Five Year Horizon For My Learning Commons

To complete this assignment, I used the 2017 version of the New Media Consortium Horizon Report. As I read, I found myself becoming slightly wary because the report felt somehow prescriptive, especially in the initial part of the report where challenges were broken down into solvable, difficult, and wicked and with regards to the times to adoption.  I think that learning commons and libraries should be tailored to the needs of their communities, and although their research might point to something being solvable, difficult, or wicked overall, the situation might be different in a specific school community. I also felt that some of the 2017 report’s timelines were too ambitious, seeing as we are now in 2022 and some of the things in even the solvable or one-year adoption time frame have not been adopted in some schools, for various reasons. For instance, maker space is a one-year time to adoption in the report, but there is variation in the prevalence of makerspaces across BC school libraries- some schools have them, some are starting, and some do not have plans for adopting them. I think the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of some technology in schools, which is not something that the report could have predicted, but it may have slowed others. For instance, when schools were running virtually learning and in cohorts, students were discouraged from going to the learning commons at all, let alone using maker spaces or shared equipment, but virtual reality and gamified learning was happening a lot. I also think that some changes mentioned in the report were out of the teacher librarian or individual school’s control- for example, the Internet of Things. This year, our school adopted smart lighting as described in the report, but it was not a decision the school made by itself, it was a district-based upgrade (50). It has been great, though, I love being able to control the amount of light in my classroom and I think the smart sensors are definitely saving electricity in teacher work areas, like prep rooms. 

I appreciated that the report gave concrete, global examples and provided definitions for solvable, difficult, and wicked. “Solvable” challenge is defined as, “Those that we understand and know how to solve,” (26), “Difficult” challenge is defined as, “Those that we understand but for which solutions are elusive,” (30), and “Wicked” challenge is defined as, “Those that are complex to even define, much less address,” (34). As I am currently a classroom teacher and not a teacher-librarian, I framed this task in the context of our school’s IB MYP program, the current role of the learning commons and teacher-librarian in supporting the program with an emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinary learning, and in the changing demographics of our inner-city school.

1. How can we bridge the “digital divide” between the have and have-not students in our school?

2. What criteria can the teacher librarian use to select which technologies to adopt, given limited budgets? 

Reference:

Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K–12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/11/2017hrk12EN.pdf

Accessed 13 May 2022.