Today’s reading deficiencies are due to over-distraction and lack of concentration on one task, a discipline to be learned, not an instinctual ability to be buried under modern society.

The very idea that we’re “hardwired” for paper and cannot change goes up there with “Man cannot breathe the air at speeds greater than 30MPH.”

Reading from a screen of whatever size, and reading from a book, use different parts of the brain.
I recommend: “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” by Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts. Her book received a lot of notice in 2008. She writes that reading is not an innate ability. We have developed the skill over centuries by in fact changing our brain structure. And it’s an ability that can be lost.

This is a quote by her from the New Yorker: “As it develops expertise, the circuitry for reading in the brain becomes both “smaller” in its streamlined regions, and also “larger,” –that is, more widely activated–in those regions engaged in sophisticated thinking, like inference,critical analysis, and insight. This type of activation is the basis for “deep reading” and the highest forms of thought in a society, from novel thinking to the deliberation of virtue. My primary concern for the future of reading is that these critical areas will be short-circuited in the next generation of readers, whose formative years may be immersed too early in digitally driven media. The addictive immediacy and the overwhelming volume of information available in the “Googled world” of novice readers invite neither time for concentrated analysis and inference nor the motivation for them to think beyond all the information given. Despite its extraordinary contributions, the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.”

Oh well, we’ve done a lot of self-destructive things in the last century or two. What’s one more?

The Library Media Center Program and Curriculum is not only integral to and supportive of the school curriculum, but also provides a mechanism for choice and exploration beyond the prescribed course of study. The Library Media Center Program provides a wide range of resources and information that satisfy the educational needs and interests of students. Materials are selected to meet the wide range of students’ individual learning styles. The Library Media Center is a place where students may explore more fully classroom subjects that interest them, expand their imagination, delve into areas of personal interest, and develop the ability to think clearly, critically, and creatively about the resources they have chosen to read, hear,or view.

The Library Media Center provides a setting where students develop skills they will need as adults to locate, analyze, evaluate, interpret, and communicate information and ideas in an information-rich world. Students are encouraged to realize their potential as informed citizens who think critically and solve problems, to observe rights and responsibilities relating to the generation and flow of information and ideas, and to appreciate the value of literature in an educated society.

The Library Media Center Program serves all of the students of the educational community–not only the children of the most powerful, the most vocal or even the majority, but all of the students who attend the school. The collection includes materials to meet the needs of all learners, including the gifted, as well as the reluctant readers, the mentally, physically, and emotionally impaired, and those from a diversity of backgrounds. The school library media program strives to maintain a diverse collection that represents various points of view on current and historical issues, as well as a wide variety of areas of interest to all students served.

The Library Media Center is the symbol to students of our most cherished freedom–the freedom to speak our minds and hear what others have to say.

Hey, they might have sold off their books and put in a bunch of video game stations…

I’ve carried one type or another of an ebook reader for over 10 years and find the format one that gives me a range of materials in my pocket at all times. If Cushing is really serious about their project they will provide every student with a means of access to as many electronic resources as possible. I recently remarked to David Rothman that I wished that I had had the hundreds of thousands of electronic primary resources presently available when I taught United States history in the late 60′s.

A question I would ask Headmaster Tracy is “How much of the personal electronic data that you created 10 years ago can you readily access today?” I’m quite sure that most of us would have trouble reading some of those old files what with the multiple changes that have been made in operating systems, data storage systems and program changes. I’m all for moving to new systems of information storage and access, but we need to stabilize access to those systems before we completely eliminate the old.

Once a system exists such as that advocated by Rothman and others with a national electronic data library available to all, then we can begin to eliminate older systems which are too costly to maintain.

All thats left in print is the entry level textbooks, almost everything else is digital first, and print second. The is certainly true for most of the fortune 1000 businesses.

It seams radical but remember that theres a different between an research and teaching library and a public library it makes a lot of sense for reasearch libraries to spend budget on making a lot of online content avaliable to student trough jstor, safari, overdrive and similar services instead of on keeping the books around, they migt be overdoing it but well they need to attract students and this clearly sends signals of being in sync with the zeitgeist.