Knowledge is Created Through Conversation

This thread in the Atlas reminds me that as librarians (for me, school librarians), we mustn't forget that these conversations are at the core of our success. With so many digital tools available to create and share knowledge, it could be easy to hide behind them and "pretend" to be engaged in the conversation.  A school librarian (school library media specialist) might be asked, "How do you intend to communicate with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, or staff?"  And that librarian might reply, "Oh, I will create a great web page with lots of information, including a newsletter about what's happening in the library, and I will host a blog."  Is that really a conversation?  Is that really knowledge creation?  Well perhaps the reader of your website or blog will engage in a conversation with themselves, that will encourage them to act or create a response, but to truly improve our communities, I think we need to ask ourselves, as librarians, am I fulfilling my end of the conversation?  Am I inviting feedback?  Am I providing the right tools to create new knowledge?  And what might those tools look like?


A recent example of initiating a two-way conversation between the school community and the greater community comes from an internet-safety assembly recently put together at my local high school.  The committee of teachers, administrators and staff who organized this assembly knew that high school students were really apathetic to the message trying to be delivered centered around the theme, "Use Common Sense, Think Before You Post" (http://www.oneontacsd.org/technology.cfm?subpage=1296680). Students, being naturally self-involved at this age, just didn't seem to get that what they posted online, their digital identity, had real-world consequences...both potentially good, or in a lot of cases, potentially bad.  So to address this apathy, the school invited in employers, college admissions counselors, and coaches who all looked to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, to gather impressions about potential employees, college students, and athletes, and a conversation was initiated.  For the first time, students were engaged in the conversation, and while I haven't heard the results of the survey conducted post-assembly, the impression the organizers received, based on informal feedback, was that students were going to change some of their behaviors in order to better represent themselves online.