OCLC report: Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers (2004)
As this report was five years old, when reading it I took the position to see exactly how many of the predictions have come to pass. Within those, I looked into my own life and saw just how many different ways I received information. I found that I am a big consumer of the microcontent industry and that I get a lot of my information from nontraditional sources, for example I don't think that I have opened a newspaper except to get the crossword in over a year. I tend to use online sources, especially wikis and blogs ( ex: dlisted.com for all my celebratory gossip) It was fascinating to find how much of their new vocabulary has become common and oft used in the past half decade.
Lied Library @ four years: technology never stands still
When looking into this reading, I am glad to see how Pitt has moved in a similar direction and has many of these opportunities avaliable to us. Our computers are up to date (at least the Macs are) and we seem to have more and more avaliable to us via non traditional sources (jstor and the like) I was contrasting this to Double Fold, which presents this turn of events as something not to be desired, in fact Baker seems so much like a luddite that I am even more turned off by his argument looking at this case study. For this institution at least, moving more and more into the digital age has provided them with a more efficient and all together better way to distribute information.
Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture
This was m least favorite reading for this week, I found it overwritten and generally dull but it does have some interesting points. I do believe that we need to focus more education on how the systems we rely on work, not just how to use them. Though we will not all work explicitly in creating the new systems (indeed my only foray into programming was a disaster to rival the Titanic) to not have any understanding will leave you in the dust. With the economy in a weakened state, understanding how and why things work becomes more and more necessary as we continue to try and rise above the mass of others in an effort to be noticed and given the chance to be successful.
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Hi Jon,
ReplyDeleteOn the OCLC Report:
As someone with a background in journalism, my concern with the use of blogs and wiki as primary sources of info is their reliabilty. When anyone can edit, where is the accountability for a fact-based posting?
Like you, I also had problems with the [i]Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy[/i] piece. The author maintained that students weren't graduating with adequate tech skills and lacked information literacy, but did not use statistics to back up his sources. The fact that he did not elaborate on what subjects one needed to be versed in to be adequately info literate was a point of contention with me.
Jon,
ReplyDeleteI like the title of your blog. I understand that you are a big consumer of the microcontent industry, like most of us who use it for everything from news to weather to celebrity gossip (perezhilton), but what is your usage of e-books? Did you buy actual physical books for your classes or are reading everything online? I am just curious about the market for the future of these books. Thanks.