Teaching and learning are problems of information management: students and faculty alike are involved in finding, processing, organizing, storing, retrieving, analyzing, composing, revising, communicating, summarizing, and distributing information in many contexts and formats. We have a broad range of tools to carry out these activities, and computers are now central to many of them. We are heading toward an information environment that will be characterized by ubiquitous computing, and must think about the implications of the nascent technologies for teaching and learning. How shall we plan appropriately, and what should we be doing to prepare the infrastructure for the demands and opportunities of the next 5-10 years?
We (like all liberal arts colleges) have huge investment in hardware, and provide access to all corners of the campus, and links to the world outside. Our library systems distribute full text and database services. We (like other places) explore the uses of computers in classrooms, and expect that students and faculty and staff will use computers in more and more aspects of their work. The conduits are in place, the basic skills are fairly well developed, and there is a level of expectation that transformative things are about to happen. Every innovation opens unforeseen possibilities, generally producing ever greater floods of information and widening the array among which teachers and learners can choose. The next steps are integrative, and will link the various constituencies.
Each constituency on a college campus must balance both a traditional view of of its capabilities and responsibilities, and a continually evolving spectrum of new potentials and challenges. Thus, networked computers have transformed Media Centers into Instructional Technology Groups, responsible for innovation and support of faculty efforts to integrate electronic media into classroom teaching; libraries need to continue to manage traditional print media, but must also develop support for management and effective distribution of digital archives and for a growing array of data formats and information resources; computing support must maintain existing networks while experimenting with new hardware and applications and anticipating growing demand for services and bandwidth; teaching faculty balance disciplinary identity and career progress with opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, and must also keep abreast of moving frontiers of research and instructional technologies; and students experience both the growth that has always occurred in four years of college activities, and a rapidly-changing array of technological possibilities --the computers they arrived with as freshmen are surely obsolete before they graduate.
Implementing the Strategic Plan
Appropriate anticipation of the directions and consequences of technological evolution has always challenged institutions, and surprises seem to come
out of nowhere. The Web itself was one such development of the last decade, and challenges like virus epidemics and the bandwidth crisis touched off
by unanticipated peer-to-peer demand (Napster and mp3 traffic) have been felt on campuses everywhere.
Much has changed in the four years since Washington & Lee's Strategic Plan of 1998. The identification of "technology as a complement to effective teaching and learning in a liberal arts environment" has shifted definitively in the direction of "technology as a component of effective teaching and learning...", and collaboration (among technologists, librarians, and teaching faculty) has been recognized as essential. The Plan includes this objective:
Initiative III: Technology
Enhance the Technological Infrastructure, Equipment and Support Necessary for Instruction, Research, Administration, and Communication
Develop a comprehensive "Technology and Information" program for faculty, students, and staff that will teach our community how to access information efficiently and to process and evaluate it meaningfully in accordance with our educational mission ...we must rely on support staff to assist faculty with the specific technological requirements of course development... staff must be provided opportunities for significant blocks of dedicated time for such research and development activities.
The question is: who should assume responsibility for the next steps in evolution, including the conceptualization, development, and implementation of technologies for support of teaching and learning? The establishment of the Instructional Technology Group is an important step towards creating an office intended to serve the needs of faculty in course development, but the ITG doesn't have the staff, the resources, or the explicit mandate to also manage the development and integration of the broader technologies of information infrastructure. The ITG and the Library need to work together to define problems and develop solutions to a range of support, information management, and deployment tasks that cannot wait for commercial solutions. It is unrealistic to think that significant progress toward the goals of this Initiative can be made as 'overload' on the fully-commited time of library and IT staff. A planning grant which underwrites "significant blocks of dedicated time for such research and development activities" by providing release time for (and temporary replacement of) those who would design and build the information infrastructure is a necessity.
Many of these challenges in managing and distributing information are shared by all small liberal arts colleges, and our efforts can contribute to their solution through a combination of extramural collaborations and local development and prototyping. Among the specific problems, addressed below and in linked documents, are these:
Evolving Models of the Digital Library
As a librarian, I see information management through the lens of the burgeoning digital library, which must incorporate and organize and distribute a broad range of media, and support the information-using activities of teachers and learners in classrooms, offices, labs, dormitories --and in extramural locations and collaborations as well. My sabbatical plan (November 2001), Plan for 2002-2003 (Jan 2002), and R.E. Lee Proposals for summer 2002 (development projects for Brazil Consortium and
ArcGIS support) articulate a program of research and development linking emergent digital library issues with enhancements to classroom teaching and collaborative research. The curricular focus of much of this activity is the emerging information needs of interdisciplinary programs, but much of the R&D effort is equally applicable to the work traditional academic departments.
Reference to 'digital library' is absent from the 1998 Strategic Plan because the concept was barely on the horizon four years ago, and it appears in the 2001 Jedrey Report only by implication, in the recommendation that the Library staff be increased to "ensure the effective use of technology in support of library services and of digital initiatives such as the creation and delivery of digitized information resources".
The image of the Library as a center of campus life is carefully nurtured at most colleges, but the traditional venues of reference room, book stacks, study carrels and circulation desk are now partial manifestations of the information services that the library provides, and more and more information transactions take place outside the library's walls. Libraries are becoming MORE central to teaching and learning by redefining and enlarging what they do. A college's library (and the services it provides and mediates) is potentially MORE closely linked to classrooms, offices and dormitories than before, and must work to further develop this extramural integration. At the edges, the services and capabilities of libraries fuse with and melt into those involving computing and instructional technologies, and roles once clear and distinct (Librarian, Computer Technician, Media Person) blur and bleed. Responsibilities flow and divide, and gaps appear that nobody is quite prepared to fill.
A naïve view of the digital library sees everything now in print converted to 1s and 0s and accessible from ubiquitous computing devices, and users freed from the need to enter a building or consult a librarian. This vision misses the real point of the digital evolution: the traditional library is not replaced by a digital version of itself, but rather the familiar services are greatly enhanced and expanded by the incorporation of digital forms of information. In this broadened vision, librarians become more important to library users as the collections they organize and maintain grow and add a wider range of information media. At the same time, users build and organize and maintain their own personal and group digital libraries --that's what folders on hard drives, and shared work spaces, and Web pages are really all about. The really interesting challenge is connecting the personal and the group and the institutional realizations of the digital library.
Terry Winograd (Stanford Computer Science professor and a leader of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project) summarizes eloquently (emphasis added):
we have adopted the perspective that the digital library is not a specific collection, or an organization of collections, but is instead a unified means for a user to access the full range of information and services on the local and global network...The digital library is distributed: it is accessible anytime and anyplace, and its ubiquity will change teaching and learning. The digital library is also emergent: it is being built by its users, as they contribute and interlink their work, their interests, and their applications. The details must be invented, by combining technological possibilities with the developing imagination of instructors and support staff. Librarians have vital roles to play in development and organization, but the digital library is not the sole province of librarians --indeed, the building of digital libraries requires a range of skills that necessitates collaboration.In the traditional library, the tools were for finding and accessing materials, with no provision for what the user did with those materials. But our intended user will be accessing the digital library from a workstation or other personal device on which many aspects the user's work are integrated: not just the library retrieval, but the ongoing interplay of activities involving information exploration and use for getting work done.
In this environment, library aspects need to be integrated into the user's overall management of information and tasks. Multiple collections will be searched and browsed, materials will be collected by the individual for future reading and use, and for sharing with others. Documents will be generated, marked up, and exchanged, and the overall environment will gradually be customized to suit the user's specific needs and preferences. Tools are needed not just to retrieve materials that are "out there" on the net, but also to manage the user's current context and state.
An interface of this kind is structured around the user's overall information usage, and often is structured, at least in part, dynamically by the user. It needs to provide uniform affordances for collecting and manipulating information objects (documents, images, and more) that may come from different sources in varying formats and with different access rights. It needs to provide standard ways to access the open-ended collection of different kinds of information services (searching, categorizing, translating, summarizing,...) that are becoming available in the net. It should make it possible for the user to provide materials and services as well as using ones provided by other people -- the library collection is not a centralized unity, but the union of everything each individual wants to make public to any audience.
(http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/papers/dig.html)
Relational Databases and the Web
The enabling technology for implementation of this expanded vision of the digital library is provided by the Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) model. Relational databases are ubiquitous --library catalogs, Development, Alumni and Admissions files, Registrar and Payroll operations, and Physical Plant inventories are all implementations of the RDBMS model, and are in effect all parts of a college's digital library, though some are accessible to limited sets of users. End users have no need to understand how RDBMS are configured or how they work --user interfaces hide the mysteries and facilitate entries and queries. The day-to-day operations of academic departments are beginning to make use of RDB applications (to carry out the library's serials review and manage electronic journal subscriptions, to construct and maintain departmental directories of graduates, to collect and analyze research data), and elementary database construction and management skills are turning up in staff members. Skip Williams is the primary contact for database development and deployment, and Computer Science students provide a potential source of expertise.
The practical linchpin of my current vision of digital library development is active Web pages: the use of the Web browser to interact with database applications, to search and retrieve, and to add information. This has obvious value for managing one's own information universe and personal digital library, but it is the prospect of group use of shared resources that has pedagogical and consortial implications. Members of a working group or a class can use the Web as a communication environment, a means to display and contribute, to query and respond, to share data (text, images, numbers, etc.) for local use and to upload local material for wider distribution. Members can work asynchronously and from different locations on the globe, and there is also the possibility of public distribution of a group's work, as public Web pages and also by inclusion in larger digital libraries via metadata protocols such as Dublin Core (linking through online library catalogs) and distribution services sich as geographynetwork.com (for spatial data).
There is nothing very complicated about the enabling technologies (.asp, JavaScript, SQL), which means that development to suit local needs can take place without exotic hardware and software, and is well within the capabilities of student programmers. The great gains come as a product of linkage of common applications which manage information in various media: a map displayed by an ArcIMS server can provide a query interface for a collection of texts or images or metadata records located on a separate server, and a user can use the Web interface to add to that collection, or might contribute a comment to a database on a different server.
Tasks that go beyond 'course development' and into the R&D arena:
Teaching with GIS
I have written extensively elsewhere about GIS as an essential visualization tool for the spate of spatial data that is flooding nearly every discipline, and that is especially important for many interdisciplinary programs. Recent explorations of the means to serve maps via the Web can be seen at ims1.wlu.edu (many of the projects include links between GIS and other databases), and a proposal for Collaboration to Manage Spatial Information on ACS Campuses:
prototyping an information infrastructure describes other work now underway. W&L (like most small liberal arts colleges) is beginning to find uses for GIS across the curriculum, but has not yet made a staff commitment to support GIS use, teaching, and development. The management of spatial data certainly falls within the library's mandate, and both R.E. Lee proposals for Summer 2002 address the construction of GIS management utilities. An effective interim solution to the problem of GIS support (until hiring of a specialist becomes an institutional priority) is for existing staff to develop the necessary skills --but once again this cannot be done as 'overload', and requires both release time and funding for training as well as additional GIS and Remote Sensing software.
The need for GIS support provides an opportunity for development of joint resources in a digital library context. We need to build a library of online tutorials to handle many of the questions that arise, and to address many pedagogical uses of spatial data. It is certainly feasible to serve spatial information over the Web, either as spatial data to be used locally with GIS software, or as interactive maps. It is also possible to extend the functionality of Map Servers to provide spatial input to other applications, such as library catalogs and data analysis software (see ims1.wlu.edu for several prototypes).
It is now practical to build a virtual spatial librarian service which could serve the specific needs of distant campuses, and thus provide a basis for collaborations using a common set of data. We seek to build a spatial information infrastructure that (1) end users can navigate easily, (2) librarians can use and maintain without special skills, (3) faculty can draw upon to augment and distribute course material, (4) institutions can build upon for outreach to surrounding communities, (5) will support the work of GIS support staff as institutions add them, and (6) will stimulate collaborations among ACS partners. The elements include:
Subsequent developments may include
Information Needs of Interdisciplinary Programs
Among the elements of the current wave of innovation in liberal arts colleges are interdisciplinary programs which broaden the curriculum by encouraging multiple perspectives on important issues, including poverty, the environment, questions of race and gender, globalization, dynamical systems, and health (among others). Each such program must establish its own information infrastructure to support teaching and learning, and traditionally this has involved library acquisition (books and journals) and access to relevant literature indexes to support instruction and research. In the context of the emerging model of the digital library, this information infrastructure takes on new dimensions, and requires access to a wider palette of resources, including imagery, spatial data, sound, and video.
Interdisciplinary programs are also creators of information, and there are no ready answers for who should be responsible for curation and support and distribution of what they produce. Sometimes the case seems clear: the library is certainly a primary candidate for manager of the spatial data necessary for GIS, for mediation of relations with external databases, and for coordination of the information streams that result from research and collaboration activities. Most liberal arts college libraries are unprepared at the moment (in terms of staffing and technical skills) to take on these responsibilities, but I suggest that an active role in supporting the instructional and research activities of interdisciplinary programs is a continuation of the evolution we have already seen, and that active engagement would spread quickly to disciplinary activities as well, as departments find themselves more and more engaged in linkage with extramural resources and institutions.
One of the proposed R.E. Lee projects for the coming summer will build a prototype of a Web-based collaborative environment for the Brazil Consortium. This effort will serve as a general model for Web services which can be adapted to the specific needs of other consortial projects (linking institutions), working groups, and courses (at a single institution, or among several campuses). At the heart of the collaborative environment is a digital library which grows as users contribute items and pointers to resources. The library consists of materials in many formats and media, which could be housed on a single server or might be located in many places. Each item has associated metadata to enhance retrievability.
The user experiences the collaborative environment as an array of Web pages with entry, upload, search, display and editing capabilities. Behind this user interface, the Web service is built upon active server pages which connect to relational databases. The service provides links to data, texts, maps, images and other forms of information and may also be connected to specific software applications for display and analysis of data. The service also provides the means for individuals to manage their own personal digital libraries, and to contribute materials to the group’s collection.
The emphasis is on active use of and contribution to a pool of shared resources. The individual and group libraries are working environments, not accessible to the outside world, but the potential for wider linkage is anticipated as well. After a process of editing and vetting, resources from individual libraries can be uplinked to the group, and elements of the group’s digital library can likewise be contributed to public collections via Dublin Core records in larger digital libraries and/or public Web sites maintained by the group.
Links with Peer Institutions and Consortial Partners
Liberal arts colleges have much to hope for in joining consortia, including the potential for cross-listed courses, improved bargaining power with software vendors and database suppliers, and possibilities for sharing the cost of access to electronic resources. The day-to-day problems and challenges of classroom and laboratory are sufficiently similar from one campus to another that instructors and support staff from different institutions find much to discuss, and can benefit from pooling technology skills. The weak point in the effectiveness of consortia is communication: people at different campuses rarely visit back and forth, so they really know very little about the specific circumstances of their opposite numbers. E-mail and occasional meetings at symposia are not sufficient to create or sustain effective collaborations, and the warmth and shared vision of conferences and workshops fade quickly unless they are sustained by joint work on common problems. Shared resources and common development efforts create a much stronger basis for collaborations among faculty, which can provide complementarity and inspire curricular innovation.
Washington & Lee is an active participant in a number of consortia, and it is likely that more opportunities for resource sharing, faculty and student exchange, and collaborative research will develop in the near future. The success of such ventures relies upon effective communication, and will increasingly depend upon efficient sharing of a broad spectrum of information resources. I expect that my sabbatical visits to a dozen liberal arts colleges, ACS-sponsored travels to campuses of several of our partners, and site visit to Brazil will lay the foundations for specific cooperative efforts.
Seeking Funding
The array of interlinked projects described above seems to fall within the terms of the Hewlett Foundation's 'Using Technology Effectively' Program ("...innovative, technology-based projects that explore ways of substantially increasing the effectiveness and quality of content and instruction, both on campus and via distance learning"). Their Advice to Applicants includes a Special Note: "Projects structured and funded as overloads generally fare poorly in competitive evaluations... Payment for work during uncompensated periods, e.g., ...that buys time away from regular duties, is permissible." The scope and scale of these projects suggests a proposal for funding of one-year full-time replacement (June 2003 through May 2004) for Skip Williams and myself, and funds for student programmers, software licenses, and travel to conferences and collaborating campuses.