mid-December Ruminations

Since I'm going to attend meetings today on (a) aftermath of the Information Literacy forum and (b) classrooms of the future, it seems worthwhile to try to summarize my thoughts of the moment. The two subjects are obviously linked, and both are concerned with what we should do.

I don't think anybody is in danger of leaping into the abyss of reliance on investment in hardware 'solutions' to poorly-articulated problems, but it might be worth sketching what's wrong with a few of them, if only by putting together some links for people to look at:

• Laptop U.: university policy requires computer purchase/use by students and faculty (see some of the flackery: University of Alberta, IBM's promo page and page of links, U. Minnesota Crookston, Concordia St. Paul, St. Gregory's University)
• The Electronic Classroom: "the Classroom of the Future", often developed in the context of distance education, sometimes a separate library facility, sometimes a departmental space (viz: University of Bergen, a class project, detailing some of the features that might be implemented in Electronic Classrooms, Memorial University, support materials from Maricopa, Va. Tech Materials Science and Engineering)

To sum up what I think we should do, it's

provide support and encouragement for people to explore...

I think that our strengths lie in the face-to-face and small-scale classroom setting, for which there is no improvement to be had from the substitution of computers. The addition of computer possibilities is something else again, and there's a lot to be gained for both student and teacher, but the most critical issue is support. This is more often an information issue than one centered on hardware: how to wring the most out of software, how to develop specific applications or link applications together. The time frame is sometimes here-and-now (where the requestor needs immediate answers and assistance), but often it's in the scale of 3 to 6 months, in developing a course or carrying out a project. We (and here I include University Computing personnel and librarians) do a lot of consulting in this general area; I think we need to be prepared to do a great deal more.

My own experience of the last few months with GIS and with Larry Hurd's ecology course is a microcosm for what I'm talking about here. In both projects I'm acting as a sort of hinge or filter or mediator, trying to turn possibilities into practical realities, often by getting the help and connivance of others (Jeff Knudson, Skip Williams, John Blackburn) to realize my schemes. What's missing (in the sense that I think I could do things better if I had it) is access to extramural expertise --in the form of the funding for training courses (for example, the ESRI ArcView workshops, which would have been less valuable before I'd messed with ArcView extensively, but now would provide valuable augmentation to my skills) and sometimes for ancillary software. I and other librarians act as "information specialists" in some well-defined realms (print, online databases), but in order to support the work of faculty in our areas we may need to deal with a whole array of new forms of digital information (spatial data, statistics, images, etc.).