San Antonio opening a library with all eBooks… and/or all cloud sourced reading materials. Described in this article from Time as a “Bookless Library”….kind of the way automobiles were originally called “horseless carriages”.
Libraries are a fascinating public resource in this learning revolution, as they clearly need to “become” something different…and we as yet aren’t sure what that might entail.
One might imagine “libraries” new, and old, to be, in a few years, places to go where there’s online access enhanced by some form of services, such as tutors and what used to be called reference librarians… and maybe a place where students can hang who are no longer tethered to a “school building”.
The vision here is that libraries become neighborhood eLearning centers, where “students” of all ages can access organized, or individualized, learning resources in the cloud. But with some added form of enhanced facilitation services…that role we used to call “teacher”.
Some of the “plant” dedicated to “classrooms” at “schools” in neighborhoods could also move towards sort of “public learning and curation” and provide affordable access both hardware and bandwidth. A new definition for places where “kids” can safely be “parked” during the daytime hours when parents are away working.
Or maybe the parents are there too, learning… and/or working? Rent a “work space”/ cubicle? Rent a small business space in the old school or old library?