I was laying in bed last night trying to figure out what my blog is about now that I'm out of library school (which was 90% of my focus for the past year.)
I came up with:
1. library-related stories
2. technology developments
3. baby stuff
…with a side helping of politics, Saskatchewan news bites and miscellanous observations – often in a tasty list format. Sound about right?
Here's an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell that combines two of these major categories – library-related stuff (especially if you're interested in children's librarianship) and baby-related stuff:
Early acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity — may thus be a misleading indicator of later success, said Gladwell. “Sometimes we call a child precocious because they acquire a certain skill quickly, but that skill turns out to be something where speed of acquisition is not at all important. … We don’t say that someone who learned to walk at four months is a better walker than the rest of us. It’s not really a meaningful category.”
Reading may be like walking in this respect. Gladwell cited one study comparing French-speaking Swiss children, who are taught to read early, with German-speaking Swiss children, who are taught to read later but show far fewer learning problems than their French-speaking counterparts; he also mentioned other research finding little if any correlation between early reading and ease or love of reading at later ages.
(via DiggieFilter)
That last line surprised me as it goes against everything we, as book-lovers, tend to (and are taught to?) believe. Anybody else ever heard this?
I bought a copy of Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Reading, Libraries and Community but never got to read it cover-to-cover, only excerpts. Time to go back to it I think…
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