Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming?CMP=fb_gu 

Teaching Thoreau In a Hyper-Connected World

Nashville English teacher Elizabeth Smith introduced Thoreau’s Walden by asking her AP juniors if they were ever truly alone in a hyper-connected world — even without a smartphone. In doing so, she wanted to emphasize how Thoreau’s Transcendentalist experiment living alone in the woods might be nearly impossible to replicate in modern, plugged-in lives — at least not without some effort.

“One student said that he gets panicked if he goes an hour without a text message,” she said, “and he has to blow up his friends’ phones with messages to make sure they are still out there.” Other students, she said, bristled at the idea they were sheep in the digital herd, and liked to think of themselves as being able to manage a healthy balance between solitude and digital connection.

But for both adults and kids — parents, teachers, and students — because we have the luxury of being instantly and constantly connected, “Being alone feels like a problem to be solved,” said MIT Professor Sherry Turkle in the moving TED Talk based on her book, Alone, Together. Based on her research, Turkle argued that relationships maintained through texting and social media might make kids feel connected, but because the phone is always buzzing, they may miss valuable opportunities to experience real solitude, which is vital for self-reflection. “If we don’t teach our children how to be alone,” she said, “they will only know how to be lonely.”

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/teaching-thoreau-in-a-hyper-connected-world/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29