Mark C. Taylor’s op-ed in the NYTimes is a real challenge to the structure of higher education…

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)……

I especially appreciated one of his suggestions:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

We’ve been imagining something like this in the Library as well. The Library’s role in learning/teaching as well as in the creation of knowledge lies in its ability to create and facilitate communities of scholarly discourse that spans traditional disciplinary boundaries. These communities engage problems as Taylor suggests in the context of the collections that embody scholarly discourse through the centuries…

I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the social construction of knowledge. We just completed a unit focusing on that in the class I teach, but I’ve been playing with the notion for several years. Ian Bogost said today at that MIT Communications Forum that living in a world you don’t construct forces one to view the world from a different perspective. He was, of course, speaking of the experience of playing a video game. It struck me that socially constructed knowledge or reality is a really hard concept to teach. We’ve all constructed our own and it is so essential to our being that we aren’t aware of it. But being in a video game, we live in a world constructed by someone else. I wonder if using a game might be a more effective way to teach that unit.

The theme for the conversation was “games and civic engagement: can computer games be tools for democracy?” This is the second or third conference focusing on game theory that I’ve attended. Each time I leave very aware of how illiterate I am in this medium. Each time I leave wondering how this might impact the Theology Library. Should I be adding video games to the collection?  Certainly there are some good games available that would be appropriate to the collection.

Or, at some level, might I think of the Library as a game. If it is a socially constructed reality of our (librarians) making, then inviting students to enter the Library as a game might be an interesting way to frame the experience.

Powered by ScribeFire.

This is a nicely done online interactive workshop on the Information Search Process for Research. It would be interesting to see something like it designed specifically for Theological Research. It’s based at least in part on the research of Carol C. Kuhlthau.

The Distant Librarian: Introducing WISPR – Workshop on the Information Search Process for Research

I mentioned to a couple of people at ATLA Annual Meeting in Chicago that the Library hosted a wiki that was used in by an Introduction to Theology course last Fall. The professor assigned the class the task of collaboratively creating a glosary of 100 theological terms that he had assigned. Later in the semester, he exported the content of the wiki to produce a small booklet that students used to study for a mid-term exam. It was an interesting use of a wiki in the classroom and was successful overall, though some of the students didn’t get the hang of formatting in the wiki.

I discovered an article entitled: “Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom” by S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder (Ferris, S., and H. Wilder. 2006. Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom. Innovate 2 (5). )

Synopis: S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder discuss the changes that are occurring in teaching and learning in a world where teachers and students are increasingly products of two different learning cultures. Adopting the linguistic theory of Walter J. Ong, they see teachers as part of a print paradigm of learning whereas they propose that students are increasingly part of a secondary-oral paradigm of learning. The growth of the secondary-oral paradigm, they argue, has been fueled by the expansion of technologies that allow for the communal cohesion of oral-based cultures on the one hand while also allowing for the preservation and convenient transmission of knowledge that characterizes print-based cultures on the other hand. In this context, Ferris and Wilder argue that wikis provide one possible tool to help bridge the gap between teachers and students. They contend that wikis draw upon the best aspects of print and secondary orality by offering a medium in which information is neither fixed in format (as it was in the print age) nor limited to locale (as it was before the print age) but still changeable to meet the needs of the community, freely accessible to remote parties, and easily archived for future use. After addressing some of the debates that have characterized the legitimacy of wikis as learning resources, Ferris and Wilder illustrate and discuss potential uses for wikis in educational settings, and they offer resources for teachers interested in using such technology in their work.

Innovate – Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom