Hi all,
We have posted our powerpoint (minus Frankenstein) and related seminar documents in the Brandeis institutional repository. Please see:
Permanent handle (URI) for The Future of the Library: http://hdl.handle.net/10192/21941.
Sue Wawrzaszek
Many thanks to Cecilia M. Dalzell, Access Services Librarian at the Arnold Bernhard Library, Quinnipiac University for the attached images!
Sue Wawrzaszek
Hi all,
Thank you for a great discussion on The Future of the Library! I’ve posted transcriptions of the flip chart exercises below — feel free to send corrections and additional comments as a Comment to this post!
Sue Wawrzaszek
The term “customer” is being thrown around more and more in the field of Higher Education.
Are our students students or customers?
Does that change how we view them?
What prompted this change in vocabulary?
John W Turner
Whenever we are faced with a challenge that causes us to leave our comfort zone we often retreat into our offices and hide behind our cyber persona in the form of email or SMS. No place better is this brought out than in the midst of a merger when tensions can be high and we are at our most vulnerable point. Often email messages can be read many different ways, and you can be sure that the one that is the least pleasant will be the way yours gets read. You may feel you are responding with a short concise response, but the reader may interpret this as snippy or dismissive. This can be especially true when you are dealing with two different cultures, as I did when we merged with the Library.
A simple yet highly effective way to combat this is to meet face to face, over lunch or coffee. Take a walk to go and visit the people you will be working with. Let them know who you are and get to know who they are. You may find that there are areas of common ground that you can use to disarm tensions and to let each other know you are both working together not in competition. You can begin to create a common dialog and learn the talk and walk of your new partners.
After all you are more likely to read an email in the kind voice of the person you know verses the unkind voice of an adversary.
John W Turner
Can we outsource the infrastructure (data storage, network) and the basic generic support services (Word, email)? And reposition staff and resources to focusing on selecting, providing access to, and helping patrons use the tools and resources we need to make available?
Dave Wedaman
Resources, tools, solutions, technologies, widgets — the amount of THINGS that are available and becoming available that could conceivably improve teaching, learning, and scholarship at your university is growing exponentially.
Our job as Library and Information Technology professionals is to efficiently comb and vet this universe of stuff, pick out the good things that might benefit our community, help our patrons access and use them, and move on.
But how do we efficiently evaluate a plethora of potential resources when the forms, formats, categories, and structures we’re used to — the conceptual scaffolds that historically have helped us determine value — are changing as fast as the content in them? If I used to select books by skimming paper slips that came from the book wholesaler, how do I even know about a new software resource in an unheard-of genre needed for a research I don’t know about (no slip comes for that . . . ), much less evaluate it?
What essential things hold true in a world of changing formats, content, roles, assumptions, users that might help us orient ourselves?
I propose what doesn’t change–or changes least–are the core and elementary processes of learning and scholarship. Not the particular forms or methods (professor stands at podium, uses a slide projector . . . patron consults print reference books, takes notes on 3×5 cards) but something more essential.
I suggest both library and information technology organizations tend to isolate themselves from these core processes but now need more than ever to (re)discover them or risk not being able to steer their ships in a rolling sea of information.
David Wedaman
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
Here’s something I’m trying to visualize: what is the college essay or term paper in 20 years?
The stereotypical term paper is the core block of communication in Higher Ed, the container in which students synthesize research and their own knowledge; reveal how they select, respond to, evaluate sources; link together other people’s thoughts; credit other people’s thought; show they were paying attention in class. The professor evaluating it is also one of the key ways the academy assesses the student’s contribution to the academy.
The term paper has been effective, but it has limitations. One student writes one paper, often on a topic that’s been used and reused for years; multiple students often write on the same topic at the same time, using the same resources, without learning much from each other; papers are seen by the instructor but then where do they go?; the apparatus of scholarly citation takes on disproportional significance; papers don’t easily integrate non-textual sources, etc.
I boil the traditional essay into a linear process: class > professor > assignment > student > library > 2 books and 2 journal articles
paper > evaluation.
How does this process change when the core underlying processes behind teaching, learning, and scholarship change? When culture shifts towards active participation in media creation; when information becomes increasingly available, searchable, usable; when sage on the sage classroom dynamics shift into collective learning in a constructivist context; when computers mitigate the citing process (when you technically can’t plagiarize); when non-textual media are accepted as legitimate knowledge blocks; when collaboratively created information sources (like Wikipedia) are considered as or more legitimate than individual works?
I’m not sure what it becomes, but here are perhaps not too novel thoughts. Breaking down the linear steps above:
The class becomes distributed in space, time, and diverse in participant ages, experiences, and cultures.
The Professor is more a fellow-learner with students in a collective learning environment, more a facilitator, maybe not even needed?
The Assignment is less a warmed-over, infinitely repeated abstract paper topic perhaps going nowhere but a dusty drawer and more an ongoing contribution to a collaborative, creative work that is published to the world during its creation, and is influenced and evaluated while it grows, and in turn influences other works.
The Student is less an isolated individual more or less amazed by scholarly methods and more a feisty, democratic content creator networked in myriad learning contexts, relying increasingly on collective intelligence to evaluate a constantly changing world of information — less interested in analyzing something by themselves, more interested in shared contributions to a bigger world of communication and information, more demanding in terms of the kinds of information he or she needs to process to do his or her work.
The Library and 2 books / 2 journal articles step above turns into the student’s lifelong(?) interaction with a universe of information, before, during, and after the assignment, in increasingly sophisticated ways. Students will use complex search algorithms, be guided by Amazon-like personalized (unsolicited?) research suggestions, and look for tools that help them analyze, visualize, understand the vast world of information available.
The Paper is less a finite, closed “box of thought,” and becomes a complex contribution to a networked, socialized world of information, it may be developed over a longer term than one semester, it involves a variety of media sources, it assumes collective authorship, it involves sophisticated evaluation of a mind-boggling amount and variety of information sources, it is less interested in credentialed information than in valuable information.
The evaluation step turns from one professor’s finite reading of a paper and turns into an iterative, social, ongoing, peer-oriented process; it’s key in the creation of the paper.
David Wedaman
Here’s the current list of institutions represented at our pre-conference seminar:
Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Brandeis University, Clark University, Columbia University, Eastern Connecticut State University, Le Moyne College, Quinnipiac University, Sacred Heart University, The Boston Conservatory, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Vassar College, Wells College, Wheaton College, Yale University
- Posted by Susan Wawrzaszek
