The New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiative have released their 2010 Horizon Report. It forecasts six key emerging technologies that will have an impact on teaching and learning. View the official announcment.
Download the 2010 report (PDF).
Download the 2009 report (PDF).
A number of participants are tweeting the Emerging Technologies Interest Group Camp at the Canadian Library Association Conference today in real time, in Montreal.
Go to
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23etigcamp to follow the likes of http://twitter.com/conniecrosby .
(you don’t need a twitter account to follow the updates).
For more about ETIG, visit http://etig.wordpress.com/
Monday - May 11th at 1 p.m EDT: How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis.
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Some are prepared to concede that the current global financial crisis may take its toll on a number of universities. Mergers, consolidations, and perhaps even closures are all possible outcomes of the financial crisis. Viewed as only a financial crisis, crisis management has attempted to attack the economic equation by constraining and re-directing inputs…. [view the full description]
One could probably be forgiven for feeling somewhat gloomy in either of the two areas where I spend most of my working life. In addition to being employed as a systems librarian at a university library, my wife and I are the owners of a community newspaper, and every week seems to be a whirlwind of technological challenges, reading a barrage of doom and gloom predictions for the future of both libraries and newspapers, and meeting the all important Tuesday deadline for going to press. Although I have been around my wife’s family’s newspaper operation for about 2 decades now, it was in 2004 that we decided to become the owners of the entire process of putting a print publication out that has faithfully met a weekly publishing schedule for the community we live in since 1895.
In some ways, there are synergies between delivering information to a local and a campus community. No less a luminary than Roy Tennant has commented on the close relationship between libraries and newspapers, and I was heartened to hear the decline of newspapers occupy a lot of airtime in listening to the podcast of LITA’s Top Tech Trends panel. Newspapers matter to libraries, and vice-versa, and each is clearly trying to find its way in a web-enabled world.
I suspect I do not have to point to many commentaries on the challenges facing libraries for this audience, and in looking at the sessions for the recent OLA conference, there seems to be plenty of evidence that libraries are defining strong strategies to stay relevant in a time of global networking and a rapidly changing information landscape. I was particularly struck by the amount of sessions on Open Source Software (OSS) at this year’s conference. My bias here is overwhelming, but OSS is a major factor in fostering agility for libraries in the face of increasing demands, and I think Ontario’s libraries are faring very well in this regard.
If anything has changed in the last year, it is that newspapers have probably far outpaced libraries in terms of the degree of widespread angst. Nick Bilton’s recent The sky is falling posting from O’Reilly Radar gathers together some of the most high profile articles on the future of newspapers, and Bilton uses the interesting example of the introduction of the telephone to illustrate how the impact of new technologies is not always what is expected, and that defining new ways of doing things seems to be called for.
The way we tell stories and consume content inevitably changes with the birth of these new technologies. The voice of the predecessor doesn’t instantly die when a new form of communication arrives, it begins to morph and adapt to the changing climate, or as the current pundits aptly predict, it won’t survive.
Of course, libraries are well acquainted with predictions of mass upheaval as a result of new technologies. One example that might be familiar to readers of this blog is Telidon:
… the technology has the potential of altering or eliminating the traditional function of librarians as intermediaries between individuals and their information needs. How will this change the role of librarians as they receive competition from commercial information services?
- CLA Information Services Co-ordinating Group on Telidon, 1981
I thought of this warning from the past when coming across a widely quoted snippet from New Directions for News that seems to have cross-over possibilities for use in both library and newspaper doomsaying activities.
Journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where … its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but, potentially, by the audience it serves.
Substitute “librarianship” for “journalism” and “information” for “news” and you have the building blocks for a quote that could be propagated through the library blogosphere in much the same way that this has made the rounds of newspaper and media blogs. I don’t necessarily completely dismiss the arguments in either case, but I do think there’s much more going on with newspapers and libraries than can be gleaned by straight measurements of news and information consumption online.
Newspapers, in particular, get a double hit in some ways because they feed many of the forces that, in turn, undermine predictions of their long-term solvency. James Surowiecki notes in an article about the New York Times, which has become a poster child for the problems of the newspaper industry, that the Times is actually read more as a result of the web than ever before. The problem, Surowiecki writes, will no doubt be familiar to my library brethren:
…people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Ah yes, everything quick and free, we go to a lot of trouble in libraries to architect this kind of experience for our community, and we are well aware of the role of Google in defining the perceptions of how information should be acquired. Still, I don’t believe this is the biggest “challenge” of the Web, in part because there is no turning back from the free-flowing ecosystem that the Web is demanding. I believe the biggest challenge is to provide and be recognized for unique value, and to leverage the possibilities of a bidirectional flow in our respective audiences in newspapers and libraries. For libraries, this could come in the form of tagging, crowd-sourcing and supporting personal collections, and for newspapers, this gets tangled up in the notion of a citizen journalist. Great possibilities exist here, but some cautionary notes are also warranted. Consider OhmyNews, South Korea’s unique experiment in citizen journalism and a web site attracts an estimated 2 million daily readers. Anyone who registers with OhmyNews can become a paid reporter:
OhmyNews tends to be anticorporate, antigovernment and anti-American. Stories are often subjective, oozing with emotion and odd personal tidbits. But they also can be passionate, detailed and knowledgeably written. The site covers everything a traditional newspaper covers — from sports to international politics — but does it with heaps of personality.
“It’s entertaining, it’s heartfelt and it’s caring,” said Don Park, a Korean-American reader who said he visits OhmyNews daily. “It’s like blogs. It has a personal side and an emotional side. It has human texture. It’s not bland and objective like traditional news. There’s a definite bias. It’s not professional, but you get the facts…. I trust it.”
OhmyNews is an interesting and valuable social phenomenon but even blandness must be tolerated in order to achieve objectivity in either a newspaper or library context. One of my heroes, June Callwood, a great voice that is no longer among us, explained it well:
“A part of the journalist’s mandate, as I see it,” [Callwood] told her audience, “is to rock the boat. This is done by seeing what is in the spaces between received wisdom and reality, and by putting into public view hard-won information that authorities would prefer to hide. If journalists don’t do that, who will? In the absence of accountability, it is natural for people in power to behave badly.”
- June Callwood, Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, 2002
The most compelling model for libraries and newspapers on the Web is probably a hybrid approach. Allowing comments on stories has had mixed success on newspaper sites. The Chicago Tribune, for example, recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political news stories because “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots“. A more successful direction is suggested by the Santa Fe New Mexican which has specific sections for allowing readers to share personal and community news and content, including photos. BiblioCommons, as evidenced by the implementation at Oakville Public Library, is sort of the library equivalent to the Santa Fe New Mexican, a catalogue system that brings forward the best of user contributions while building on a solid base of library data.
Ironically, my biggest worry from a community publishing point of view concerns the stories that might not be recorded if web-delivery of news obliterates other publishing sources. Web technologies have an amazing reach, but I really wonder about the baseball, hockey, and soccer scores of generations of children that might not be recorded for posterity, the description of social events that help define a community and the place where you can find traces of family members from the past. The OurOntario project of Knowledge Ontario is building on its newspaper initiative to bring forward the archives of community newspapers, and to take just one example from the publication I know best, consider this report on causalities published on Dec. 7, 1917 (and go easy on that link, we are still working out the application). Where else, for example, is the story of Wilson Homes, who was at the battles of the Somme and Vimy Ridge, but was sent home on the discovery that he was only 17 years old. The community where I live is not that big, but my small newspaper has over 31,000 pages between 1895 and 1968 just on microfilm alone that records the activities of this community at a level of detail that would otherwise be lost.
Perhaps the most promising future of both newspapers and libraries on the web is as a community platform, bringing forward the best of local content and the world of recorded information in a manner that builds on tradition strengths as well as the power of the most low-barrier method of publishing that has ever been seen. Chicken Little may have been wrong about the sky in terms of it falling, but the best place to look up and deal with what is coming at you is almost always when you are standing on solid ground to begin with.
It’s that time of year again, when we look out for what the technology trend-spotters predict we should be watching over the next year. This year the library and education bloggers that I follow did not disappoint. I was fortunate to attend Michael Stephens’ Education Institute audio conference on top tech trends for 2009, where he predicted that 2009 would be about:
Stephens’ post, Ten Trends & Technologies for 2009 in his popular Tame the Web blog expands on these themes, and is definitely worth a read. ALA’s self-acclaimed “information maven” and popular blogger, Jenny Levine, commented on Michael Stephens’ predictions in her Shifted Librarian blog post, We’re Not All Ready for the Cloud Yet. She emphasized the need to teach critical skills about the cloud, particularly relating to synchronization and privacy issues.
Besides the broader world of libraries, I’ve been reading the predictions about the future of technology in K-12 Education. In his particularly thoughtful post ’09 Bringing social learning to the masses, Thinking Stick blogger Jeff Utecht says that 2009 will be about broader adoption and more powerful use of Read/Write web technologies in education.
“In 2009 I think you are going to see us build value into these tools educationally. I’m not convinced that 2009 will be about the ‘next new thing’ so we (the early adopters) will turn our focus to what we know. The tools, we know, can make a difference in education and we’ll help the masses understand those tools better and how being connected fundamentally changes the way we teach and learn.”
Will Richardson, OSLA’s Spotlight Speaker for Super Conference 2009 estimates that about 5% of educators are really thinking about the big shifts that the Read/Write web bring to how kids learn. In his Weblogg-ed post, Looking Back, Looking Forward; Slow Blogging, Slow Change, Richardson speculates on what it will take to effect change.
Speaking of Super Conference speakers, Stephen Heppell, who intrigued audiences at both the 2007 and 2008 conferences, published a fascinating article in The Guardian in which he discusses “the space in-between” - the sometimes synchronous and sometimes asynchronous online spaces that we occupy on Facebook and Twitter, for example. He speculates that educators and the media will have to think more and more about investing in people who live in these spaces, the “inbetweenies”.
The theme this year seems to be consolidation and making meaning. A challenge to librarians and educators alike!