From Elizabeth Church's article Bringing the reading room into the digital age, we've seen that in many ways campuses and many high schools across the nation are becoming more high tech and slowly working their way into the most recent available education systems, taking full advantage of the internet and the resources it can provide. By revamping their libraries and the systems that have been incorporated there for years, we've seen the decline of reference rooms and media clippings to increased digital paraphenalia, computer lounges and digital collections of reference material.
Is this really the way we want to go? Honestly, I'm all for using technology in the classroom and augmenting the resources in a library with that of the internet or digital collections of reading material, but in some cases schools have gone so far as to make everything reliant upon the technology factor and remove books from the shelves of the library itself. Yes, this may make finding information more convenient, but are we not just encouraging our students, both present and future ones, to dismiss actual books as less than worthy sources for information when they can simply press a few buttons to find what they need?
Another issue brought up would be the funding of such a task. Granted some schools may have the superior funding for something like this, but how many schools that are under-funded, who barely have enough money to buy the necessary books for the classes, let alone the computers to replace said books are there?
I find this article to be encouraging in the fact that there are open-minded faculty out there in the education process that will incorporate both the old and the new ways of finding, storing and passing on information, but in the same breath, I fear if we immerse ourselves and our schools in a library system where there are no books at all.... we should read up on M.T Anderson's Feed, and see how we like their way of life.
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After reading the article, I must admit I shared some of Carissa's fears regarding the abolishment of written texts in favor of electronic texts. However, despite the push for technological advancement, I feel even modern day students are clinging to paper-and-ink reading material.
For example, in one of my classes, we were offered the option to purchase a physical book for $60 or the electronic text for $29. My professor was shocked when he spoke with the bookstore and discovered that 80% of his students had purchased the print text despite the 50% markup. The fact that students chose a more expensive text, not because of content, but simply for form, indicates that we are a long way from an entirely technological society.
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