What about this Community stuff?
Just skimming through the 2008 Horizon Report by the New Media Consortium (see http://www.nmc.org/horizon/) underscores the common feeling that what used to be expert-driven, credentialed, individual, controlled things (communication? learning? media creation?) are turning into collective, collaborative, community, creative, un-credentialed things.
The emerging technologies listed there (pgs. 2 - 3): Grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, social operating systems.
Does this shift effectively explode the library? Can we really rethink everything — from staff training, to involvement with our community, to collection development, to support of Microsoft Word — to really embrace this trend?
David Wedaman
March 5th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I read recently, in a blog post on a blog post (ack), that Clay Shirkey said “we have to move to a publish-then-filter world”. He was talking about the media, but the same phenomenon is at work in academia. The relative advantages and disadvantages of filter-then-publish vs. publish-then-filter while mostly not too subtle, are still, I think, worth further reflection on the part of people who are preparing academics and citizens to process information.
Referenced blogs:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2008/02/28/clay-shirkys-book-talk/
(David Weinberger’s Joho the blog)
http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/a-publish-then-filter-world/
(Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed)
March 12th, 2008 at 8:19 am
There is indeed power in the collective or community, and these trends in media and social interaction will have a transformative effect on education as we know it. The opportunity lies in the way we harness the collaboration to engage our students in the lessons, the result of which will be projects that are far richer than previously required individual papers or exams. The challenge will be how we guide this to a meaningful and effective change. Remember - community without proper guidance (leadership) isn’t community - it tends towards chaos.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Great question- types of ones we are trying to gather now on the Horizon Project Research Agenda wiki - please consider adding
http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Research_Agenda