Thinking about college for free
February 27th, 2008 § 1 Comment
When I was in high school, I wrote an extremely lengthy letter the editor of our local weekly newspaper responding to my English teacher who had written an op-ed column complaining that students in my high school were given a free pass (we couldn’t be counted absent) to attend school-related events like debate tournaments and athletic competitions. I’m extremely grateful that I was in high school in the pre-Internet age because it means my fifteen-year-old righteously indignant prose has been lost to history, but I remember feeling that he just didn’t get it if he thought that what was going on in the classroom was the only learning I needed to do in high school.
I went to a largish high school in a small town and while academic success was valued, academic ambition was more unusual. I was definitely considered weird for wanting to go away to college, or really even for thinking that it made a difference which school I went to. Not necessarily bad-weird, but weird nonetheless. It was more common to think that college was college and price and convenience were as important as anything else in the where-should-I-go decision.
While I learned a lot doing things like debate, sometimes I think the most important academic impact those activities had on me was that they opened up my academic world view – bringing me in contact with people who thought differently about where they were going to go to college and what they might get out of college than the people I was used to.
I was thinking about that this morning when I read these musings on the possibility of a “Distributed University” at Weblogg-ed. To paraphrase roughly, the question here is what does all of this disruption in information, communication and knowledge mean for the university — aren’t the alternatives to college as we know it becoming increasingly visible and viable? Because I find a lot to resonate with in the idea that the alternatives are becoming more visible and viable. And in the connections drawn here between the ability to pull together disaggregated academic content and lifelong learning. But I found that I wanted to think some more about the value of college beyond the content – Richardson’s not claiming that because the content is free the college is free, but he doesn’t spend his time on this question and I wanted to.
Enter Alex Reid, coming at some of the same ideas from a different direction in his post on what it would take for a university to be free. He goes immediately past the idea that free content = free college and looks at what he calls cross-subsidies (an idea pulled from Chris Anderson’s blog).
I like this idea of cross-subsidies as a way of thinking about the more of “college is more than the classroom” or more than the content. And really, more than the credential. Both Richardson and Reid acknowledge that the credential is important but don’t linger on that topic – because it’s not really the compelling thing about this question. The diploma’s not the value of the college experience to those who think there’s something inherently valuable about it and diploma doesn’t add value to those who believe it can be replicated by other experiences. Isn’t that why so many of us get frustrated by conversations that seem to focus on the credential over the learning?
But I’m still curious to hear what people think is that added value. Given that almost everyone who reads this did a lot of extra college, at least somewhat voluntarily, I think most found something they valued in the experience. And I’d be surprised if it’s remotely the same thing for everyone.
Reid talks about the mentoring-coaching-advising role of faculty in his post, and how to recreate that in a free environment, which is fascinating. For me, you’d also have to figure out a way to recreate the experience of having classmates. As he describes, my relationships with faculty varied a lot from class to class. But the experience of going away to school, with a bunch of strangers who had come from different backgrounds than I had and who brought different experiences with them to college – that was transformative.
The How College Affects Students guy pulls out expanding our understanding of diversity as his #3 goal in an article outlining his opinions on what kind of research we should be doing on what college means.
interactions with a diverse spectrum of people, ideas, values, and perspectives that are different from one’s own and challenge one’s assumed views of the world have the potential for important developmental impacts during college.
And the interesting thing is – this sounds like what I’m talking about when I talk about the importance of going away to college and meeting people not like me. But it’s really only part of the picture. Because it wasn’t just about meeting people who challenged my world view. For me, the experience of meeting people who were different than I was used to sometimes meant meeting people who were more like me than the people I had known before.
Just being from Oregon made me kind of unusual in college, which was cool. But wanting to be in that kind of academic environment, having aspirations for graduate school, wanting to do academic-y things — that didn’t make me stand out at all. And that was cool as well.
Where this isn’t as smart as what you’ll find on Digital Digs, though, is that I don’t really have any good ideas for how to replicate this experience in a free university. I’ve been thinking and writing for a while now on the importance of finding learning communities both in school and as part of a lifelong learning agenda – and I think part of of the disruption and opportunity mentioned in both of these posts relates to that idea.
But perhaps more to the point is something else Reid says — that the point isn’t trying to create a perfect college experience. I’ve told prospective students before that it’s possible to get a good education or a bad education almost anywhere – but some places make it harder than others. How to make a free university where it’s hard to get by without at some point running across potentially transformative people and experiences — that’s the question. And as usual, I’m more interested in thinking about the questions than answering them.
Oscar doesn’t get YouTube?
February 25th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
CinemaTech pointed this out last year, and again today — the Academy’s attitude towards YouTube is pretty messed up. And I think they’re blowing a terrific opportunity here. Like the Royal Family, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has exactly the kind of content that works on YouTube. They should have the key clips up immediately, just like SuperBowl commercials. But they don’t have any clips from last night up and there’s way less stuff from other people than you’d think — suggesting that they are being pulled soon after they go up.
And why is it that people who want to hang on so tightly to this content are usually so bad at doing anything interesting with it themselves? What I was going to write was that Oscar should have his own YouTube channel – but as it turns out, he does. So now what I’m going to write is that Oscar should have a good YouTube channel.
This is just a weird hodgepodge of clips — some are cool moments someone might actually want to revisit, but most are … not. Like – why do they have Sidney Poitier accepting his honorary Oscar, but not his real one? Seriously, which award is more meaningful? Why do they have nothing about the glitz and glamour – nothing even suggesting that there is a red carpet?
With the video resources AMPAS has – resources no one else has – they could really build a fascinating channel connecting the show and the history of movies and Hollywood and celebrity, but instead it really looks like they just grabbed a handful of stuff that was readily available. Maybe it’s just me just me but it looks like the Academy has something to learn about “show don’t tell” — almost half of these videos are talking heads telling us why the Oscars are important. I honestly think watching the great big movie stars and all those other creative people at the Oscars over the years would tell that story better for me.
It’s insane — if AMPAS understood what YouTube can do in terms of raising interest and awareness and buzz they could be using their archives to build a lot of interest, but with this they’re just reinforcing the idea that they’re (the awards and the organization) increasingly out of touch.
ETA — I’m thinking about what Caleb was talking about last week – when people get information they don’t stop asking questions – instead they get new questions. A kick-ass Oscar channel on YouTube doesn’t mean people will stop being interested in the Oscars – it’ll generate new reasons why they’re interested.
But – to be fair, my favorite moment of last night is up there and has stayed up long enough to get 142,222 views.
ETA — It’s gone now. I don’t know when it went away, but the IP police have had their say.
facebook ain’t all that in French
February 23rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Here are three visualizations of the most popular social networking sites, mapped (and tree-mapped) geographically created by a research student at University College Dublin. It’s a nice reminder that no matter how many articles I run across about Facebook, Facebook privacy, Facebook Beacon and Facebook applications – Facebook like anything else is culturally situated and needs to be kept in perspective). Sitting there all alone in Europe is France with a blue color representing a network I haven’t heard of I don’t think – Skyrock? Skyrock rules Algeria too – and looking at the the treemap version I see that some of the smaller European countries with big French-speaking parts, like Belgium and Switzerland – are Skyrock countries as well. As well as Senegal, Martinique, and New Caledonia.
This fascinates me – now I need to know more about Skyrock. What about it is pulling all of these French-speaking places together? Is it somehow easier to socially network in French using it? Is it something about the people behind it? Its history? Its marketing? I must find out more!
The data is from Alexa, and the visualizations were created on ManyEyes, where the data is open, so you can go over there and play with it yourself.
FWIW – The US is not Facebook-violet on this map – it’s MySpace gold.
Now going to go find out more about the Skyrock thing. Even though the pink text on black background thing on the project blog is making my eyes hurt.
cool stuff that’s fun to look at!
February 21st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
For reasons I won’t go into, I recently spent way too much time on the internet looking for magazine scans. (Anyone going to Online NW might soon be able to piece together why). Looking for those I ran across some other things I thought were awesome, even if I’m not always clear on what to do with them.
- I’m linking to the main page – the database page is on the left. I probably lost an hour going through these. The site design is a little old-school, and navigating can be kind of clunky. The site is also intended for the collector community, so it might be perfectly organized for their needs and only clunky for non-collectors. Oddly there’s no notes anywhere about what one can do with these images, or actually anything at all intellectual property-related.
Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page
- Again, more a browsing space than a searching one, and initially I was like “why would I want to browse this.” Thirty minutes later I still wasn’t sure but I couldn’t stop. These are screengrabs of the title shots from a whole lot of movies. I almost didn’t include this one when I couldn’t find All About Eve, but this one from The Awful Truth was entirely charming so I left it in –
- A big collection of scans of old Vanguard record albums. Both front and back material, which is awesome. I love these because you can see how old they are.
And I also found magazine scans galore — these were my two favorite sites:
And finally this – cute mid-century French stuff. I’m not sure how to categorize this, but how could I not include it?
the Gap Year (or decade)
February 20th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
So Princeton is hoping to send 10% of their incoming first-years to do a year of social service work in other countries before they ever enroll in classes. I saw a mention of this in Inside Higher Ed yesterday and I keep thinking about it. On the one hand, this seems like a marketing thing – go to Princeton! see the world! It’s pretty easy to imagine a program like this making the difference for the student making the choice between Princeton and Yale or Stanford or Duke.
On another hand, I got a little twinge thinking – amazing subsidized experience for kids who are already going to Princeton? It feels a little bit like the way that the really rich and famous people at the Oscars get showered with tons of free stuff they could afford to buy. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the Princeton students shouldn’t have this experience – or that they won’t get a lot out of it. I went to a similar kind of school and I think I would have been a much better college student and that my classes would have been really enriched by this kind of experience. But I think about how much students I’ve known since would get out of something like this. Students who come to college without ever having had the chance to see people who aren’t a lot like them and not on TV. Who might not expect they will ever live and work with people so different. And then there’s a little twinge.
But mainly I’m thinking about it because I’m a big fan of the gap year concept. As a grad student/ new teacher at Syracuse I encountered a lot of students who were in college because that’s what you did after high school. They didn’t really know why they were there, and they didn’t really have the life experience to apply to what they were learning. That made for some frustrated and unmotivated students. In my own life, I have several relatives who struggled with school as traditional undergrads, not because they weren’t talented but because they weren’t motivated. These relatives all did kind of a Gap Decade, went back to school in their thirties and had much more successful experiences the second time around.
But I wonder what’s happening to the gap year idea. Is it getting too structured or too achievement-oriented too? A few years ago, Harvard began encouraging all of their new students to defer admission for a year, which I thought was a great idea. (And it’s an fact I’ve used a lot trying to convince my parent friends not to worry if their kids aren’t ready for college at 18. “Harvard thinks it’s okay” carries a lot of weight).
Now, Harvard focused on how the gap year is an important time for students to reflect and really take ownership of their own learning and their own life plans. They warned parents of burnout and suggested that teens with over-scheduled, intensely achievement-focused lives were at risk, ironically, of never developing the tools they needed to create their own happy, fulfilling adult lives for themselves:
So the problem can often be well-meaning but misguided parents who try to mold their children into an image of success they value; and their children, being moldable as they are, often get on board and go along with the program before they have any capacity to make such a choice for themselves. Yet the paradox is that the only road to real success is to become more fully oneself, to succeed in the field and on the terms that one defines for oneself. So the pressures placed on many children probably have the unintended effect of delaying a child’s finding herself and succeeding on her own terms.
So this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Princeton’s plan, but I am wondering if the message that the gap year is a time for the student to take control of some things isn’t getting a little bit lost. I’m thinking that more because of stories like this one in the Washington Post. The student highlighted in the story seems to be taking advantage of the opportunity just like Harvard (or in his case, Miami of Ohio) would have wanted: “‘I want to find out what I can accomplish without my parents or my school telling me what I can do,’ Neville said”
But there’s stuff like this in there too — there’s a whole gap-year industry now. There are consultants and books and websites out there that are designed to help families and students plan this year out fully – even “intensively.” To me, this kind of smacks of making sure that the gap year is done “right.” Which, on one level, is exactly how to do it wrong. If the gap year just becomes another way to keep up, stay competitive, qualify for the best opportunities then we’ll start to need a gap year for the gap year. Studens won’t get the chance to reflect, to make choices, and to make mistakes on their own.
As a teen, I was way to impatient to start college to even consider the concept of a gap year. Sometimes now, though, it sounds kind of nice.
If I picked the Oscars (it would be ridiculous because I haven’t seen all the movies in any category)
February 19th, 2008 § 1 Comment
This has been a crazy busy weekend – I’d like to blame the writers’ strike for our rushed preparation for this year’s Oscar party but I think this happens every year. A few people have asked how we did seeing the nominated films this year –
Shaun and I usually make a pointed effort to see all of the films in one major category (for what it’s worth, this category hardly ever ends up being Best Picture. It’s usually an acting category, sometimes directing, and one year was even cinematography). We didn’t have time to do that this year, an experiment that proves that that kind of deliberate plan is necessary. Because I don’t think we’ve seen all of the nominees in any category.
(ETA: it’s confirmed, we haven’t)
ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett
Julie Christie
Marion Cotillard
Laura Linney
Ellen Page
Easily our worst showing of the major categories — 2/5. Which isn’t unusual – the Academy usually has to dip into movies with very limited releases to get their five nominees for lead actress – and Tucker Carlson still says there is no patriarchy anymore.
I didn’t like the first Elizabeth movie very much (though Blanchett’s performance in it, I did like) so we weren’t going to see this one which didn’t get the good reviews. La Vie en Rose opened when there were a lot of things in the theaters we needed to see. And the Julie Christie movie didn’t get a wide release, even though she’s clearly going to win the Oscar.
The two I did see were worthy nominees. I appreciated the Linney nomination, because it seemed obvious to me that despite the “sibling story” wrapping, The Savages was clearly about her. And Ellen Page honestly carries Juno on her shoulders. A different actress in that role, and that movie could have gone from entertaining all the way to unwatchable.
ACTOR
George Clooney
Daniel Day-Lewis
Johnny Depp
Tommy Lee Jones
Viggo Mortensen
3/5 — I’m not sure we had much of a chance to see the other two yet. If those movies played down here in the Valley, I don’t think it was for long. Of the other three, they were all great, but I think DDL is a pretty obvious choice. He’s in almost every scene of an old-school epic-style story and his narrative counterpoints are written to be overwhelmed by him. Not to mention, he might not make another movie for five years so you have to grab your chance to give him awards.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett
Ruby Dee
Saoirse Ronan
Amy Ryan
Tilda Swinton
4/5 here. I don’t know when we’re going to get around to seeing Atonement. I haven’t read the book yet, which has been one hesitation. Ruby Dee won the SAG, but everything else has gone to Ryan or Blanchett and I think this award has to go to one of them. I did love Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, though, really loved her.
I honestly have a hard time choosing between Ryan and Blanchett. These were two really brave performances, for different reasons. Ryan was brave enough to play an unlikable character with unflinching honesty. Nothing in her performance tried to make us like this woman – and that honesty in the end makes her sympathetic in a way she never would have been if Ryan had hedged her performance. Blanchett is astonishing as the one Dylan most of us are most familiar with. I would imagine that many in attendance Oscar night will be thinking that they would have never even taken that role. I was mesmerized by her, and would easily throw down my non-existent vote for her — except she’s already won an Oscar for being brave enough to play an icon and hitting the performance out of the park. Yeah, I still don’t know which way I’m leaning in this category.
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck
Javier Bardem
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Hal Holbrook
Tom Wilkinson
4/5 again. Philip Seymour Hoffman was my favorite thing about Charlie Wilson’s War. And Tom Wilkinson was great as usual. But neither of these performances holds up to the ones from the Westerns in my eyes. I loved Javier Bardem’s performance in No Country a LOT. But for me this category is all Casey Affleck. Luckily, I had already seen Gone Baby Gone at this point, so I didn’t spend half of this movie saying “where is this coming from?” I mean really, before this I pretty much only knew him from the Oceans’ movies and while he’s totally hilarious in those – I had no idea he had this in him. But this is really the lead role in a very good movie and he nailed it; it’d be hard for any other supporting role to match up to it.
DIRECTOR
Julian Schnabel
Jason Reitman
Tony Gilroy
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Paul Thomas Anderson
4/5. The subject matter of Diving Bell kind of freaks me out. Shaun would have seen this by now if it was just up to him. Of the others, I think I have to go with the Coens for this one. I really liked Juno and Michael Clayton both, but for me this comes down to the two western stories. Paul Thomas Anderson put together a mid-century type movie epic, and did so brilliantly. But I can’t separate this movie from it’s central performance to see the whole as well as i can with the Coens’ film. I can see so much of them in the film, and at the same time see the actors, the source material and more in it.
PICTURE
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will be Blood
4/5. Basically, I feel the same way about this category as I do about Director. I’d probably vote for No Country if I could, but if There Will be Blood goes on a tear, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
We tried a new invite service for the party this year, so I’ve been stressed that some emails might not have copied over. If you’re in cosmopolitan Monmouth next Sunday – welcome!
open access (go Harvard!) and peer review
February 13th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
After seeing versions of this headline — At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on the Web — all day yesterday in my feeds I was actually waiting with bated breath to see what the outcome of the vote would be. Weren’t you? Okay, probably not. But some people wrote the headline in ways that made it seem like the vote had already happened, like this one — Open Access at Harvard – Seriously — and I would get all excited and click on it to find out what happened. Only to find out that we didn’t know yet. After a few of those, my breath started to get more bated.
But now we do know – and it’s a YES.
The gist of the story is this, yesterday the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty voted on a policy that requires faculty to post their published scholarly work in a free, open-access repository. In other words, if a journal refuses to let an author do that, this policy says that Harvard A&S faculty won’t write for that journal.
It’s not absolute. Faculty authors can apply for waivers that will allow them to opt-out of the repository. But that’s exactly the opposite of the situation on most campuses, where including one’s work in a scholarly respository is an opt-in thing. And getting faculty to opt in is one of the more difficult things many libraries are trying to do.
I think one reason that I was so invested in the outcome of this story is the discussion/debate that’s made its way across most of my listservs and a lot of my regular blog reads over the last few weeks sparked by this post on danah boyd’s blog.
Not really getting into the details of that discussion (if you’re interested, I thought Anne Galloway’s response to the initial post was pretty great, and clear about why people were bothered by it) one thing that kept coming up, and kept bothering me was the way that discussions about boyd’s initial post would quickly shift into discussions about the need for or value of peer review.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a good debate on those questions, but open access doesn’t immediately mean publishing free for all where no one evaluates the quality of anything. Never has, and I don’t think it ever will. But that’s where discussion after discussion seemed to end up. If you want to see what I mean, check out this thread on Air-L.
For a taste of what’s going on, check out the initial post by Barry Wellman, and the responses by Jimmy Wales and Jeremy Hunsinger I like this thread as an example of what I’m talking about because Wellman pretty quickly realizes that he’s conflated some issues and issues a correction. Most of the discussions I read weren’t started or continued by people who really think that if anyone can find an article than that article must have been written for the lowest common denominator. It’s more like something about the word “open” (or maybe it was the word “closed,” as in “closed journals”) pushes people’s minds to the question of audience, authority and peer review. And I started to get really worried about that — it made me think a lot about how much farther open access still needs to go in just communicating the issues and defining the terms.
So yes, Harvard’s just one school. And yes, this was the Arts and Sciences faculty, not everyone. But on the heels of this from the NIH, it’s pretty exciting.
(And yes, the second comment on the Inside Higher Ed article claims that this is the “academic equivalent of relaxed fit jeans” – that’s harshing on my happy moment just a bit)
historians harnessing the web 2.0
February 12th, 2008 § 2 Comments
I saw this on the American Historical Association blog today – the AHA is maintaining an archives wiki – a clearinghouse of information for researchers with everything they need to know before heading off to a new archive. I went there expecting to see the usual just-launched wiki with more promise than content and I was blown away by how much information is already there.
Here’s the entry for the archive where I researched a substantial part of my undergraduate honors thesis. What is not included there is any mention of the nice man who fed me soup on the day when I forgot to bring a lunch, and decided to skip eating because I only had one day that weekend to spend in the archive and I didn’t have the time to spare looking for food. But then, because I am very old and my undergraduate years were so long ago – he’s probably not there any more.
The idea of the AHA blog and the Archives wiki is kind of funny to me, given how much some of my professors used to insist that they didn’t ever want to use computers, especially not for email. On the other hand, it’s really not that surprising. Way back in the day, when you had to learn Unix commands and I still had a reference book for Archie and Veronica on my desk, the one killer app I could use to convince just about the most entrenched of old-school scholars that this Internet thing had some merit was — Hytelnet.
Does anyone remember Hytelnet? The thing it did was make it relatively easy to search other libraries’ catalogs. It would tell you where to go, and give you the login information you would need. If you want to see what it used to look like – this is pretty close. But it was about one thing — the one thing you don’t want to do when you have to go somewhere else to get the stuff, is waste your time. So this wiki just reminded me of that – and what a great use of a wiki it is.
fancy search everywhere
February 11th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Not quite on the heels of why I don’t like Ebsco’s new visual search, parts one and two, there are suddenly all kinds of different ways to search for news and information to try. I’ll admit, I don’t totally get any of these yet. I’ve barely played with them, which is part of the reason for that. I think that they’re not fully ready to be gotten yet, though as well.
What’s interesting to me is this common thread running through all of these attempts — the idea that people searching want to see how their results connect to each other. They want to see connections and context. I think this is true, and I think that it’s something we have a hard time doing when we research, especially keyword-research, online. I’m liking the trend, though I’m still a little unclear on the execution to date.
First, from Google Labs
Google Experimental Search. If you have a Google account, and you choose to “join” this experiment, you get some additional options for your results. (A note – all of these images are to screenshots. You have to be logged in and part of the experimental search to see what I’m seeing)
At the top, you can choose to look at these results in info view, timeline view or map view.
The “info view” seems to be about refining your results. You can choose to focus on a particular location, or a particular period in time. Here’s the WGA strike search, refined by “Vancouver.”
I’m not sure exactly what the cool factor is with the timeline refining feature – it seems to pull out results about a particular time, not so much results that were from a particular time. So things like Wikipedia articles, which include lots and lots of dates tend to appear pretty high on those results, no matter which timeframe you try to limit to. I appreciate the concept behind these options, but really, I didn’t find nearly as much to play with as I did in the next two options, at least not yet.
Silobreaker
Next, we have Silobreaker. From the site:
More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user.
As you can probably imagine, the idea that it’s looking at things just like a person would is a little bit suspect. And from what I can see, it does better recognizing fairly concrete things like people and places than more abstract concepts or (especially) keywords that can mean more than one thing.
The default search is called the 360 search and it brings back a big bunch of different ways of looking at results. At the top is the expected list of articles and other resources, with things like photographs and YouTube videos in the right-hand sidebar. Below the fold, you’ll find the additional options:
On the right, you can choose to look at a network view of your results, or a “hotspot” map. You can also choose to just do your initial search in any of these views.
Of these, I found the network view to be the most fun. It was really more fun for me to see the people and places that Silobreaker included in the network than it was for me to drill down to the articles and webpages associated with those people and places, but I can see where this would be valuable for certain searches. There’s also the “trends” view at the bottom, but I haven’t figured out why that’s cool yet. I don’t think I’ve been doing the right kinds of searches.
TextMap
Finally, TextMap. From the site:
s a search engine for entities: the important (and not so important)people, places, and things in the news. Our news analysis system automatically identifies and monitors these entities, and identifies meaningful relationships between them.
Time and place are some factors TextMap uses to contextualize results, but its main point of organization is the “entity.” Do a search, and your results come back listed by “entities” – which can be people, places, companies and more. From the main TextMap page, you can also browse by predefined entities. Click on an entity – and your results come back clustered around that entity.
(And at this point, the word “entity” has started to look really weird to me)
Like Silobuster, TextMap’s options include a network view and a heatmap view. There is also a “reference time” view and juxtapositions between your entity and others.
There’s some awkwardness and “not quite getting it” pieces to all of these options for me. Part of this, of course, is from the fact that I just haven’t played with them very much. Part of it is probably that the underlying metadata won’t really support the types of visualizations they’re trying to provide well enough – or that the sites they’re drawing data from are uneven in their metadata, so the existence of the metadata is skewing what you see in the results. Still, the idea that the user needs and wants to see the contextualization, and the relationships between the information sources they’re using, is exciting.
Defining reference
February 5th, 2008 § 5 Comments
I was thinking about Desk Set the other day – how Bunny and her team answered their phone at Not-NBC (or ABC, or CBS) “reference department” and how everyone seemed to know what that meant. It made me wonder – do they now? We keep hearing that no one knows what terms like “reference” and “circulation” and “interlibrary loan” mean now, how did they know these things back then? Of course, the kind of reference going on in Desk Set was pretty particular — you have a question and I’ll find the fact that answers it for you. We don’t do that kind of reference very much around here, and I expect there are a lot of people spending a lot of time at reference desks who aren’t doing that kind of reference very much where they are, either.
Caleb posted this note on del.icio.us – that RUSA adopted a new definition of reference after Midwinter, based in part on feedback gathered on the RUSA blog the previous few months. I missed that, but went back and caught up on some of it this morning. The issues seem to be these – that we need a standard definition of “reference transactions” since we have to report those out and a standard definitions allow for meaningful comparison across institutions. And that libraries have changed, so the previous definition, adopted in 1984, wasn’t capturing enough about what goes on in libraries now.
The old definition was simple:
An information contact that involves the use, recommendation, interpretation, or instruction in the use of one or more information sources, or knowledge of such sources, by a member of the reference or information staff.
The biggest change between the new definition and the old is that the new one adds another category – “reference work,” distinct from “reference transactions” to capture more of what goes on in libraries today:
Reference work includes reference transactions and other activities that involve the creation, management, and assessment of information or research resources, tools and services.
The definition of Reference transactions is substantially similar, with two major changes. The addition of the word “consultations” created quite a bit of discussion on the RUSA blog. The resulting langauge looks like this:
Reference transactions are information consultations in which library staff recommend, interpet, evaluate and/or use information resources to help others meet particular information needs.
They also added some language about what should not be treated as reference transactions: namely, formal instruction sessions, or answers to directional or policy queries.
I like the addition of “reference work” – given how much reference work/ research consultations/ research and development goes on around here, the transactions alone are only part of the picture. I found myself nodding and recognizing these things in these definitions.
I’m wondering, though, if there isn’t something missing. Like lots of us, I spend some time thinking about where things are going in library public services and I’m not sure I see changes in these definitions that so much reflect where reference is going so much as they reflect where reference has been for a long time. I mean, I’m pretty sure most of what is captured by that “reference work” definition has been going on in the 20 years since 1984 – it’s great that that’s being recognized, but is that what is going to take reference forward? That I don’t know.
My frames of references are emerging technologies/ web stuff and teaching and learning stuff – and they have something in common that I’m not seeing here. And that’s the idea that reference services needs to think about giving up some control. What is being described in both of these definitions is very top-down, with information (at least with reference information) only traveling in one direction. And if the main goal is counting and comparing statistics then I can see the why of that, but at the same time I wonder how long reference can continue to hold onto control of what reference is so tightly.
One of the dominant themes of web 2.0 is that the users take some control of the web – whether it’s in contributing content, or in pulling just the content that they want to together, the developers and content providers can’t control how users interact with, use or encounter their content. That’s kind of a given. And the benefits to users taking some of that control are clear for many reasons, including rich, dynamic content that stays fresh.
The same theme appears in education. In fact, I just spent a couple of hours talking to the director of our Center for Teaching and Learning about encouraging exploration and discovery-based learning in large classes and the question of how to support faculty who want to give up some control of class content in this way was a dominant theme. And that’s nothing new – it’s even in the language that we use to talk about active learning or the pedagogies of engagement — the whole shift from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side” thing. That’s all about giving up control.
And around the library – giving up control is a constant theme. When we talk about library instruction it’s definitely a theme. Don’t worry about coverage, make sure you do active things, encourage deep learning – that’s the watchword for what we do today. And when we talk about new ways of using and organizing information on the web we talk about the same things — when we think about the benefits of folksonomy and tagging we’re asking catalogers to give up some control as well. When we use widgets and 2.0 tools on our websites we’re giving some control of that space to our users. And speaking of space – when we talk about our libraries as dynamic learning spaces, and we put our furniture on wheels, we’re giving students control of the physical spaces as well.
So how does reference get in on this game? Do you see reference giving up control? People who work with me have heard some of this before in my reactions to this panel at last year’s ACRL conference. I went hoping to hear some of these things addressed, and mainly got a lot of talk about how people wanted stuff on the web all the time, and how we’d be working on the web instead of at the desk. I think there were a lot of reasons for this, for one, the panel was updating an earlier conversation using some of the same people – even though those people had moved on and weren’t doing reference any more.
I feel a little bad bringing up this panel, because the reaction afterwards was kind of negative, but focused on some very different things than I’m focusing on here. So I’m thinking that there might be too much baggage for this to be a good addition to this post, but I’m going to leave it in because it was this panel that really got me thinking about these issues of control. Just be aware that I’m not talking here about whether librarians are at the desk, on SecondLife or in Facebook. That’s not the piece I came away thinking about.
Because I don’t think the where is really the question. Basically, I came away feeling that I had heard a lot of stuff about moving reference online – as if that change of venue was the end of the story. And that disappointed me because it felt like e-learning conversations from the late 90′s or so, really old-school and not very radical. And I wasn’t sure why — Brian Matthews, linked above, was the only panelist to really focus on the how and the what about the web (and probably not surprisingly, he was the one I remember being actively engaged in reference work now) but even he basically described fairly controlled, top-down reference transactions that just happened to take place on the web.
(And this is someone who definitely has been doing other stuff as well — I couldn’t decide which event to link to, so I’m just linking to the whole tag)
So yes, I don’t think it’s the where. I think it’s the how – and to a real extent it is also the what, as in what reference services are. And that’s what brings me back to the definitions above. In all of those other ways, we’re increasingly seeing value in letting our users, our students, and perfect strangers on the Internet, take some control over things. Control over what they learn in class, what a library space is, what belongs on a webpage, and so on. In some cases, these questions of control are fairly profound – giving up control over what a thing IS as well as how it’s done. So what about reference? How do we give up some of the control that is obvious throughout those definitions above to our users? How do we let them, in part, define what reference service means to them?
Unfortunately, Michael Buckland’s is the only talk not linked from this conference – because it sounds like he’s getting at these same questions. And being Michael Buckland (and Kimberley Carl too), he probably had a lot more to say in the way of answers than I do. I do think that the idea of self-service reference fits in here. And I suspect that reference 2.0 will also involve some aspect of our users serving each other – doing reference for each other – providing answers and resources for each other.
But that’s as far as I’ve gotten – any ideas?
