Favorite Recommendation
Praise for the Knight Commission report, “Informing Communities,” from Colin Rhinesmith, the Community Media Coordinator at Cambridge Community Television and an Adjunct Lecturer for the Media and Culture Program at Bentley University. Colin blogged about the report under the heading, “A Few of My Favorite Things.”
“For those of us working in community media and technology, the report provides overwhelming support for our field and creative strategies to help us push it forward.
“The report envisions a world where community voices truly matter. It provides residents with opportunities to become more actively engaged in community life through media. It provides parents and educators with thinking about how youth can gain digital and media literacy skills today and into the future. And there is much more to the report.”
Colin singles out Recommendations 2, 6, 7 and 11 as among his favorites. To read the whole blogpost, click here. Which recommendation is your favorite?
My favorite recommendation is #7: Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.
I think libraries have an important role to play, not only in providing instruction in completing basic computer tasks but in learning to evaluate digital information and linking that information with other resources and librarians' expertise in things like understanding the different departments of the Federal government and their functions so patrons can identify likely sources of needed information.
In our community, our local government has made a significant investment in providing computers for our community in our local community resource centers but haven't seen the need to link these computers to librarians or library resources.
I think linking librarians to computers provides more "bang for the buck" when feasible. After all, we libraries have online databases which could be of use to the community if community members had access to them and knew about them.