One of the more enjoyable parts of the NITLE Summit was the final keynote by Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond. Ayers is a historian previously at U Va and is one of the people behind the much vaunted Valley of the Shadow project.
The main theses of his presentation was that collaborative digital scholarship that engages students can broaden the horizons of students at smaller institutions while at the same time providing a tighter sense of community and connectedness for students at larger institutions. The History Engine, which lets students/scholars contribute to a crowdsourced collection of historical episodes drawn from primary sources, was his prime example of this type of digital scholarship.
When Ayers came to Richmond, one of the things he asked for was a Digital Scholarship Lab, which has done The History Engine and a few other projects.
Ayers spoke of a missed opportunity by the academy to really embrace the revolution in networked technology. In his view, digital technology can be trans formative to humanities scholarship, not just teaching.
I was encouraged by the talk, especially to have someone at the highest level of liberal arts college leadership encouraging the types of digital projects that we're trying to foster here at Watzek. He said that when college presidents get together and eat rubber chicken these are the kinds of things they like to show off to each other. What an endorsement!
In my mind, The History Engine falls into a category of project in which you have undergraduate students doing research and contributing publicly to an evolving body of knowledge. Ayers thought that students learn better when they know that their work is public and making an original contribution to a body of knowledge.
I can think of a few projects like that around here, chief among which would be our situated research initiative in Environmental Studies. We've also had interest from our SoAn folks in building a digital library of senior project bibliographies. Many of the science labs on campus accumulate data over the years through student research projects, too.
Should academic libraries develop competencies in building these collaboratively created digital knowledgebases? Will this kind of project be an aspect of future library expertise and service? If the library has been the laboratory for humanists to date, are these a future version of that laboratory?
Showing posts with label NITLESummit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NITLESummit. Show all posts
Friday, April 3, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Moving Metadata into the Cloud
Here's the ppt of a poster presentation that I gave at the NITLE Summit 2009 in Philadelphia this past weekend. It's about moving metadata from local databases to global ones and cites applications of WorldCat Local, delicious.com, and flickr as examples.
Nothing that I haven't blogged on before, but thought some folks might appreciate it.
Nothing that I haven't blogged on before, but thought some folks might appreciate it.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Kindle Question
At the "Core vs. Context" session at the NITLE Summit, Rick Holmgren of Allegany College likened the dilemma of higher ed library and IT services to that of newspapers, making reference to Clay Shirky's piece on the latter.
Hopefully, I'll find some time to blog more on that session. But for now, I thought I'd toss out an idea that came to me this morning. Ever since that session, I've been thinking about a trigger might cause the current "organizational form" of the academic library to collapse.
Could new models for e-books be that trigger?
A liberal arts college library like ours does around 100,000 circulation transactions a year. We spend around $500K to buy print books. The staff time devoted to book selection, acquisitions, cataloging, ILS administration, circulation, stacks maintenance, etc. would easily equal $300K a year. I imagine that the space used to house the book stacks for a 400,000 volume collection in a library like ours is worth $200K a year or more not including study spaces in the library, computer labs, special collections, etc. (it would cost that much to rent similar space with all utilities included, etc.).
What if all the books that a college like ours needed were available electronically for the Kindle price of $10 each? $10 X 100,000 circ transactions=$1,000,000, about what libraries like ours are spending right now to keep up a print collection. So our library should just give a million dollars to Amazon a year and be done with it, right?
That begs the question, why even have the library or the college as the middle-man? Instead of raising their tuition for another year in a row, why not pass the $1,000,000 savings on to students, and let them buy the books they need themselves?
Of course, this is an extreme scenario, impossible at the moment. Currently, the Kindle only has a small fraction of the books we purchase and house. Most of our books cost more than $10 each, though this might be different if the economics of book sales changed. Institutionally purchasing content does have potential advantages in cost savings and perhaps the incentive it gives students to read and research widely without thinking about incremental costs.
The point I guess is that the network can remove the advantages that print institutions had in bundling together information. The bundle of information that a library provides in its stacks (and web site) might lose its value in the same way that the bundle of information that is a print (or even online) newspaper has.
Information is atomized in the network environment and middle man organizations are increasingly irrelevant. Libraries, bookstores, publishers are essentially middle men between the author and the reader just as newspapers are (were) middle men between journalist and reader.
Hopefully, I'll find some time to blog more on that session. But for now, I thought I'd toss out an idea that came to me this morning. Ever since that session, I've been thinking about a trigger might cause the current "organizational form" of the academic library to collapse.
Could new models for e-books be that trigger?
A liberal arts college library like ours does around 100,000 circulation transactions a year. We spend around $500K to buy print books. The staff time devoted to book selection, acquisitions, cataloging, ILS administration, circulation, stacks maintenance, etc. would easily equal $300K a year. I imagine that the space used to house the book stacks for a 400,000 volume collection in a library like ours is worth $200K a year or more not including study spaces in the library, computer labs, special collections, etc. (it would cost that much to rent similar space with all utilities included, etc.).
What if all the books that a college like ours needed were available electronically for the Kindle price of $10 each? $10 X 100,000 circ transactions=$1,000,000, about what libraries like ours are spending right now to keep up a print collection. So our library should just give a million dollars to Amazon a year and be done with it, right?
That begs the question, why even have the library or the college as the middle-man? Instead of raising their tuition for another year in a row, why not pass the $1,000,000 savings on to students, and let them buy the books they need themselves?
Of course, this is an extreme scenario, impossible at the moment. Currently, the Kindle only has a small fraction of the books we purchase and house. Most of our books cost more than $10 each, though this might be different if the economics of book sales changed. Institutionally purchasing content does have potential advantages in cost savings and perhaps the incentive it gives students to read and research widely without thinking about incremental costs.
The point I guess is that the network can remove the advantages that print institutions had in bundling together information. The bundle of information that a library provides in its stacks (and web site) might lose its value in the same way that the bundle of information that is a print (or even online) newspaper has.
Information is atomized in the network environment and middle man organizations are increasingly irrelevant. Libraries, bookstores, publishers are essentially middle men between the author and the reader just as newspapers are (were) middle men between journalist and reader.
Monday, April 7, 2008
NITLE Summit
Mike Wesch of "The Machine is Us/using Us" fame, gave a great talk at the NITLE Summit on the ways he believes digital technology changes learning. A major point was that the "sage on the stage" lecture model just doesn't make sense anymore. Knowledge is no longer scarce--the professor no longer has the kind of authority that they used to.
Not sure how much I buy the part about lack of authority. There were always ways to challenge a professor's authority in the past. To do so is still hard. To challenge a professor's knowledge and authority, you need much more than just information--you need knowledge and understanding of that information, and digital technology doesn't endow students with that. And the professor still sets the agenda for a course and hands out the grade. But the point about the lecture as a somewhat outmoded vehicle for instruction in higher ed is well taken.
On a more practical level, one thing that was striking about this guy was that he cobbles together his own learning management system out of freely available, open Web 2.0 tools: Zoho databases, WetPaint wikis, YouTube, Netvibes, etc. Bryan Alexander, in his intro to Wesch, referred to him as a "faculty member from the future." One might say that he represents the beginning of a third stage in the evolution of teaching technology:
When someone in the room, which was full of educational technologists, among others, asked, "what can we do to help faculty like you", Mike's memorable quote was: "Get out of my way!"
Not sure how much I buy the part about lack of authority. There were always ways to challenge a professor's authority in the past. To do so is still hard. To challenge a professor's knowledge and authority, you need much more than just information--you need knowledge and understanding of that information, and digital technology doesn't endow students with that. And the professor still sets the agenda for a course and hands out the grade. But the point about the lecture as a somewhat outmoded vehicle for instruction in higher ed is well taken.
On a more practical level, one thing that was striking about this guy was that he cobbles together his own learning management system out of freely available, open Web 2.0 tools: Zoho databases, WetPaint wikis, YouTube, Netvibes, etc. Bryan Alexander, in his intro to Wesch, referred to him as a "faculty member from the future." One might say that he represents the beginning of a third stage in the evolution of teaching technology:
- from individually managed, desktop teaching tools like Word, Powerpoint that confine information to the teacher's personal information space and rely on the lecture to get that information across
- to institutionally managed, server based tools like Moodle, WebCT, BlackBoard that can serve to share and discuss information within a particular course or institution
- to systems that are managed at the network level and in some cases (like Wikipedia) serve to share knowledge globally
When someone in the room, which was full of educational technologists, among others, asked, "what can we do to help faculty like you", Mike's memorable quote was: "Get out of my way!"
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