If you follow blogs, Twitter, or school library listservs, then the name Bill Ferriter won’t come as a surprise to you. He stirred up quite a bit of controversy this spring when he urged librarians to tone down their librarian-as-superhero language. It was a fair point that, unfortunately, spiralled into some pretty negative back-and-forth. I wrote about it here.

But as time goes on, I keep going back to Ferriter’s work, partly because he says some very good things that have been very useful in our preparations for our Teaching with Technology course in the School of Educaiton, partly because his very provocativeness makes me step back and rethink my preconceptions, partly because many of our Teaching with Technology students find resonance in Ferriter’s work. It’s good to feel uncomfortable once in a while, right?

Alice Yucht Tweeted that Ferriter, his co-author Adam Garry, the fabulous Meg Ormiston, and his publisher, Solution Tree, are embarking on a VoiceThread discussion project around Ferriter and Garry’s new book, Teaching the iGeneration, and a portion of Ormiston’s forthcoming book.

Here’s the best part: you can download the FULL TEXT of Teaching the iGeneration and a sample Ormiston chapter if you register for free at the Solution Tree site.

Click here to view Ferriter’s post and all the details.

Wouldn’t this be a great way to kick off your building’s professional development season — for free? (Ahhh, free … the magic bullet of staying afloat in these hard times.) You’d be bound to get some great conversation out of it.

Luisa posted a fascinating link on the IASL listserv today about a tech-intensive program at Seton Hill University  (not to be confused with Seton HALL!).  In a program they call the Griffin Technology Advantage, the university writes:

Twenty-first century students live in a world of technology and collaboration where learning happens 24 hours a day and is supported by professors, friends, professional experts, and fellow learners in the classroom, on the web, and around the world …

Seton Hill’s faculty understand that each student has a unique learning style. Some of you learn best by attending lectures and writing papers; others excel when given the opportunity to research a topic and create a video or an audio podcast.

To this end, Seton Hill is committed to moving past the teaching of information literacy (understanding how to locate and evaluate information from resources that range from the traditional library to sophisticated online sources) to what we like to call “creative literacy” - teaching you not just how to find the information you need, but how to process it in the way that allows you to make sense of the information, apply the information to actual situations, and solve problems.

Fostering creative literacy by:

• Connecting you and your teachers to versatile, dynamic communities of learners.
• Providing linkages and connections throughout our academic and co-curricular environments.
• Allowing any classroom to become a virtual computer lab.
• Providing access to both Mac and PC-based software applications from a single hardware device.
• Increasing more interactive and in-depth teaching and learning experiences.
• Supporting our vibrant campus environment - increasing both student learning and entertainment opportunities…

In this way, Seton Hill is training students of all learning styles and abilities to be better researchers, better at compiling and organizing data, and better at publishing and presenting information - better, in fact, at becoming lifelong learners who can easily adapt to new situations and new technologies in their lives and careers.

Each incoming student will get a Mac laptop, which they’ll exchange two years later for another laptop that will become theirs upon graduation.  Faculty will also receive a laptop.

Could your school district claim similar goals? (Mine has a very similar set of objectives, though different means.)

Seton Hill uses “creative literacy” to define the process of seeking, using, and synthesizing information.  Do you agree with this term? 

My hunch is that this blurb tells us more about the technology and less about the pedagogy. And since it’s PR, I can’t blame them.  We see the who, what, when, where, and why.  But the $64,000 question (to date myself as a child of the 70’s) is … how? How is an entire university moving from where it is to where it wants to be?

For you middle-grade fiction fans, check out the full-text eBook of Molly Moon Stops the World here!Full-text access like this really has my head churning about how we scaffold deep reading experiences for a generation of elementary- and middle-school aged kids whose regular online behavior is to bop all over the place.

This could make a cool book club experiment!

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