The good news from my visit to Ohio this week is that it didn’t feel like there was as much resistance to the Wikipedia model, even from the librarians in attendance. (At least I didn’t get yelled at like in DC a few months ago…) I totally understand the difficulty many people have with the blurring of trusted/not to be trusted sources. And I got more of a sense of “this is going to be hard work” rather than “this is something we can’t do.” That’s the bottom line. None of this information literacy stuff is getting any easier, nor will it. I thought one of the most genuine moments of the conference was when one woman said something along the lines of “I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.” It’s not an easy admission, and I think a lot of people would just rather hold on to what they are used to, sticking to what they know. Problem is, of course, their kids aren’t. And I think once people understand the inevitability of it, the conversations turns from stopping it to dealing with it. That’s an important first step.

It’s been a great couple of days at the ILILE Conference in Kent, Ohio except for one thing. Here I am waiting for my plane at the Cleveland airport and it’s the first time I’ve had a connection. It’s a sad commentary on my existence that it felt as painful as it did to be offline. Anymore if I go a day without wading through my Bloglines account I get up over 300 posts behind, easy. And I’d still say at least 50% of them are usually relevant or interesting…worth a few minutes at least. I need to get a life.

Today the teachers and librarians in attendance had a great conversation about what it means to teach in a world where content is easily created, freely shared, and actively engaged. It’s such a big shift from the traditional, textbook focused classroom where our students create documents and assignments that are basically collectors of information. With the Read/Write Web, assignments become not just containers but connectors to all sorts of other important resources. It’s a riff on what David Weinberger writes and talks about so well.

But one teacher from Toledo spoke about how fewer than 40% of her students can access the Internet from home, and how she worried that the learning divide between her students and those with access will expand more quickly in the era of an interactive Web. It still amazes me that the number one national education priority isn’t to connect EVERY student to the Web. It’s sinful.

And here I’m complaining about not having wifi that works in my hotel…