Author: Scott Voth

Speed Skates, Technology and Open Learning

“Speed Skating” – by Parutakupiu

I met with a bunch of professors and fellow alums in a focus group last week, and we discussed things we liked about the grad program in Library Science at Queens College, and things that needed might need some tweaking.   We went around the circle a couple times, and on the third go around, I said the courses I liked best were those which were non-hierarchical, and emphasized openness and sharing, where the professor wasn’t the sole content provider, and didn’t treat students like open vessels which needed to be filled, and students didn’t feel like they were just cycling through the system, but were contributors in the learning process.

All this I stole from reading Luke Waltzer’s great post “On EdTech and the Digital Humanities.”  Luke’s ideas had been simmering in my head for days, and they finally found an outlet.

Reactions, while friendly and supportive, were cautionary.   Yes, but there is an incredible volume of information that needs to be transferred to the students.  Yes, but the curriculum has been carefully constructed to provide information necessary for librarianship. Yes, but there is an incredible diversity in our student population.

All of which I agree with, to a point.

When you’re in library school, you have to take four, traditionally structured core courses:  fundamentals, technology, cataloging, and reference.   After that, depending on your specialization, you may have other requirements to meet or be lucky enough to choose your own electives.  I found courses which focused on distance learning, digital collections, new technologies, open paradigms, and the value of wikis, blogs, and social media.  And it wasn’t coincidental that these courses valued member participation, and encouraged students to create shareable resources and e-portfolios to document their work.

Anya Kamenetz writes in her book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, that technology can provide “speed skates” for teachers and students.  But educational technology, she warns, needs to be “well-designed and carefully implemented” (p. 103).   Putting gadgets in students’ hands doesn’t necessarily make them great students.

Cathy Davidson, director of HASTAC, responded to a NY Times article Math that Moves: Schools Embracing the iPad, sharing her mixed reactions to providing iPads to students.  Yes, iPads are great, and yes, some students will have incredible experiences playing around with them, but if a school’s curriculum doesn’t change, those iPads’ potential will never be fully realized.

Gardner Campbell Educause article “A Personal CyberInfrastructure” proposes to give students a personal web domain as freshmen, and let them build upon it as they progress through their education.  This makes perfect sense for students in library science, where technology plays such an important role, and where a large amount of information is thrown at you, and archiving it can become overwhelming.

In the old days, newly-minted librarians used to leave library school with a deck of reference cards that they painstakingly collected.  They used these cards to guide them in their new jobs, adding relevant cards to their personal stacks as their careers progressed.  Can we re-design a curriculum that perpetuates this need to collect, so that students leave the program with a portfolio that helps them land jobs, and likewise guide their futures?  Can we re-structure course work so that students learn from each other, in the open, and not just from the sage on the stage?

There’s been a lot written about the difference between consuming technology and producing it.  I came across a cool article by Jeffrey MCClurken called “Learning through Digital Media: Teaching and Learning with Omeka: Discomfort, Play and Creating Public Online, Digital Collections,” which questions the common notion that digital natives somehow intuitively get digital media.  Their “digital abilities tend to be fairly narrowly-focused (Facebook, texting, and the first page of Google Search results)” and “their involvement with digital media tends to be consumptive rather than productive.” The notion of the digital native “risks letting teachers off the hook from teaching with digital media,” simply because their students already know it, maybe even better than they do.

First year library students quickly become connoisseurs of digital media, and many become effective producers, using technology to propel themselves through the program.  But are the “speed skates” laced on too late?  One suggestion from another alum in last week’s focus group was to run some kind of technology “prep” course for those entering the program.  Besides addressing the diversity in students’ digital literacy, this course could introduce some basic social media tools that will be employed in future course work.

It’s hard to get to know your peers in grad school, and I regret I didn’t learn more from this group of extraordinarily bright, interesting, and diverse future librarians. One way the program can do a better job fostering a community is by using tools like WordPress, where students reflect upon their coursework, post their papers and projects, and comment on each other’s work.

The idea of student e-portfolios is being actively investigated.  Can we take it one step further?  Can we integrate the concepts of e-portfolios with the program’s pedagogy and realize technology’s potential to propel open learning?

Our Open Source Community

An open source project’s success depends on the community it attracts, networks of motivated members working together for a common purpose, creating and nurturing interfaces which evolve, often at an incredible pace, and snowball in popularity, as new people get drawn in, share and contribute.

Courtesy of OSI

It’s exciting to watch as the CUNY Academic Commons grows, expands, and responds to users’ feedback.

Commons users – CUNY faculty and grad students – create groups, participate in forums, post content on blogs, and collaborate on our wiki.  Some help develop and maintain our underlying software, which we, as a community, document, test, and if we find issues, report and track defects.

As we collaborate, we may have epiphanies or nervous breakdowns, we may write about Archeology in Iceland or managing on-line courses for distance learners, but it’s incredible to be part of the Commons!

We are enjoying a bumper crop of new members, and I look forward to their contributions!

Edupunks, Freedom, and Copyright

Thanks go to Jim Groom, who mentioned the “If we don’t, remember me” collection in his blog, Bavatuesdays. It contains animated gif files from classic movies that can be inserted into blog posts. Check them out. They are really fun!

Eben Moglen gave a talk entitled: “Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century” at the Grad Center last week. An audio recording is available on the Commons. From a ridiculously high-level, here’s my one sentence summary: the world needs more Einsteins and Shakespeares, and they are out there, but they don’t have access to knowledge, largely due to the Draconian way publishers lock up resources. Dangerous words for us librarians, sworn to protecting copyrights, and who fall back on the Open Access movement as our way of addressing this issue.

But the Edupunks are coming!

Back to the animated image above – copyright infringement or original work? Interestingly, the collection of gifs was created anonymously on Tumblr.com, so maybe the artist had concerns too. I don’t know much about the process of creating animated gifs, but basically a number of frames from the movies were taken (I guess you might say stolen) and re-processed. Whether this is substantive enough to pass the copyright litmus test for a derivative work, I don’t know. It could be argued that this type of video re-working is equivalent to Pop artists drawing pictures of soup cans, or even Ted Turner colorizing Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.”

There’s no doubt that today’s technology opens up a lot of thorny copyright issues. YouTube is always on the look-out for copyright infringers on the upload side (they don’t want to be sued). Once a video is marked public, YouTube is great about allowing it to be shared anywhere. Flickr differs from YouTube in that the photographer has more granular control over the rights to his or her photos.

Somewhere in his speech, Moglen claimed most non-literary authors don’t mind having their works reproduced or altered, as long as they are given credit for them. Attribution means a lot to people. Moglen is of course a big proponent of open source and open access, and feels that sharing knowledge on the web is essential and commonsensical.

Edupunks – those DIY self-learners considered by some as university “parasites” – depend upon an open and free internet to explore and create. They take “Fair Use” to the absolute limit. They are extremely interesting, and librarians should to be aware of these growing movement. And check out the picture of Jim Groom, “Edupunk’s poster boy” – Wikipedia.

Embedded below is a five part dialog between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell, entitled “Edupunk Battle Royal,” put together by Educause, that explores the term “Edupunk” and its implications.

Appended below is the Wikipedia “Edupunk” article.

A Librarian’s 2.0 Manifesto

 

Laura Cohen delineated the major Library 2.0 concepts way back in 2006, in her video above, and most are still relevant today.

Definitions for Library 2.0 get a little nebulous, and we tend to think of it as just Web 2.0, in a library. This post tries to find a distinction between the two terms.

First, O’Reilly’s (2005) seven principles of Web 2.0:

(1) The Web as Platform; (2) Harnessing Creative Intelligence; (3) Data is the next Intel inside; (4) End of Software Release Cycle; (5) Lightweight software models; (6) Software above the level of a single device; and (7) Rich User Experience.

Is Library 2.0 just a made-up term, or does it really mean something? Maness (2006) thinks so. He feels that Library 2.0 is user-centric, has multimedia, is socially rich and communally innovative. But is it simply a subset of Web 2.0? Or are these just characteristics?

My (ideal) concept of Library 2.0 is that it’s a massive push to get the library beyond the one-dimensional, catalogued concept of information.

Library 2.0 uses the common Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, streaming video, social networks, folksonomies, RSS, Twitter, and the inevitable mashups. Its aim is to enrich the way libraries present information to patrons. So I made up a list that summarizes Library 2.0’s implications, at least as I see them now. Hopefully my list will grow!

  • Tech-savy librarians take on tasks traditionally done by IT.
  • Creating blogs, websites, pathfinders, wikis are commonplace tasks.
  • Mobile devices will continue to proliferate and be used to access the library website/catalog.
  • Instant messaging continues to explode as a way to interact with librarians.
  • The blogosphere will be a continual challenge to sift through, qualify, judge…
  • On-line information will become (or already is) the norm.
  • Distance learning: information literacy classes will be on-line
  • e-books will proliferate – librarians must negotiate best terms for vendor contracts
  • Cloud Computing will compete with Open Source
  • There will always be Privacy concerns
  • Libraries will enrich OPAC records with with pictures, sound, articles, and reviews from various internet providers (see Scriblio, a WordPress plugin)
  • Librarians will create social networks (book clubs, interest groups, etc.)
  • The library home page itself will become a social network.