Watch the tech page for further developments

Many librarians have been reading the Publisher's Weekly list of best children's books and it's certainly worth looking over. But also today we got another reminder that the book news isn't the only news we should be following if we want to serve our patrons well. The good old NY Times once again reported important news in its technology colums. Peter Wayner has written a fascinating article about one of the newest opportunities in the digital world, several new computer programming languages which have been developed for children. Now this may be a subject librarians haven't thought too much about because programming is usually a classroom or afterschool subject, but these new languages may change that. New tools like Scratch and Alice allow children to cooperate to produce simple video games and animated films. These tools are not for the faint of heart or those who want to have spectacular results in five minutes. They require patience and work, but they lead children into the pleasure of expressing their creativity. Surely the library, whether school or public, is a good home for this kind of extracurricular project. In a world where children spend far more time interacting with screens than they do with books, we should encourage them to use their creativity to create stories and explore the possibilities of media literacy as well as print literacy. The children in our libraries today may develop a whole new kind of book for the future and that's exactly the kind out outcome we want to encourage.