Re-education?

(First off I'm sorry this is so late, my roommates are getting married on the 18th and I'm in the wedding party so this weekend we were dealing with a lot of prep stuff plus we have two people who flew in for the wedding staying with us right now so its been crazy.)

Current technology and future developments are changing (and I believe will continue to change) how universities and schools in general will work. Will the digital classroom replace the traditional classroom? I feel this debate has a lot in common with the question will digital libraries replace physical libraries? I believe the answer to both is no. The Internet and all its capabilities will supplement both schools and libraries and broaden the services that can be made available but ultimately we are social creatures and need face to face human interaction. Social software imitates this but ultimately chatting with a friend online is not as satisfying as seeing them in person.

Will some guy in Hungry be able to get a degree from Rutgers without ever leaving his country (or desk chair for that matter)? Will a professor be able to teach a class while pursuing research deep in the rain forest? Yes. The services universities provide, the audience they reach and the range of facility they draw from have already and will continue to expand.

However I have seen in libraries, while people want more information available from home at all times, people still come into the library for more social reasons. In my own library I have seen parents and siblings sit and read to younger children and parents and their older children sitting side by side on a couch each reading. They could just as easily do this at home, they don't need to spend more then five minutes in the library if they didn't want to. They can order books ahead, pick them up and then leave. Yet despite the busy world we live in some people still linger in the library. Last year, at the patrons request, we started a knitting circle in the library. It is still going strong and the patrons really appreciate the social aspect of it as well as how easy it is to share what each knows. Those with greater experience help those with are still learning.

As someone else pointed out, to undergrads who are transitioning from teenager to adult the social interactions and independence of the college setting are just as important to their social development as the traditional classes are to their education.  Because of this I believe we will see more changes on the graduate level where this social education is not as imperative.

 

I am really enjoying this class and the subject matter lends itself to an online class, however with a few exceptions, I don't feel like I'm getting to know my classmates the way I do in an traditional classroom setting.

One of the best classes I had at Rutgers incorporated both an online component and the traditional classroom setting.  We would have class discussions in a face to face setting, then use the class wiki to work on our assignments collaboratively.  This is how I see colleges changing, not a total reorganization but a melding of the traditional classroom and digital technology into one seamless whole.

Brown and Duguid Chpt. 3

In this reading what I focused most on was the idea of how important collective knowledge is. Brown and Duguid's story of the new employee in an isolated office struggling with the technology who's problems cleared up once she was move to a more populated area really stood out to me. When one runs into trouble with technology, or to put it into a library setting, when one runs into an information need of any kind, being able to tap into a shared collection of knowledge is crucial.

In the Human Information Behavior class I took one idea continued to appear. When a person has an everyday life information need, in most cases, they turn first to friends, family or co-workers and ask. (Ever since taking that class I have observed this in my own everyday information seeking behavior) Sometimes they are able to gain a satisfactory answer. Sometimes their immediate circle has not encountered this problem previously and the information seeker must look to other sources.

As was pointed out in the reading, the problem of technology that allows one to work almost anywhere, thus enabling the work from home attempts Brown and Duguid discuss, is that the user is cut off from that collective knowledge generated when groups of people gather. Social Software like blogs, wikis, IM and the others we will discuss in our class can be used to take this collective knowledge online and help to reconnect the user with others to recreate that ability to chat around the water cooler or ask a neighbor for help.

A recent example of this from my own experience is an online friend of mine from LJ posted a question on her blog asking for bibliographic data on the manga art group CLAMP. I saw the question and knew that my library had a manga guide book that would contain that information. During my down time at work I was able to look up and send her the answer to her question. I have also frequently observed blog users ask other users how to perform certain functions like customizing their blog or placing their posts behind LJ-cuts (a function that allows long posts to be collapsed or expanded so as not to take up too much space). This behavior greatly resembles a worker at a desk asking the workers near him if they know how to do "X".

The benefits of social software for creating a virtual shared knowledge collection are great. However, there are limits that need to be addressed. How such knowledge is stored and retrieved for later use is a questions librarians have been grappling with, in one form or another, for a very long time. Also, if your problem is that your computer crashed or your modem won't connect to the Internet then sending out a tweet or posting a help message on your blog won't be easy to accomplish.