Julie Walker, Executive Director, American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and Board member, Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21).
After a couple of grey days in Helsinki, we were welcomed to Stockholm with two days of sunshine. Unfortunately, our schedule would not accommodate a school visit, so our meetings were largely with two sections of the national government focused on education. The first presentation was framed with the quote, “The future has already happened, it’s just unequally distributed.” In a country where computers and Internet access are almost 100%, the quote was more a reference to how ICT is being used in schools.
So called “office applications” are quite common, but general infusion into teaching and learning are still not as common they would like. In conversation with a young Swedish programmer, he mentioned that he had gone to an American school abroad and that his mother was the school librarian. When I asked him about school libraries in Sweden, he indicated that they were “a great black hole” in their education system.
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