Philip M. Turner
The industrial revolution created cities, and then suburbs, as the automobile allowed millions to live and work in locations a great distance apart. Over the past century, library education has also experienced significant changes. A century ago, most library education was provided in the library by librarians. The concept of a discipline of library science with a cadre of professors teaching library science for a living is a twentieth-century phenomenon. That this would be done at the graduate level in schools devoted entirely to library education is a second-half-of-the-twentieth-century concept.
For the past quarter century, the curriculum of library and information studies education was stable enough that a faculty member could teach four to six different courses each year. While new reference sources emerged and new government documents were created, professors assigned to teach the reference or government documents courses could keep up with these changes, and still conduct research in their specializations and perform service activities.
The telecommunications/information technology revolution in which we are immersed will no doubt have as much impact on how we work and where we will live as the industrial revolution did. In some cases, the former will reverse the effect of the latter. The number of home offices has grown exponentially in the past few years and information entrepreneurs have reversed the decline in population in some small towns. Where access to the interstate highway system was the pivotal factor in locating the business of the second half of the twentieth century, access to the global information highway is a critical factor for businesses in the twenty-first century.
Impact on the SLIS curricula. Whenever a new teaching technology is introduced, the temptation exists to simply translate existing content onto the new medium. (As an example, transferring legal pad lecture notes to an overhead transparency and then onto a Power Point presentation.) This practice might be characterized as practicing bad education at the speed of light!
In fact, the developments in data storage and transmission capacities and the development of the Internet in the past two decades have dramatically altered the tools used by our profession and resulted in significant changes in the content of many of the courses in the library and information studies curriculum. Coping with these changes presents a significant challenge to library and information studies education. Keeping up with governmental information sources alone takes more than the one-fourth to one-sixth of a faculty member’s instructional time allocated to each course. This is true for medical, business, law, and many other types of information courses. In fact, teaching even the basic reference source course probably requires more than its share of faculty resources to stay current.
Courses with an instructional technology focus are particularly ephemeral. Keeping up with the developments of the Internet is a career in itself. While the theories and principles at the foundation of the profession are relatively stable, the tools of the trade, and the means for accessing them, are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. The shortfall of faculty resources to keep up with the changing content of library and information studies courses will no doubt increase as legislatures demand greater benefits from each education dollar and mandate teaching loads.
While the telecommunications/information technology revolution is causing considerable stress on the traditional model of library and information studies education, new technologies are also providing tools for alleviating that stress. Paralleling the impact of telecommunications/information technologies on late 20th century society, a significant portion of the teaching duties in library and information studies education may revert to its former habitat: the workplace. While curriculum development, advising, and awarding degrees will remain under the auspices of a formal degree offering program, telecommunications/information technology will provide the means for accessing up-to- date instruction by the practitioner. Most likely, the optimum method that will emerge is a collaboration between a faculty member who will manage the course and teach reasonable, stable theories and principles and one or more practitioners who will teach the more volatile portion of the course content.
Exporting knowledge products. By far, the most common utilization of emerging distance-independent technologies is to take an existing course, taught by a single faculty member, perform as few alterations as possible, and make the course available to students at distant sites. This is an important use, as schools of library and information studies education are not evenly distributed geographically, and large segments of the population do not have access to this education. In addition, a school can connect to the workplace to deliver much-needed continuing education. However, limiting the use of the emerging telecommunication technologies to exporting knowledge products is wasting the most powerful potential of these.
Importing knowledge products. In the past decade, breakthroughs in compression algorithms, combined with massive investment in fiber networks, have greatly increased potential of connectivity. By early in the next century, high-bandwidth connectivity will be ubiquitous, and a virtual presence, not limited by geography, will be possible.
Because of the emerging connectivity, practitioners will have an increasing role in preparing the next generation of professionals. A government information specialist will be able to demonstrate the latest electronic sources from the workplace and also answer questions posed by future information access professionals. Increasingly, the full-time faculty member will serve as learning manager, orchestrating the optimum combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences. Curriculum-enriching experiences such as colloquia will take on a new importance, with the potential for participation no longer limited to students who are physically present at the school, and the point of origin not limited by geography.
While the curriculum has never been static, curriculum revision during the next few decades will need to be an ongoing event. Connectivity to leading professionals will enable a constant dialogue to take place as the curriculum is fine tuned. This increasing reliance on practitioners for instruction will emerge gradually and be driven by developments in telecommunications/information technology. A prime example is the advent of low-cost desktop videoconferencing equipment. For an investment of around $2,000 and the addition of an ISDN telephone line, any 486 computer can be turned into a two-way video site. Access to virtually any practitioner in the world will soon be governed not by geography, but by negotiation.
Another opportunity presented by the these emerging technologies is increased collaborations among schools of library and information studies. The 1992 Standards for Accreditation opened the door for schools to develop an emphasis, and the technologies will allow schools to use scarce faculty resources to develop specializations, while relying on other schools for access to content not emphasized. Of course, this collaboration will not be limited only to other schools of library and information studies. Multidisciplinary collaboration via enhanced communication tools has the potential to revolutionize the MLIS curriculum. Doctoral students will have the potential to access almost any scholar for committees, and the concept of “residence” will be challenged, as students propose and defend dissertations to a virtual committee from a location thousands of miles away from campus. In short, the emerging technologies will allow students to construct their own learning experience, aided by the faculty, and participated in by a wide variety of practitioners.
There are many barriers to the optimum utilization of information and telecommunication technologies in library and information studies education. Faculty reward systems, governing board regulations, formula funding, and other artifacts of higher education reinforce the practice of a closed classroom with a single faculty member exporting instruction to students at a distance. Articles on distance education have appeared with increasing frequency in the past few years. Many detail cases where technology is used in time- or distance-independent teaching. Virtually all of these cases involve the export of knowledge products, usually a complete course, from a campus to remote sites.
The function of higher education has always been to bring learners together with hose who can teach, with other learners, and with the recorded knowledge of civilization. Telecommunication and information technologies will remove the impact of both geography and time on this confluence of learner, teacher, and recorded knowledge. Our challenge in library and information science education is to build partnerships with the practitioner and with each other that will enable access to the best learning experiences possible. Practitioners will be challenged to work with schools of library and information studies in developing and delivering the curriculum. Together, we can prepare the next generation of information professionals.
Philip M. Turner is dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences, and associate vice president for academic affairs for Distance Education at The University of North Texas.
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