More than just a pretty face....
and other observations on school libraries and teacher-librarianship
School Libraries in Canada, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter 1994, p. 23.
New Toys and Old Books
I finally managed to get a copy of Grandma and Me , the new (or is it already
old?) CD-ROM version of Mercer Mayer’s little story about the trip to the
seashore that the Little Critter and his grandma made one summer.
Now my real introduction to this thing was not in the Curriculum Laboratory
where I would have been able to be quite impassioned, if somewhat removed
from the child. In the Lab I would have been demonstrating this new
wonder to teachers, or at least, potential teachers. This time I was
using the CD-ROM unit that is part of this new Macintosh I recently purchased
for myself. And the audience was not those people at work! This
time the audience was real kids...grandchildren yet, blood relations! And
they loved the CD-ROM version of Grandma and Me.
There is a lot to like. Suddenly the characters that were in
the book (which comes in the package which may cause me further ruminations)
were on the screen in full colour. There was no degradation in the
quality of the image, no change in the size of the drawings. the characters
actually moved and talked! And music played! And when you touched things
with the mouse pointer and pressed the little button on the top of the mouse,
amazing things happened. Pictures came alive and did funny things.
Crabs snapped their claws. A starfish jumped up, picked up his little
hat and did a little dance with music, before resuming his place on the sand.
The little boy talks to his grandma and she replies. The story is
told with coloured lights moving along the text (shades of the bouncing ball
short films in the Saturday afternoon matinees of my youth), expanded, enhanced,
embellished by dozens of fascinating windows and neat gimmicks. Touch the
rock and hear the rock band! Push on the door and the doorbell chimes!
Touch the fence and a piano plays with colours dancing as the notes are changed.
It’s magic!
I delighted in my grandsons' attention. The two year old (I
swear), managed to make the mouse work! And he laughed and laughed
as certain things caught his fancy. He was back in the computer room
when we found him. The machine was off and he was trying to put it
on!
This week I have watched and listened to the squeals of delight and interest
coming from those older kids who would be teachers, as many tried out the
new thing in the Lab. I delighted in the enthusiasm and interest the
thing generated as everyone tried to find all the buttons hidden in each
picture. Hey, did you try the clouds?...a dog, an elephant, neat!
Everyone wanted to know the bottom line. About $60.00 depending on
where you find it. Yes, there are about four or five titles available
now and with the rapid increase in the number of home sales of Macs and IBMs
with CD-ROM units, there will soon be many more titles and considerably more
sophisticated processes. The big problem for the schools will not be
the software purchases, but getting sufficient computers in colour with sufficient
power to drive the disks quickly. Everyone seemed to accept that almost
20 seconds elapsed between pages on the LC we were using. That time
delay seems an eternity for me now that I glimpsed the truth on a faster
machine. And the machine needs lots of memory- at least 6MB will be
essential.
The other day I met a graphic artist who was giving over much of his waking
life to the development of a CD-ROM that was not that different to Grandma
and Me. His company was rapidly moving towards what he described as
comic books on the computer. When I asked about the educational considerations
that were being applied to the development it was clear that the emphasis
was entertainment.
I am troubled that my enthusiasms for this new device and its magic, may
be at odds with my concern for reading and the imaginative life. What
happens when the child reaches the end of all the buttons and is trapped
in the limits of the programmer's imagination? It is revealing to look
at the original book produced by Mercer Mayer in 1983. All the elements that
have been used in the computer version are on the pages. While the
story is short, the pictures do tell so much more. When the Little
Critter's swimsuit sags on screen it is very real, yet the implication of
that event is clearly evident (but not explained) in the book. The
child would have had to read that event into the story to find the humour
rather than passively finding it along the pre-programmed path.
So it's magic. It is definitely what we are going to get. It, together
with the encyclopaedias and atlases on silver disks, is going to send affluent
parents and grandparents all over the country into a great convulsive rush
to provide Johnny and Mary with these important new devices. Once again
the schools that are able to acquire these shiny new things will be considered
by some to be progressive and modern. I still cringe when I hear about
the school that has little in its library, now able to boast that it has
an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM. Given the mindlessness of Nintendo and
all the other games, this "new" book offers concerned parents a way out.
I am worried that it is merely another wonderful, very expensive toy that
will be seen as something it is not. It is not a book! It is
really not reading (although it will be of great moment for remedial work)
and given its Spanish and Japanese versions (built-in), it may do much to
stimulate and enhance early studies in those languages. But it is not
the same as the book. This thing does not make any demands on the child beyond
being able to move the mouse and any 2 year old can do that. This is
a toy. It will be loved and then discarded when the next new thing
comes along.
It is fun, but it makes few demands on the player. It is magic, but it soon
reaches the limit of its sorcery. Plato wrote: "When the mind is thinking,
it is talking to itself." With Grandma and Me we lose that conversation.
Donald Hamilton