September 26, 2007
Library Education Goes Virtual
The virtual campus of the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science was recently featured on KQED, a PBS-affiliated station in Northern California. The school has 16 acres in Second Life where it holds office hours and classes.
During the broadcast, the interviewer, Sheraz Sadiq, asks Linda Main, a faculty member at the library school, if it’s hard to have office hours with an avatar sporting a green mohawk and purple skin.
“Not at all,” she replies. “Some of our students show up that way in person.”—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday September 26, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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Come on, people. This is ridiculous … reality is waiting for you when you want to disconnect from your fantasy world.
— Sol Sep 26, 04:53 PM #
Second Life is only slightly more ridiculous than library school.
— Trust me, I'm a librarian Sep 26, 05:21 PM #
Second Life ridiculous…..indeed!! As a librarian, I find it ironic that we are being pushed to use these types of virtual tools AND increase the number of students/patrons who come to the library. How do we do both?!???
Also, “Trust me”, could you clarify why library school is so ridiculous??
For me, library school provided a strong theoretical foundation that prepared me for a career in librarianship. The alternative is untrained paraprofessionals using Google!!!
— kitty Sep 26, 06:01 PM #
Second life is ridiculous
time wasting exrecise
— Tech savvy Librarian Sep 26, 07:48 PM #
I think that this demo is a little bit frivolous but I went to the KQED website and saw many better examples of this technology.
— Janet A. Sep 26, 09:00 PM #
Information retrieval (much of library sciences) is actually a very interesting science, involving linguistics, computer programming, and measurement theory.
Second life, I think, has interesting applications in other areas such as sociology, art, and architecture, but I am still a skeptic about introducing it for classroom use in other courses.
— Steve R Sep 27, 10:45 AM #
Second Life is fantasy and quite useless for anything real and tangible. Librarians (and I am one as well as a professor of library science) are losing their grip on the realities of information and student learning and dabbling in Second Life is more pretend and fantasy in an increasingly pretend world, unhinged from reality and common sense. I make sure my students read Borgmann’s, Holding on to Reality (Univ of Chicago Press, 2000). It ought to be required reading for every member of the ACRL. You can’t cook your dinner and do your laundry in Second Life.
— JAM Sep 27, 11:07 AM #
Most people interested in pursuing a Master’s in Library Science don’t live anywhere near a university that offers the program, there just aren’t enough of them. This is one reason online programs like the one at San Jose State are so important. Most of the comments here seem to be considering the use of Second Life in a University environment where students could actually attend their professor’s office hours without getting on a plane. Even though Second Life may not be as good as the real thing, it is still more like real face time than say, email. I agree that as librarians we shouldn’t wholesale embrace every new technology, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss it for all uses either.
— Rebecca Sep 27, 12:32 PM #
Oppostion to Second Life sounds a lot like the views of “digital immigrants” – those of us who didn’t grow up with loads of technology and find ourselves challenged by tools and methods students use to communicate technologically. Many of our students are already exchanging much of their information in virtual environments; they are likely to be curious about new ways to use technology to learn. They are the “digital natives” — I consider Second Life to be a unique opportunity to satisfy their curiousity, teach them what I know, and learn a thing or two from them in the process.
— LHM Sep 27, 01:20 PM #
Most of these comments sound exactly the same as the critiques of every technology before SL:
“The telephone is ruining society…why can’t people just talk to each other anymore?”
ditto the web, the radio, television, and probably the printing press and telegraph.
Every new method of information exchange is initially ridiculed as “useless”. While SL might not be the exact form of the next generation of informational exchange, you can bet that virtual interactions aren’t going away, and those that hand-wave them as “fantasy and quite useless for anything real and tangible” will be left behind .
— Jason Griffey Sep 27, 01:58 PM #
While SL may not be the final resting place of librarianship in a virtual world, it is the best place at the moment to determine how useful the tool can be. The biggest drawback right now is the time it takes to live comfortably in that world without the platform being a burden, so you can go about creating and interacting. Educational classes abound in SL, and there is a very exciting library community that is thriving. Virtual worlds may not be for everyone, but I think it behooves us as librarians to at least explore its potential.
— Prano Amjadi Sep 27, 02:25 PM #
Most these comments sound like the posters are techo-phobes afraid of advancing technology. Wake up to the future of wide-scale communications people.
SL isn’t perfect by a long way, but it does appear to be a viable tool for reaching out to those who may not be able to come to a physical classroom. How can it be wrong to vastly increase your audience when one is attempting to impart learning to a willing audience?
— Gary Sep 27, 04:00 PM #
You may call it fear of technology – I prefer to think of it as prudent skepticism of corparate hype.
Ever take a walk through your A-V department’s storage area? You’ll see that it’s littered with useless remnants of the last 50 years of“educational technology.”
Technology’s a useful tool but that’s all it is, much like a screwdriver. It has nothing to do with education per se.
— Paul Sep 27, 07:30 PM #
I graduated from the library program at SJSU, and I NEVER ONCE showed up with a green mohawk or purple skin.
— SJSU alumna Sep 27, 08:22 PM #
There’s a new breed of librarian popping up and we’re not scared to try new and exciting things. While there will always be those who want to sit behind their desk and shoosh rowdy patrons, we prefer to make noise!!! We’re successfully blending information science with traditional librarianship. For those who say that this type of thing has nothing to do with the library, then YOU have a mixed up view of the library.
— NEUbreed Sep 27, 09:55 PM #
Second Life is but one of many tools and technologies to which students are exposed. Like Harvard Law, we believe that there are opportunities available than may not be possible through other venues. The“reality” of course is that our clients, by the millions, are active in seeking and using information in Second Life: to ignore them would the be worst fantasy.
— Ken Haycock Oct 1, 12:31 PM #
As librarians we must meet the incoming generation of students – the Milleniums – on their own turf, much of which is digital or virtual in nature.
Communicating with FaceBook is, of course, not as real as talking with a person in front of you but our users are digital natives. Why not use Google Scholar if you find the information you need there? Users don’t need the librarians’ advocacy or permission for using the available technology. IM-ing is as natural as breathing to this group.. why not meet them on that ground? Either the librarians embrace and employ newer technologies or they will be seen as Luddites and out-of-date. I’ve been a librarian long enough to remember when it was really cool to have and load a CD-Rom that could hold 10,000 pages of text (golly!) How quaint that seems in 2007. Go with wave of innovation or be left behind. Try to bring some of the Luddite faculty along with you.
— Creaky Oct 10, 03:57 PM #
“ [Technology] has nothing to do with education per se. “
Paul, are you serious? There are so many things wrong with this statement—in the context of digital information sharing and beyond—that I don’t even know where to begin. Perhaps you should stop yourself where you are, look around, and try to explain how technology isn’t fueling the everyday educational experiences—both formal and informal—that are within sight.
— pkoso Oct 11, 03:11 PM #
more fantacy than reality.
could possibly be used as a stress tool for overload in library assignments.
— marina meevelis Oct 19, 12:38 PM #