond to initial obstacles by remaining involved, trying new strategies, and using all the resources at their disposal for learning.
To help motivate students to adopt the growth mindset Dweck recommends that teachers create a culture of risk taking and strive to design challenging and meaningful tasks. This will require teachers to learn to encourage and reward effort, persistence and improvement rather than simply reward results and test scores. It will also mean that instructors will need to educate student on the different mindsets. Dweck offers many key recommendations in the article that include:
- Emphasizing Challenge, Not “Success”
- Giving a Sense of Purpose;
- Grading for Growth.
To help teachers learn more about a growth mindset Dweck and her colleagues have developed growth mindset curriculum that can be accessed at www.brainology.us.
- Watching 'Jerome Bruner' @Vodpod http://bit.ly/hgaU61 #
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