Will they tweet to the President?

President Obama startled many pundits today by holding a twitter forum on TV. He answered some of the more than 50,000 questions that were tweeted for him. The content was similar to press conferences and other political commentary that we've heard for the past few years, but the method and media should make librarians think about process. The children who are in our libraries and schools these days are learning to communicate through social media as much as through traditional writing and talking. The time for arguing about what has been won and lost in the changing, whirling media world is over. It doesn't matter whether the skills of handwriting and public debating are being lost because most of the children of today will rarely or never need to use those. Librarians are naturally conservative when it comes to culture. We know the value of preserving literary and other intellectual content in book form, but we are living in today's world. We should help children to react to older artifacts like books through every technique of the digital world. We should help them feel at home with tweets and blogs; ebooks and vbooks. Today's children almost certainly will not be tweeting to whoever is president in 2024, but they will have been able to use the skills they develop today to adapt to new media in whatever form it takes. As librarians and teachers we will help them get there.