It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books. Complete  Article  Availaible at…

The Future of Reading – In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update – Series – NYTimes.com.

African-American Studies Expert Dies

Gloria Harper Dickinson, an African-American professor who was the president of the Association for the study of African American Life and History and international regional director of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, has died. She was 61. The chairwoman of African American studies at the College of New Jersey, Dickinson specialty was the African Diaspora. In 1978, she was named a professor of African American studies at Trenton State College, now the College of New Jersey in Ewing, where she taught until she became ill in the fall, Philly.com reports. She died last Sunday of breast cancer at her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Willingboro, N.J.  The only child of a Merchant Marine and a nurse, Dickinson was raised in Queens, N.Y.; she graduated from Hunter High School in New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in European history from City College of New York in 1968, and a master’s in 1970 and a doctorate in 1978, both in African American studies, from Howard University. She was an early proponent of media technology in African studies, according to Philly.com. “Gloria introduced a computer in her classroom in 1988,” her husband said. At the time of her death, she was Webmaster for the Association of Black Women Historians. “I’ve always tried to connect with communities of people from African heritage,” Dickinson said before leaving for a trip to France in 2001 to lecture at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and the U.S. Consulate in Strasbourg. Six years earlier, she was among representatives from every continent at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. She spoke on African women’s topics, including equal rights, wages, domestic and political violence, and female circumcision. Kim Pearson, a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, described her friend as “a connoisseur of culture.” She had the “Rolodex from God. She traveled the world and connected people with people,” Pearson said.

African-American Studies Expert Dies | News You Should Know | BET.com.

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