Information overload and the elders

I'm completely swamped by all of this. No surprise. The web just keeps getting better and better and more fun to navigate. Clever communities of people are cropping up everywhere and seem to have been long before my recent knowledge. It's all, however, a bit much to take in. It will take some discipline to go by the guidelines of my course leader of not being swept away by pure, and hyper, enthusiasm over the topic. I will do my best.

Meredith Farkas, back in 2006, made some interesting points about libraries marking their space within social networking sites. I think she is right in arguing that it isn't just about "being cool" with the kids when setting up a library profile on those sites. The are a lot of useful applications and ways of making that profile worth people's while to visit, i.e. the students'.

In that same post, she mentions the issue of teenage students and their ideas or concepts of privacy online. This is a concern of many elders - after all, it's our duty to worry about our youngsters. Somehow though, we've left them to rummage in the open fields, creeks and crevices of the web without much thought. Well, many of us have and many still are. Ignorance is bliss as they say. Young people deserve guidance though - without guidance they may suffer negligence. And nobody wants that on their conscience. Especially libraries. Or what?

I think it's every college's obligation to reach out and mark their space within their user's space. The web is at the heart of information flow. The web is the platform students use for most of their information seeking. Why shouldn't the library be visible and accessible to its users there. It's simple logic.

There seems to be a tendency to think of the library as guardian and controller of information amongts many, still. I've had people imply that the open free public web is a danger. That blogging is potentially very risky and dangerous. That freedom of expression might instigate a dangerous situation for the institution of the library.

Many also seem to suffer from FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about blogging. Comments - how do you deal with them? Do you allow them- or don't you? If you don't, what is the purpose of your blog in the first place? You might as well post announcements up on Blackboard.

The idea of an open, public dialogue between students and lecturers or librarians, like the ones in blogs, suffers a rift somewhere and I'm inclined to think that a solution to that rift may lie with us elders. It probably all comes down to us, the digital immigrants - and the change we are suffering while the digital natives, the students, run happily and freely amongst each other on the open web. It is our responsibility to go in there, mark our place and by doing so making it clear that the web is for all - it's public, it's not private. It's for all to make use of. We are not invading their space - we are not trying to be cool - we are simply - and we might feel like we're clumsy at first - making use of that space. Like they are. (The royal "we" stands for librarians of course).

Isn't it ironic...as someone said

Over on Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Service, Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian at Iowa State University, recently posted up an online survey called 'Library presence in social networking'.

One participant had this to add to the survey:
"In our case it is because we are partially government funded and the state government filters our servers. All social networking sites are blocked - so while we will be funded to attend 2.0 training and encouraged to be 'innovative' we aren't allowed to access or use anything of interest (even Firefox is blocked). I think the extreme conservatism of government and university IT services sections is MAJOR limiting factor for many libraries."

Although this hasn't been mentioned as a barrier or problem in my research I can imagine many institutions working under similar conditions. The institution where I'm doing my research allows access to MySpace, Facebook, IM and they use itunes, systematically, in student education.

Students there use all of these media on a daily basis. As for lecturers and library staff...

Blogging students

In my research so far I have heard how teachers that have incorporated blogs into their courses often anticipate the blogs to be taken off by students without any prior participation of the lecturer's behalf. Lecturers in this way set up the blog and tell students to go blog. According to my participants the blogs, for this reason they suggest, never really take off.

On a similar note, my participants furthermore say that blogs within education only seem to materialise if students get marks or are assessed in how well or much they participate in the creation of the blog

This seems to be supported by research already done on blogging in education. Williams and Jacobs report on how two university blogs were highly successful, even though they report that students were not given any direction in how to use the blog other than logging in and to write on their subject matter for the course they were taking. Participation was optional but students were told that for considerable participation in the blog they would receive five marks included in their assessment for the course.

So, maybe the Williams and Jacobs study is a sign of the times that still seems to linger - that students simply need to be directed toward a blogging facility and the blog would take off. However, as noted above, the reason for the success of the aforementioned blogs seems to be that students participated for marks - not simply because they wanted to.

Educational blogging seems, in this way, to clash with the original concept of blogging - at least to some of my participants - the concept behind the blog being that people participate because they want to.

Some of my participants are furthermore critical towards this idea of forced blogging. Where students are directed to blog on a particular subject under the specific conditions of academic assessment.

There are also the classic issues of control of content and access, the idea of privacy and last but certainly not least the feeling many of my participants described as that of "being watched", i.e. that students see what you are writing and vice versa, lecturers and librarians see what students are writing. Many generally seem to have reservations about the idea in that way.

These are interesting issues, especially when academics do generally seem to want to be part of web or library 2.0. I wonder if any of this might lie at the heart of why universities and libraries find it difficult to engage with blogging in the first place.