To be sure you’re pointed in the right direction as a library media specialist and that you’re pointing your educator colleagues and your students in the right direction, you’re constantly monitoring articles, blogs, websites, professional learning networks … your teachers’ lounge! The information sources are many and varied. Here are two more:

Coming Up

In October: We’ve already built and posted the conference program for this fall’s Internet @ Schools West in Monterey, Calif. We maintain there’s still a need for face-to-face interaction with speakers and colleagues from schools and organizations that are out of your geographic—or maybe even comfort—zone to be on the cutting edge, which is why we do this conference and the concurrent Internet Librarian conference every fall.

Highlights include keynoter Vint Cerf and sessions such as these:

• Trying Not to Filter: Internet Filtering Technologies Update

• It Takes a (Global) (Virtual) Village: Social Learning for Students and Teachers

• Gaming in the Library: The Hows and Whys

• Open Educational Resources: Join the Global Education Community

• Expanding the Concept of Library

Check out the program for the K–12-focused Internet@Schools conference at www.infotoday.com/Internet@Schools/program.asp and for the more broadly focused Internet Librarian at www.infotoday.com/il2009/program.asp. Register for the Oct. 26–28 events at www.infotoday.com/il2009/registration.asp.

Here and Now

In this very issue of MMIS: You can read up on your library’s and your students’ futures in several features and columns right now. If you follow Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog, you know he’s in touch and tuned in, so you’ll want to read his article Libraries for a Postliterate Society (p. 20) to see whether you need to reset your professional compass. In discussing how you can serve a "postliterate clientele," Doug notes that "postliteracy is a return to more natural forms for multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats."

And as education reform (encompassing the refocusing of the school library!) increasingly embraces continuous and embedded professional development (PD), you can read experts Joellen Killion and Cheryl Williams’ assessment of the PD scene in Online Professional Development 2009 (p. 8). Joellen is with the National Staff Development Council, and Cheryl is with Teachscape.

David Hoffman , editor

hoffmand@infotoday.com