On the Horizon...
For the past few years the New Media Consortium has collaborated with the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) to research emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on higher education. The report is divided into sections by time to adoption and includes technologies that will be adopted for educational use in a year or less up to five years. The 2007 Horizon Report discusses a number of technology and trends, but rather than summarizing them all, I'll point out a few I think are most significant or have an impact on academic libraries.
Key Trends
1. Changing higher education environment --
- less students overall because of declining enrollment
- Increased need for distance education
- More non-traditional and non-residential students
2. Academic review (including peer review) , merit, and tenure processes are not adapting to new forms of scholarship. As faculty are using digital mediums for expression and increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, their work is moving towards a new type of peer review, but "traditional" ideas of academic status are presenting barriers to change.
3. Information Literacy should not be considered a given. The IL skills of students are not increasing proportional to technology usage. Today's students are using various types of technologies, but that does not make them more information literate. This is why many academic libraries are boosting their efforts at IL instruction.
The three trends discussed above impact higher education as a whole, and are issues that effect academic libraries provision of services and instruction. The changing nature of the academic environment and student body contribute to the services offered by academic libraries and the amount and types of instruction we provide, while the new forms of academic review have a potential impact on the scholarly publishing crisis. I was pleasantly surprised to see that information literacy was one of the key trends. Many times the misperception is that netgen students are information literate because they are technologically literate. Libraries have been teaching information literacy skills for years, but I would like to see more an institutional emphasis and initiative for information literacy. Many universities are emphasizing IL, but many are not. Institutional support and interdisciplinary collaboration with libraries to include IL instruction is increasingly important.
Stayed tuned to my next post where I'll continue the discussion of the Horizon Report by discussing the critical challenges and technologies to watch...
Labels: higher education, Horizon report, information literacy, library instruction, scholarly publishing
posted by Mary @ 7:23 AM
3 Comments:
Yes, as a distance learning student, I can relate to the need to access reference materials from, well, a distance.
Somewhat of topic, I wonder about the concept of access to public library references for non-students, public school students and private school students. Is there or will there be total access to materials or will there be some tiered access depending on where you are categorized?
As a high school teacher, I agree with Bob's comment. We need to teach our high schoolers how to access public library references. Unfortunately, most public and private high schools have limited media resources and have no framework to support such teaching. Most teachers do not know how to effectively search public library references. The result is that most college students have no background knowledge to build upon in accessing library resources. In fact, most of their experience with accessing literature comes directly from web search engines, not library databases.
This problem will only be exacerbated as more and more students take classes through distance education. They will never have contact with you, or any other specialists in navigating the abundant resources available from university libraries. It seems like their should be a Library 101 course that all students (freshman) need to take to introduce how to navigate media resources and a second, advanced course for graduate students
Dr. Dawson gave us all a copy of the Horizon report in my last class. Very insightful.
In terms of the information literacy,I agree with you 100%, but whose responsibility do you feel it should be to teach students those skills, and how and when should those skills be taught?
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