Joe Pa’s Salary Is Public Information

I agree that video is having and will have a huge impact on learning in higher education – and that the academic librarian can take a leadership position on campus in providing technology, resources and support to faculty and students to facilitate this fundamental shift in learning in which students won’t just be consuming content but creating it. 

You may have forgotten about your pal’s essay on this very subject:

http://bit.ly/otwXfW

Once again, we are (sort of) of a like mind on this issue.

Love your text on this, Brian. Would it have been more convincing as a video?

I love the idea of communicating scholarly information in viral format because it allows the viewer, or would be reader, an opportunity to see the emotion in the message and gives the creator the opportunity to showcase in a visually creative format what they want to say. The now longer have to rely on just charts, graphs, or survey results to illustrate their points. I say bring on the film/media majors and embrace the new way of learning!

One would think that if the English Department wishing to teach the “new English” looked around its own campus, it might in fact find that the Communication Department or Media Department there, and in hundreds of other universities and schools, had been teaching the newly discovered subject for many years. I do not mean just the “nuts and blots, but everything connnected to producing a film or video and its impact on an audience and culture. R3

Video has a place, but it will NEVER replace text. For many uses, text is more precise and more efficient. Take something like the Rachel Maddow show: the show is very well-produced, but I could learn as much or more from 15 minutes of reading than I’d learn from watching a one-hour show. (And reading would still be much more efficient even if you could eliminate the commercials.)

Beyond that, there’s a very real political danger in over-reliance on video as a means of commentary and analysis. The law is text, and it always will be. If citizens do not learn to analyze and work with text, they will seriously compromise their ability to understand the law or have any real input on what it says and how it is written. And if undergraduate students don’t learn to work with text, they can forget about law school or a career as a lawyer.

English programs and the librarians supporting them might find some useful lessons in the university’s journalism school, where a shift to video has been going on for some time.  I know Baby Boomer reporters and photographers who have had to learn to shoot video as a regular part of their jobs of covering the news.  Video and multimedia production is popular among journalism students at Indiana University, the school I know best.  Writing is still critically important, but text alone is less so.  I don’t know whether or not librarians at IU or elsewhere have kept up with the journalists’ new requirements.

Text is also machine searchable, and I think text search will always outperform audiovisual search.  I read somewhere that it’s now possible to identify an object in a video (like a backpack by a bench) and search for the scene where the bag was placed there.  If this were written as a story (or better yet a play), even the most basic text search could find it.

One indication of how text is still dominant is the number of graphic illustrations in a text (not just the picture on the cover or the start of the article, but graphics which are essential to communicating the ideas in the text).  I don’t think the number of essential graphics has increased that much.

No argument.  But journalism students’ needs of librarians are changing.  That’s undeniable.  The question remains, What are librarians doing to adapt to this change in patrons’ requirements?

You might want to review what’s been happening in the field of arts librarianship, where your colleagues have quite a bit of experience supporting the production of non-textual works.