For this post I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make it (by my standards) short.
Flickr is another one of those things I first heard of this past spring at Computers in Libraries. Shortly after the conference, in order to figure out a bit about it, I set up a Flickr account.
You can see it here: Joe's Flickr Account.
It seemed kind of like cheating, though, to use an account set up months ago for a current assignment. So a week or two ago I uploaded a bunch more photos and started adding captions, tags, etc. I've still got a ways to go before I finish all of this editorial work but there's still a lot here - about four and a half pages of photos. Some are pictures of family, others are pictures of my wife's sewing projects, others of my own assorted projects and, finally, there's a bunch of "around the house" photos. I've managed to create three sub-collections of pictures and would have made more except that you only get three for free.
This was another one of those assignments that was quite a lot of fun. If learning at school had been this much fun I might have stayed awake in class a bit more often.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Lifelong Learning - Is ignorance really bliss?
Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow employee and mentioned that my first job had been as a soda jerk in a drugstore soda fountain. Even then (I think it may have been sometime during the administration of Grover Cleveland), I was a heavy user of public libraries.
The library I used, though, was as yesterday as my first job title. It had books. It had magazines. It had musical recordings too (on 33 1/3 LPs, of course). But databases? Audiobooks? Videos? Computerized circulation systems? Computerized anything? Don't even dream it.
By the time I went to library school things had changed. Not much, though. The library at my library school still had a card catalog but the university itself may have had an automated catalog (of a sort) and databases did exist. In fact my class went on a field trip to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Library once, just so that we could see what an online database looked like. You can't believe how fast a 300bps computer terminal with an acoustical coupler seemed back then.
So look at me now. A decade ago the Howard County Library hired me to buy reference books. How many reference books do you think I buy these days? Not many.
These days I mostly buy electrons. I buy online electrons, streaming electrons, downloadable electrons. You name it. If it's an electron, somebody will discover that we have a need for it and will tell me to buy it.
This gets back to the subject of this post. In the real world that we actually live in these days, ignorance is only bliss if your particular flavor of bliss also goes by the name of "unemployment."
After all, what do you think my job prospects would be if I was still a professional soda jerk or if my resume claimed that "I'm really good at filing cards in the card catalog"?
This is where the concept of lifelong learning kicks in. Back in my grandfather's day an eighth grade education taught Grandpa pretty much what the old boy needed to know to function in what then passed for a modern society. Only once did Grandpa need any significant job training after the eighth grade - when Uncle Sam issued him a Springfield '03 and told him to go out and fight Kaiser Bill.
It doesn't work that way anymore. In fact, these days, the most important skill you can learn in school is to learn how to learn. This is so because almost everything else you learn in school is certain to be obsolete within a few years of graduation.
In a lot of ways 23 Things is the real face of modern education. Aimed at the already graduated, it isn't a degree program. Rather it is a modest, incremental little "courselet" that updates the skills of the already educated and prepares them to deal with things that didn't exist when they got out of school.
Which gets me to the whole point of this particular exercise. In looking over the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners we are asked to, "write down which habit among the 7 & 1/2 that is easiest for you and which is hardest."
Except for one, all of them are actually pretty easy. That's largely because of habit number 7 1/2 - "Play." If you let it be, learning actually is fun. Habits number two through seven come with the territory to those who allow themselves to enjoy the process.
It's actually Habit 1, "Begin with the end in mind," that's the hard one. This isn't because it's hard to begin with an end in mind but because it's in the nature of learning that learning frequently brings you to many places beyond the one you thought you were going to.
It sounds like I'm laying it on a bit thick here. I'm not. Can you imagine what an absolute bore our jobs would be if we were still futzing with card catalogs and if microfilm (of all things!) was still the hot new technology? All the new toys we get to play with these days are an absolute blast. What could be more fun than getting paid to play with them?
The library I used, though, was as yesterday as my first job title. It had books. It had magazines. It had musical recordings too (on 33 1/3 LPs, of course). But databases? Audiobooks? Videos? Computerized circulation systems? Computerized anything? Don't even dream it.
By the time I went to library school things had changed. Not much, though. The library at my library school still had a card catalog but the university itself may have had an automated catalog (of a sort) and databases did exist. In fact my class went on a field trip to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Library once, just so that we could see what an online database looked like. You can't believe how fast a 300bps computer terminal with an acoustical coupler seemed back then.
So look at me now. A decade ago the Howard County Library hired me to buy reference books. How many reference books do you think I buy these days? Not many.
These days I mostly buy electrons. I buy online electrons, streaming electrons, downloadable electrons. You name it. If it's an electron, somebody will discover that we have a need for it and will tell me to buy it.
This gets back to the subject of this post. In the real world that we actually live in these days, ignorance is only bliss if your particular flavor of bliss also goes by the name of "unemployment."
After all, what do you think my job prospects would be if I was still a professional soda jerk or if my resume claimed that "I'm really good at filing cards in the card catalog"?
This is where the concept of lifelong learning kicks in. Back in my grandfather's day an eighth grade education taught Grandpa pretty much what the old boy needed to know to function in what then passed for a modern society. Only once did Grandpa need any significant job training after the eighth grade - when Uncle Sam issued him a Springfield '03 and told him to go out and fight Kaiser Bill.
It doesn't work that way anymore. In fact, these days, the most important skill you can learn in school is to learn how to learn. This is so because almost everything else you learn in school is certain to be obsolete within a few years of graduation.
In a lot of ways 23 Things is the real face of modern education. Aimed at the already graduated, it isn't a degree program. Rather it is a modest, incremental little "courselet" that updates the skills of the already educated and prepares them to deal with things that didn't exist when they got out of school.
Which gets me to the whole point of this particular exercise. In looking over the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners we are asked to, "write down which habit among the 7 & 1/2 that is easiest for you and which is hardest."
Except for one, all of them are actually pretty easy. That's largely because of habit number 7 1/2 - "Play." If you let it be, learning actually is fun. Habits number two through seven come with the territory to those who allow themselves to enjoy the process.
It's actually Habit 1, "Begin with the end in mind," that's the hard one. This isn't because it's hard to begin with an end in mind but because it's in the nature of learning that learning frequently brings you to many places beyond the one you thought you were going to.
It sounds like I'm laying it on a bit thick here. I'm not. Can you imagine what an absolute bore our jobs would be if we were still futzing with card catalogs and if microfilm (of all things!) was still the hot new technology? All the new toys we get to play with these days are an absolute blast. What could be more fun than getting paid to play with them?
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