Week 6: Thing #15--Perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and the future of libraries

Social media brings people together. Just look at Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya at this very moment. There are too many news articles and blogs discussing the part social media is playing in revolutions to mention or even read. I looked at several, including these two:

Libya, Egypt, Bahrain--they just want to be like us. Iain Macwhirter Now and Then

Can social networking overthrow a government? Peter Beaumont February 25, 2011 - 12:27PM

In an article from Next: The OCLC Newsletter titled "The Thoughts of Nine Experts About Our Increasingly Online Lives," Paul Jones (one of the experts) says:

If libraries and museums act on their heritage as places for intellectual improvement and social interaction and cultural cohesion, there is a great future for them. If they act as warehouses for cultural treasures as interpreted by the dominant culture, their days are numbered.

They may be numbered anyway. The gathering place, where information is gathered and exchanged, is treasured by the human race, but is frequently excoriated by taxpayers and tax collectors. As we see gross assumptions that students no longer need reference material because everything is available on the Internet and pundits declare that, somehow, 21st Century Skills will save us all if students just have access to technology, it is really questionable whether libraries can survive. Explaining to a dubious public that we are busier than ever is an ominous task, unless we are explaining it to the public that uses the library. There are great examples of librarians leading the technology charge--I'd like to be one myself. Advocacy will be everything.

In the face of revolutions without leadership, I think I see the face of the same anarchy that followed the French Revolution. In "Books in Time," a Carla Hesse article about the eBook, technology, and literacy, written approximately fifteen years ago, she states, among numerous amazing forecasts:

What appears to be emerging from the digital revolution is the possibility of a new mode of temporality for public communication, one in which public exchange through the written word can occur without deferral, in a continuously immediate present. A world in which we are all, through electronic writing, continuously present to one another.

I attended the CSLA Conference in Sacramento last fall. It is usually my first stop to look for ideas on integrating technology into my curricula. CUE came to Napa early in the year and met at American Canyon High School--our new tech rich site. Digital responsibility, social networking, collaboration--all considered 21st Century Skills--were the order of the day. Looking into the near future, or even the now, according to the Horizon Report, electronic books and mobiles are what to look for. Slightly down the path, we need to be ready for augmented reality and game based learning and gesture-based  computing. My cell phone seems to be using the last, my grandson is heavily into games for math, and augmented reality--well, aren't on the fringes of that? The "augment" feels more like an equitable access than a future based technology.