We’re back in familiar territory for me on this one, though it’s less on my mind at a community college. Our faculty aren’t the ones doing a lot of the publishing, but we certainly benefit from others publishing OA.

One of the main places my mind goes when I consider OA and this ideal future of all OA research, is finding it. Probably because I’m a librarian, right? As I mentioned in my “Are We There Yet?” post, one of the concepts I sometimes try to emphasize to students is that searching for any kind of depth of purpose is a lot more challenging. Google can provide a very good answer or two very quickly. It’s not good at exhaustively searching and providing every relevant thing to you. You start scrolling down or paging through your Google results and pretty quickly you see the pages aren’t all that helpful. Google wants to have fantastic precision, not recall. Library databases are looking for great recall. They are also much more limited in the resources they provide to the user. They provide facets and filters and controlled vocabulary to help you search more powerfully.

My point is that I think the database layer of library resources will still have a purpose even if all of the content itself is OA. My hope would be that it’s a whole lot cheaper. But I think the tools and added functionality will probably still be of value in assisting the finding of the OA things. Unless someone out of the goodness of their heart wants to create a free version that works really well… But I think in this case, actually paying someone is a better idea in terms of reliability. That’s often the snag with open, free content.

In addition, I think publishers would argue that they add value to the published content through editing, marketing, etc. You can take issue with that and disagree, but I think that would be the publisher counterpoint.

As an E-Resources Librarian, another place my mind goes is… what about the usage data? I wouldn’t need it to determine cost effectiveness if the content is all OA, but I would certainly still want to understand the usage of resources by Germanna students in particular. What are their research habits and how can we better serve them? We use the usage information we get from our databases to help inform us in that. I don’t know how we would get that information otherwise, unless we kept a search layer from our vendors at the least.

And that’s the end of my scattered thoughts about OA.

The gist of this week’s readings and viewings to me is that there is a movement to take formal learning and open it up. By open it up, I mean a few different things:

• Connect formal learning in the classroom to activities and community outside of the classroom
• Create opportunities in the classroom for students to explore what interests them
• Connect students with other students and other people in general who share interests
• Deconstruct and recreate what education looks like now that we have tools like the internet, which removes limitations that existed before

There are a lot of good-feels behind these things, so I felt pretty positive about it all. It also feels impossible or maybe too rosy. In the big picture, I wonder if this isn’t a reaction against all of the structure that has crept into education. I hope we don’t just react against structure without taking into account ways in which it might still be a useful component. My dad likes to say “don’t take down the fence until you know why it was put there in the first place.” He has a lot of sayings that still float around in my head. So, hopefully, folks who are spearheading this are not completely rejecting structured learning as inherently bad for learning.

Something that comes to mind about all of this in terms of libraries, is actually related to public libraries. Public libraries have more of the community space role and our local Central Rappahannock Regional Library does this well. The public library becomes the space where like-minded people can gather to pursue an interest. One of the problems with pursuing our interests with a group is where to do it. Not all activities pursued together can be pursued entirely online. Public libraries often provide space, and sometimes the resources. I know CRRL has a group that plays European games regularly. They also have a knitting group, book club, card playing group, etc. They help facilitate bringing people together in the community who wouldn’t necessarily know each other otherwise, and that often includes young people.

However, I wonder about the motivation to make such group connections happen. I suppose the thought would be that if you are interested enough you’d take the risk and put yourself out there in the community. But I wonder how many are really willing ultimately to do that. It is risky. I think of how we generally separate ourselves even from our physical neighbors and don’t necessarily even want to get to know them. Let me also add that when I moved into my house last year I intentionally interacted with my neighbors on multiple occasions because I want to reverse that trend at least for me personally. This was an intentional decision, though, as my inclination would be to keep to myself.

Perhaps that’s where the formal education in some form comes into play. The instructor can become the facilitator for such connections and the boost of confidence needed. The student wouldn’t alone in taking the risk as others in the class take the same risk.

This all still feels a bit vague and up in the theory clouds, but I can see the potential positive impact of bringing it down to earth.

Back in familiar territory for me, as a librarian. Thus the coziness of the post.

I read through and listened to a smattering of the links for this week. How funny to be directed to the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework. It’s a bit of a controversial document still within academic libraries – stirs up a lot of strong feelings. Instruction is a secondary task for me, so I don’t personally think about it as much as my colleague does since he is primarily involved with instruction.

The content that sticks out the most to me is the whole idea of fake news and evaluating content. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to emphasize this in my instruction as I think it helps with that motivation piece for students learning how to do evaluation. For myself, I have not in the recent past been very engaged politically. During the recent election cycle, however, I tried to do better as a citizen than I have in the past. This process involved reading and reading a lot. I find myself not fitting nicely in any one political group, and I wanted to intentionally read from multiple points of view. What I really wanted to find was a source (podcast, web site, news source, whatever) that would actually provide both “sides” to any given story. The best I could come up with is www.allsides.com which is still a bit clunky. I’ve also tried KCRW Left, Right, and Center, which I did enjoy, but it didn’t go to the level of depth I was looking for. If anyone knows of something that does strive for deep analysis that provides multiple perspectives, please share. What I have landed on is reading/listening to a lot of things. I listen to Decode DC and a National Review podcast called The Editors. I read the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and Politico to name a few. I look at Politifact and FactCheck to check on politician claims. This is not to say I listen to every single episode or read every article, but the bit I do is time consuming enough. I have family and friends that run the gamut on politics, so relying on one perspective is not going to work for me. Plus, I don’t find relying on one perspective to be intellectually honest. Having said all that… again, it’s time consuming. I don’t really expect everyone to be able to dedicate the amount of time needed to be the best possibly informed citizen. I certainly don’t. I suppose the best I hope for is that, whether or not I have time to investigate a claim, I have the knowledge/skills to know to be skeptical of whatever that claim is. Maybe I won’t immediately share it on social media, convinced of its truth.

One of the frames in the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework is “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” I like this point in particular:

Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. Novice learners may need to rely on basic indicators of authority…

To me, this point is trying to grapple with the democrat vs neo-gatekeeper opinions that Alexander discusses in his post. Like many things, I don’t think it’s an either/or. (This part of my personality is a source of endless frustration to my loved ones. I am forever playing a bit of devil’s advocate or trying to see both perspectives. It sounds like a good thing, but it can also leave one a little ungrounded and paralyzed when you have to actually make a decision.) I think authoritative sources can have their purpose (I would see Politifact and FactCheck as having that function for me when I do my current events reading) as long as there is a bit of skepticism kept in the mix. I recognize that while these sites do their best to refrain from bias, there always is bias. And sometimes, the voices that are being shut out by the authorities are ones that need to heard. The majority can be wrong, as we all know from our history classes. Those concepts are challenging to bring to college students, but I do think at this educational level and age they should start grappling with that complexity. I don’t typically get to that point with students in my instruction because I only have so much time with them. My hope is that as they continue on to upper-level classes they come to understand those ideas through the instruction of their professors, which I think they usually do. I have fond memories of a few different professors who achieved that with me.

It’s clear this concept is important to me. Information literacy is also important to the VCCS and is included in our general education competencies. Digital literacy, which seems related or broader than information literacy, is not mentioned (as far as I know). For those that are accredited by SACS, it seems like a great topic for the Quality Enhancement Plan piece of the review. Here at Germanna we are too far along in that process to bring up digital literacy, but it’s important enough to keep in the back of my mind as opportunities arise to investigate it and suggest it as an area of concern for the college.

I always find myself landing on practical thoughts rather than philosophical ones… I promise I do enjoy philosophical reading from time to time…

Whoops, time got away from me this week. So, I won’t be doing justice to this week’s content. I listened to the interview but didn’t really delve into the reading.

The speaker this week rubbed me the wrong way, which always makes it a bit harder to get something out of a talk. Or makes what you get out of it different in any case. He struck me as elitist and arrogant at various points because of how dismissive he was of what has been and what continues now. I don’t think the current educational system is perfect, and I could even see the need for a dramatic change or overhaul, but I wouldn’t consider it a disaster that doesn’t achieve anything good. However, I also find myself seeing the need for radical points of view to get discussion started. My younger cousin is much more of a political idealist than I am, for example, and talking to her has had me reflecting on the need to always have that young, radical voice in the conversation (says the 28 year old).

One thing that did stick out to me and resonated with me was the idea of student motivation. If students were left to learn more organically, let’s say, and allowed to step away from our current educational structures, the point was made in the interview that, well, students wouldn’t learn anything because they wouldn’t be motivated. I’ve often thought about motivation when I teach because information literacy is boring. I’m also not grading anything, so I’m almost as bad as a substitute teacher in terms of my authority in the classroom. I make various attempts to inspire motivation to learn information literacy, and it’s something I continue to mull over.

Motivation to gain education brings to mind the documentary Half the Sky and its pair A Path Appears. Both of these documentaries are about the plight of women in third world countries, and one of the main emphases of them is that education is a way out. But it’s a way out many of the women can’t access for one reason or another. What always strikes me about any film that highlights education in a third world country is the motivation difference. I would not want to overstate it. But the documentaries at least present the young women who have access to an education as highly motivated. My point is that it’s relative. K-12 education is a given in the US, which is wonderful, but also brings about the problem of student motivation. Students in K-12 don’t necessarily have a sense of what a gift education is, and it’s not something that can be forced. I supposed student-centered learning has been an attempt to bring about the motivation that is missing. We try to make the education more relevant to the current situations and needs of the students.

I like the idea of students negotiating a learning journey like most of us do after we finish school, motivated by our real life needs. But I don’t know what that would look like or how you work that out practically with them.

Before I started this post, I looked around to see if anyone else had posted on this week’s content yet. I wanted to see about linking to other content as we have been prompted to do. Well, as far as I can tell, no one has written on this week yet, so someone has to start. Maybe I can come back to this post later and revise based on the other thoughts that crop up.

Something that I touched on in one of my earlier posts is that I am not an abstract thinker. I deal better with the practical, on-the-ground, concrete aspects of work. Being that way is a strength in some cases. However, I also recognize the limitations. Once I began my professional life and worked with other librarians on committees, I started to realize that my bent is to do things the way they’ve always been done. Not to the degree that I would resist a change because I’m used to doing a task a certain way. More that I don’t “think outside the box” naturally or take the bird’s eye view of a problem. Can’t see the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. As with any challenge, awareness is the first step to overcoming it. So, since I noticed that strength/weakness of mine, I’ve periodically reminded myself to consider the bigger picture or what the end goal really is.

All that to say – I admire Doug Engelbart’s vision and his ability to think outside the box in what appears to be a natural way to think for him. I’m reminded of a test I took at work recently called the Strengths Finder test. The 34 strengths are split into 4 categories, one of which is Strategic Thinking. Needless to say, only one of my top 5 strengths fell into this category. I get the sense that more of Doug Engelbart’s strengths would fall into that category.

Though I don’t think I see Engelbart refer to Bush anywhere, it seems to me that his creation is an attempt to take Bush’s ideas and make them real. And now, we feel closer and closer to that reality all the time. I’m waiting for when I can manipulate information on floating screens with hand gestures, like you often see in science fiction shows/movies.

Bringing Engelbart’s talks down to something concrete for me… I appreciate his point in one of his speeches about how the technology that makes a task easier, and therefore enhances human capability, can sometimes be difficult to learn. Or it seems difficult to learn if you’re thoroughly entrenched in a very different way of achieving a task. Where my mind goes with this is students and their study/learning habits. My impression of K-12 school is that it is still very physical book driven. That impression could very well be wrong, so someone correct me if they know better. I think the Almighty Textbook still reigns all throughout school. I don’t know how, given what happens in K-12, higher education is supposed to make a dramatic shift in student learning/studying habits. Given Engelbart’s point about how shifts happen slowly because of the difficulty in switching methods, I don’t know that I’ll see big change in higher education until we have a whole new generation or two coming through that have different expectations for what learning looks like. Young people that have grown up in a very different educational environment. I stress educational because outside of education, many dramatic shifts have already occurred. I myself am probably considered a “digital native” who is more used to ubiquitous technology, finding it easy to use. I can’t remember not owning a computer or having access to the Internet. Embarrassingly for someone in their 20s, I’ve only had a smartphone for a few years. I finally got on the bandwagon with iPhone 5. However, my educational experience, in terms of the classroom materials and methods, was largely lecture and largely print textbooks.

So, to wrap all this up, change needs to happen in the K-12 arena (easier said than done) if we’re going to have students prepared for a radically different way of learning and studying. Or we’d need to build into higher education some way of easing students into new methods. Right now we’re probably just looking at particular classes taught by exploratory professors who are willing to test out new methods. It occurs to me that perhaps community colleges could be on the forefront in this, given that we are more teaching focused institutions. Something to mull over…

First off, I’ve had yet another library school connection. I’m not sure which class I read this article in, but somewhere along the line in one of my classes we were assigned this article. At the time I remember being impressed that someone would have such a good sense of the future of information, though a lot of the mechanics ended up being more sophisticated than he thought they’d be what with the Internet and the advances in computing. I’m a science-fiction reader, and I’m often similarly impressed with what older science fiction authors get right about the future. Of course, they often also get it wrong. I don’t know whether to be amused or upset that male science fiction authors of the 50s and 60s could not imagine a future in which women were not housewives (see Fahrenheit 451 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

I named this post “Are We There Yet?” because it seems to be that the seamless access of information and ease of annotation is lagging. As Bush notes, we have gotten very good at storing information and taking less and less space to store it cheaply. However, access and annotation are still regular snags. Search algorithms have a long way to go for research purposes. When I teach students how to use the library, knowing that they will be frustrated by the ever-present clunkiness of databases, I try to get them to see that the purpose of their searching is different. In a Google search, often the first web page or two will do the trick. Who ever scrolls to the bottom of a Google search results page? Who goes on to the next page? More likely you’d rerun the search with different words. The idea is that a web page or two will meet the need for information. Research for scholarly purposes ideally involves a more exhaustive search, and Google doesn’t handle that well. They prioritize precision over recall. A library database prioritizes recall over precision. As of yet having both done well isn’t possible. So, while the information is out there, still in traditional article form for the most part, it’s not simple to retrieve effectively.

Besides access is annotation. The research indicates that students still prefer print books, and the ease of annotating is often cited as a reason for that preference. Digital versions of annotation tools exist, but they are still awkward and limited. They also vary based on which e-reader software/hardware is being used. I feel there is a long way to go toward making annotations and links between data easy to achieve in the digital realm. Ultimately, while students prefer print, libraries generally see students use e-books more than print books. I don’t think this means the students were misleading us when they said they prefer print. I think convenience wins over preference and the student at home that wants to use information from a book for an assignment is going to use the book they can access immediately.

My musings are mainly concrete and concerning the technology we deal with right now. I’m aware that all of this assumes a scholarly communication environment that has perhaps stagnated, and some of the “but this is the way it’s always been done” needs to be challenged. My impression is that the challenges are happening – the movement behind this course is one example – but they haven’t hit a critical mass yet or gained full support from academia. When I reach the end of my career, 40 years from now perhaps, it will be interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same.

When I realized one of the authors of this first article is Jeffrey Pomerantz, I laughed out loud. Dr. Pomerantz was my thesis advisor when I was in the library science program at the University of North Carolina. Thankfully, I have no bad memories of that process, so I have not been traumatized by reading an article co-written by him.

While I recognize that discussions about “what is open?” and “why open?”, etc., etc., are necessary, I am always a little bored. I am not the best abstract thinker. I find it much easier to be concrete and active. Articles like this one feel like academic exercise that will never end. Other academics are free to engage in that discussion. I’ll be over here for when something needs to be done, thanks!

One way in which the concept of “open” and what it means exactly matters for me is as a librarian working with e-resources. Resources provided by the library are not “open” in the sense that they are free to everyone. But they are effectively free to the students and faculty who don’t feel the purchase. They have been available for a very long time, and faculty are typically free to use them to build a non-traditional curriculum.

Overall, I’ve thought that education is an appropriate space for valuing openness. Gaining knowledge, creating knowledge, sharing knowledge. The values of library science especially match up well with these ideas. One of our ideals is that information would be accessible and free to absolutely anyone. Socioeconomic status should never be what determines whether a person can access the information they need to be a good citizen, parent, caretaker, friend, partner, etc.

Hello, all. My name is Erin Crane, and I’m a librarian. This is my first post to get started.