Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Wither the University? Or Simply, the Educational Long Tail



Director of Center for 21st Century Universities and Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Richard Demillo has an intriguingly controversial argument about higher education: it isn't working.  With rising costs of tuition and textbooks, higher education has outpriced too many.  Demillo sees some worrisome trends for the future. While the elite Ivy League and prestigious schools such as Harvard and Yale's are likely to survive any environment, the majority of public institutions of learning are walking towards the path of self-destruction. With enrolments decreasing each year, institutions are still turning away potential students.  In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo traces the history of the university system to its origins in European monasteries, and sees that the centuries-old model of higher education inherited by American institutions are out of tune with the the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world.

Online Universities -  If University of Phoenix, Open University, and Athabasca University is showing us, distance education is enormously successful, and is giving campuses of higher education a run for its money.   Students find great value for their tuition fees and the business model is efficient and profitable.  Demillo sees online universities in fact returning to the origins of European universities -as learning institutions that is not restricted by class or economy.  

Industry Drives Education - Regardless of the philosophy of higher education, students enrol at higher education with an intent for employment.  Universities in India and China are at the cutting edge of creating new areas of research that synchronizes with the needs of industry.  Demillo points out institutions such as Zhejiang University's newly opened Department of Ocean Sciences in 2009 which puts theory into practice by fusing engineering with coastal trade being innovative in fusing the practical needs of trade in that area with the latest research in the interdisciplinary sciences.   It's a conundrum: does a liberal arts education actually foster or prevent critical thinking? Demillo seems to believe that universities and colleges theorize to the point that it does its graduates disservice by training them to think as their professors.

A New Way To Be Accredited  - Accreditation hampers education more than anything.  If anything, Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare has also shown that with the web, learning has not only become accessible, but free.   Massive open online course (MOOC) courses where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web.  Breaking apart the fabric of the current system, Demillo argues that accreditation of a degree should not be at the whim of universities.  Could we imagine a future where students can pick and choose their own degrees? Could they tailor their studies to what they truly want to learn?  Could this be achieved in an open system where universities champion the ecology of courses rather than the rigidity of structure?   Will the future of higher learning be based on this educational long tail work

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Open Access or Digital Parasites?

Mozart in training
Robert Levine's Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are destroying the culture business, and how the culture business can fight back offers some fascinating thoughts. Good thing he's not giving it away online in PDF.   Levine makes some interesting points: online users (and customers) love the technology free ride.  Why bother buying CD's and DVD's when they're easily streamed or downloadable?

Media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business are going out of business. As Levin points out, "Newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half since file sharing became common, TV ratings are plum­meting as viewership migrates online, and publishers face off against Amazon over the price of digital books."

It's true: the media industry has lost control.  It's fighting and desperately clawing and hanging its way confusingly to stay afloat.  Part of the problem is that the history of copyright has existed long before the digital world disorder.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) was passed in 1998, seven years before YouTube.  Seven years before remixing became the norm.  Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has merit when he argues that "creative remixing" is healthy within reason.   Yet it appears that the balance has been tipped to the point where it could have harmful effects on the culture industries.  Here are a few points:

Copyright and Originality - Sure, YouTube might produce some unique content, but how original really are they? Much of the viral remixes we view online are based on the original products that had been built on the backs of commercial enterprses.   Could there be Chad Vader without StarWars?    There might have been some unique online stars created overnight, but ultimately these stars still require real agents to promote their originality.  They ultimately require people to buy their originality whatever form that may be.   There are many who don't necessarily require monetary gains; but ultimately most do.  And it isn't through Google Ads.

Content Quality - Yes, it seems print newspapers have also given way to digital content.  Commercial newspapers are giving away their copies for free.  Content is given away as "information wants to be free."   It's an exciting time for open access and open source.  Chris Anderson had long argued that businesses should give it all away for free.   But is this really for the best though?  For one thing, anyone can open a blog and write about the news - it's called grassroots citizen journalism.  But much of it is run on shoe string budgets.  Editorial oversight is thinly disguised.  Much of the news aggregators in fact churn out such news that way.   Look at the Huffington Post.

E-Books & Authorship - Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is one of the first services to allow for any writers to self-publish books on the Amazon Kindle Store.  It's supposed to be the future of publishing.  To cut out the middleman the publisher so that the author can directly publish his work inexpensively and accessibly.  It will democratize the literary world.  It will change the book industry; with e-books, who needs to purchase directly from a publisher when it can be easily created and bought in digital form?  Just hire a designer and a copy editor (or not).  But is that really how it will happen?   Perhaps not.  With publishers no longer involved, who will promote emerging writers?   For decades publishing houses have bought the rights of the author's creativity in return for selling their books.  Without them, will new authors be able to compete with the established stars?   Does the long tail promised by Chris Anderson really work for those artists on the tail who need to survive on next to nothing until they get noticed?

Will artists return to the patronage system as in the days of Mozart?  Levine brings forth a really intriguing and plausible scenario.  Before the days of record companies and career agents, the only way performers, musicians, painters, and sculptors could maintain their art work was through the financial support of the nobility and the wealthy.  With the demise of the commercial industries, will artists revert back to this classical period?  Will cultural producers such as authors and musicians rely only on the rich to support them? 

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

An Internet of Things in Education



This year’s Horizon Report 2012 identifies mobile apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less.  Of the six technologies highlighted in the Horizon Report, two were also noted in the 2011 edition. Game-based learning remains in the two- to three-year horizon, as does gesture-based computing in the four- to five-year horizon.  For the first time, Internet of Things is introduced and is seen emerging in the third horizon of four to five years.

I'm most intrigued by the report's Internet of Things.  I've noted in the past that the Internet of Things (IOT) will be a driving force in not only web and internet technologies, but will be an ubiquitous part of our lives, seamlessly integrated into our personal lives.  Imagine being able to tag physical objects and being able to connect them to the web.  Ultimately, the IOT extends the way we understand and convey information, thus making objects addressable (and findable) on the Internet is the next step in the evolution of smart objects — interconnected items in which the line between the physical object and digital information about it is blurred.

In the Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku has already pointed this out.  Ubiquitous computing frees the chip from the computer.   Thousands of chips scattered everywhere there is an object, being tagged as it is produced.  Is this exciting or will it just be confusing?  Information specialists will also be important if this technology is to take off.  If the web is one big disorganized mess, what will happen once the physical world expands this messiness?

This has to be an exciting time for libraries.  The Internet of Things is really not so different from what libraries have faced since the card catalogue days: collocating disparate pieces of information from the books to cards.  Eventually it became matching the physical (books) with the digital (OPAC).  Then it evolved to bar codes.  Then RFID with library books.  As a metaphor, the IOT takes this beyond the walls of libraries and extends beyond tagging a book to just about anything that has shape and form.  I encourage you to watch the video above.

Friday, February 03, 2012

Demise of Tradition?

“I’m not interested in selling a bowl. That’s not the business I’m going to be in,” Heather Reisman told the Globe and Mail in November. “I am interested in creating an experience around the table for the customer.” As MacLean's article recently argues, that Indigo Chapters “experience” paradoxically relies on the cultural patina of books—and their ability to provide product adjacencies, especially around cookbooks and children’s books, two categories predicted to defy digitization. As the article asserts,
"The new product mix is wisely skewed to women, the primary book buyers, and exudes comfort, warmth and well-being: teapots, wine decanters, yoga socks, lavender-camomile bubble bath, pretty notepaper and $28 olive oil."
What's happened to the Blockbusters (or Rogers Video, in Canada) is slowly happening to bookstores.   What's happening to Virgin Records and HMV is slowly happening to bookstores.   The method for how one purchases CD's and DVD's has been completely transformed; the way for how consumers borrow a movie is also completely reversed.    Venerable old Yellow Pages which for decades has been the point of destination when it came to finding names and businesses has also lost its market.  People have moved away from the product experience to the "digital experience," and it's really interesting seeing the dramatic change in the way publishing, bookstores, and libraries are transitioning.

In a way, these three businesses - publishing, book selling, and librarianship - have been the last to be revolutionized by the digital world although the tensions are there and the changes are coming swiftly.  With all these changes in business, it is fair to say that it seems libraries and publishing have been the late in the game to be hit with changes.  Two reports indicate more changes to come with print.  The bookstore model has been altered with less demand for books: but how will publishing and libraries fare?

In a recent study released by the Education Advisory Board, Redeļ¬ning the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services, it proposes for wholesale changes to how academic libraries are run: workflow efficiency, relationships with journal publishers, patron-driven acquisitions model, repurposing library spaces, and organizational cultures.   In a report prepared for the Association of Canadian Publishers called The Impact of Digitization on the Book Industry, proposes that Canadian publishers should brace themselves in digital rights management, copyright, and e-books.   Is this the death of the book?   (A popular question nowadays). 

Saturday, January 21, 2012

How To Build




Srinivas Rao is the author of The Skool of Life and is a blogging expert.  I came across this excellent presentation created by Rao.   How to "Build An Insanely Loyal Tribe."  I am intrigued.  I hope you are to.  

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Affordances of the $100 Laptop

The XO-1, previously known as the $100 Laptop, is an inexpensive computer intentionally to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to allow for access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves.”   Soon the the third-generation XO-3 will be release in 2012.  By constructivist standards, the One Laptop Per Child program is a dream come true.  It certainly allows for students to construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences.  What better way than to permit a child in the slums of India to use Google to search the world of its wonders?

MIT’s One Laptop per Child Project is indeed a compelling, contemporary design for a learning environment, as it aims to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop.  As MIT’s OLCP asserts, “To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.” 

I’d like to take a closer look at the structures of affordances, particularly how Donald Norman believes design is of the utmost priority, particularly the affordances construct where properties of the objects that set up a relationship between those objects, possibilities for action in the design, and users who encounter them.  When does glass become useful for windows; when does it become an eating utensil?   As Norman puts it, “Anything we can interact with is an affordance.”  The same lenses should be gazed upon educational technologies.

As much as a technologist as Steve Jobs was, he certainly prioritized the practicalities of design.  As he puts it, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”  Contextualized as a piece of “educational design,” I wonder then how the pieces of the $100 Laptop puzzle works.  For example, who teaches the digital literacy?  What lessons are planned in advance?  Are students simply allowed to surf aimlessly or are there specific learning resources used?   Will e-Books be provided?    While its website provides multitude of success stories, how are children really instructed?  It is a courageous novelty to provide luxuries to children (of any socioeconomic structure) for education, I just wonder how these digital literacies are being nurtured?

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

UnLibrary Service Model




Gene Tan is one those rare individuals that is making a difference in the profession of librarians, one innovation at a time. A creator of Ask Stupid Questions, Aspiration PathfinderTM and Bear FruitTM. Ask Stupid Questions is a reference inquiry gameshow that is based on a concoction of brainstorming, gameshow format, relays, music and play. The intention is to have staff get off their comfy seats, break out of their inhibitions and start rattling off "stupid questions" to develop creative ideas for key projects. So successful has the programme been that it caught the eye of the private sector -- Sun Microsystems became the first private sector organisation to include the workshop as part of its drive to generate new marketing ideas for the following year, and several more rounds in the private sector, including companies like SingTel, as well as non-profit bodies such as the Association of Diabetes Educators, and a core training programme for the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC). Ask Stupid Question's popularity has grown almost exponentially, as it has been conducted at more than 50 organisations for over 2,000 participants. 

In addition to the Aspiration Pathfinder, an experience-driven subject discovery programme, experiments with combining the travel experience with library services and Bear Fruit do-good, a creativity programme conducted for the benefit of institutions such as the Institute of Mental Health, Tan also developed programmes, conferences and exhibitions to bring libraries into the mainstream of businesses, institutions and communities in Singapore. Tan also directed Singapore Memory, a national digital project to collect, preserve and access Singapore’s knowledge assets to tell the Singapore Story.

Certainly both pioneering and controversial, Tan calls this unconventional method the "UnLibrary Service." Arguing that the traditional model of library service has been bounded by time, place and transaction, the UnLibrary service model seeks to free library services from these constraints in order to deliver these services on the premise that time, place and transaction are not constrained or pre-determined. Instead, services are treated to a new platform for the delivery of these services: the human experience. Sounds nice, but what are the mechanisms for this? Tan coins this the "three experiences" - Experience by Straying; Experience by Mystery; and Experience by Subversion. Catchy, but does it work everywhere? It'll be interesting to replicate it.


Sunday, November 20, 2011

Future of Shift


In 1970, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock altered the world's thinking by arguing that society was facing a "future shock," a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies -- namely that the world had "too much change in too short a period of time."   Toffler popularized new concepts such as "information overload" and the "third wave." His insights resulted in a US president to commission a special report, inspired cultural and artistic creations, and gave a powerful new concept to the social sciences.

Could Lynda Gratton's Shift: The Future Work is Already Here have a similar influence in the way we perceive the world and work?   It's certainly too early to see, but from judging the arguments made and the quality of thought put into the book, there is great potential.

A faculty at the University of London's Business School, Gratton looks at current developments of the world, and predicts what it would look like in 2025. A workbook created is available for download that offers readers an opportunity to think more deeply about how to go about crafting one's working future. Follow the three steps and ten questions to make the Shift yourself - Download The Shift workbook. Free of business jargon or economic models, the book is offers refreshing look at what might be, not what the world should be.  This book is an excellent companion for any librarian and information worker who is truly interested in how information, data, and the web is altering our work and our lives

1.  Force of Technology - Ten pieces of this technological puzzle includes: technological capability increases exponentially; five billion become connected; the Cloud becomes ubiquitous; continuous productivity gains; social participation increases; the world's knowledge becomes digitalized; mega-companies and micro-entrepreneurs emerge; avatars and virtual worlds; the rise of cognitive assistants; technology replaces jobs.

2.  Force of Globalization - Eight storylines that emerge: 24/7 and the global world; the emerging economies; China and India's decades of growth; frugal innovation; the global educational powerhouses; the world becomes urban; continued bubbles and crashes; the regional underclass emerge

3.  Force of Demography and Longevity - Four trends will emerge: the ascendance of Generation Y; increasing longevity; some baby boomers grow old and poor; global migration increases

4.  Force of Society - Seven developments will reshape our way of living: families become re-arranged; the rise of reflexivity; the role of powerful women; the balanced man; growing distrust of institutions; the decline of happiness; passive leisure increases

5.   Force of Energy and Resources - Three emerging trends in energy that will affect the way we work: energy prices increase; environmental catastrophes displace people; a culture of sustainability begins to emerge


Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Fall of Faculty?


Benjamin Ginsberg's latest book, The Fall of the Faculty, is a scathing yet insightful analysis into the increasing tensions between university faculty and its administration.    A polarizing book to say the least -- verging on the edges of controversy -- Ginsberg asserts that since the turn of the century, universities have increasingly added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers -- all in the name of budget cuts.

While many of these non-academic--administrators are merely "career managers" who not only reduce the importance of teaching and research, they also manipulate the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists to "chess pieces" in a game of power politics. By championing initiatives such as affirmation action, social justice, and gender rights, the administration has gained favor with these groups, while boosting their own powers over the faculty.  Intensely fascinating, heavily cloaked with sarcasm and wit, this work is definitely going to be a polemical force in years to come in the academic world.

The danger of Ginsberg's arguments -- though cogently displayed -- is that it potentially creates more problems than solutions.   (In fact, Ginsberg offers very few).   Ginsberg's confidence that the university is the nurturer of society's ideas and hotbed of political and industrial movements -- where the Silicon Valley's and the Civil Rights movements had its origins -- has been the discord of many who dispute that the university is out of touch with that very society that Ginsberg's university seeks to salvage.  In somewhat patriarchal fashion, the notion that faculty is the central raison d'etre of the university place perhaps not only distances the university from society, but places its students as almost an afterthought.   While one cannot fault Ginsberg's hesitations about the rise of managerialism and bureaucracy at the expense of efficiency and mandate of teaching and learning so central for higher education, the idea that increasing the leverage of faculty alone can be the solution potentially further deepens the view that the university is sheltered behind the ivory walls of academia.  Is it irony or is it a paradox?   

Monday, October 31, 2011

Great By Choice

Jim Collins' Great by Choice is another classic in the making.  After Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall, Collins' latest book examines what defines greatness in times of turmoil and instability.   10Xers are those that lead organizations to greatness.   Yet these traits and skills are also habits that can be learned and possessed over time.   Through rigorous research into companies, Collins and his research team reveals three concepts which distinguishes performers that excel above the rest.   Collins' findings correlate closely with his earlier research.  Hard work, persistence, low maintenance, and high quality work all pervade heavily in the ingredients to success.
1.  20 Mile March - Requiring great consistency and discipline over a long period of time, delivering high performance in difficult times, and holding back in good times.  Much more than philosophy, the march is about having concrete, clear, intelligent and rigorously pursued performance mechanisms that keeps one on track.  Think of climbing a mountain every day at 20 mile intervals, despite the weather, despite the conditions.  The maxim "never too high, never too low" is concisely the point here.

2.  Fire Bullets, Then Cannon Balls - Success is never a single-step creative breakthrough when in fact, it comes about as a multistep iterative process based more upon empirical validation than visionary genius.  The idea of bullets is to make small ventures -- small steps -- and learn from potential mistakes, before firing the "cannon balls."  

3.  Productive Paranoia - Success is never complacent.   As a result, 10x'ers prepare obsessively ahead of time, all the time, for what they cannot possibly predict.  They assume that a series of bad events can happen at anytime; it's what one does before a storm hits that matters most.  While one cannot predict more than 1% of when a disaster will strike, one can comfortably be assured with 100% certainty that disaster will strike at any time.  Therefore, one must be ready at all times.



Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Libraries in a Digital Frontier: Preserving Chinese Canadian Cultural Heritage



I'm really pleased to present to you my latest publication.   With my terrific colleague at the University of British Columbia Library, Yu Li and and I, we co-published, Libraries in a Digital Frontier: Preserving Chinese Canadian Cultural Heritage.  As a three-year community-based research project at the University of British Columbia, Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past is government grant-funded project by the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) that brings together the expertise and resources of a wide range of UBC Library units and off-campus partners: from the digitization of archival material of UBC Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections; to the digital storage infrastructure of UBC’s Digital Initiatives; to the community outreach and digital technology of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre; to the Chinese language online resources and community historical preservation expertise of the Asian Library. 

A labour of our love these past three years, Lilly and I presented our project to an audience in Beijing, China at the International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2011) "Digital Libraries -- for Culture Heritage, Knowledge Dissemination, and Future Creation" in Beijing, China, Oct 24-27, 2011.  Through this project, a number of partnerships with community and civic institutions nationwide were formed.  This UBC-library led project focuses on three initiatives: a one-stop web portal, a series of community workshops, and digital interactive cultural game using cutting edge technologies. This paper is a progress report of the project.  For more information about this unique project, there are a couple of websites you should visit:

http://chinesecanadian.ubc.ca

http://ccs.library.ubc.ca/

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Digital Humanities for Librarianship

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) has been a rising force in the digital humanities (affectionately known simply as “DH” in the field).  Having been hosted at the University of Victoria campus for more than 10 years now, DHSI has provided an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, and preservation in different disciplines.  Every year, faculty, staff, and students from the Arts, Humanities, Library, and Archives communities as well as independent scholars and participants from industry and government sectors participate in the DHSI.    Digital Humanists can no longer be classified as a “fringe group” or sub-discipline; it’s grown to encompass its own set of theories, best practices, industry standards, and scholarly publications.     What is DH and why should we care?   Simply put, it touches on so much, as
an area of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Sometimes called humanities computing, the field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials related to the traditional disciplines of the humanities. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as historyphilosophylinguisticsliteratureartarchaeologymusic, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisationdata retrieval, computational analysis) and digital publishing.
One of this year’s themes of DHSI 2011 is Editing Modernism in Canada, or better known as EMiC.    Bridging academia, technology, and industry, EMiC has slowly risen as the hub for training and networking graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, professors, publishers, and technologists.  Where traditional disciplines shun digital technologies, EMiC fills in by providing the resources necessary for researchers to conduct literary projects using cutting edge technologies, be it digitization, text-encoding initiative markups, or social media fluencies.   Although it aims primarily at preserving Canadian modernist literature, it serves as a the gold standard in innovation for the digital humanities field.
It seems an opportune time for academic libraries to take note.  To a certain extent, academic libraries have slowly shifted in that direction, with such positions as Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship.    University of Toronto Library has its own digital scholarship librarian, and in the process of creating its own Digital Scholarship Unit.  The University of British Columbia Library forged ahead in creating a brand new division called Digital Initiatives.   It seems quite clear: academic libraries have an important voice in DH.   For humanists, who only recently had been questioned whether it will survive the 21st century, it’s only logical to collaborate with one of academia’s oldest partner: the library.  So let’s move forward.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Teaching Generation M


Teaching Generation M: A Handbook for Librarians and Educators is an important piece of work in the librarian’s toolkit.   In bringing together writings by 26 librarians and educators at colleges and universities across the United States to facilitate thoughtful planning for teaching Generation M in the college library, the book is separated into three sections, the volume begins with chapters defining Generation M and the meaning of the term literacy. The second section defines the culture of Generation M and the technologies it encounters. The final section focuses on best educational practices, theories, and applications to assist the librarian or other educator in serving this new population of “Generation M” students.
Patricia Dawson and Diane Campbell’s Driving Fast to Nowhere on the Information Highway: A Look at Shifting Paradigms of Literacy in the Twenty-First Century examines the history of librarianship and information literacy.   In it, they point out that librarians have been concerned about teaching people how to access and use library collections since the 1800′s.  In fact, library instruction had been taught in universities as far back as the Civil War.  Indeed, academic Lamar Johnson is credited with laying the foundations of bibliographic instruction when he offered tours of the library with instruction in the use of basic reference tools, point-of-use instruction, individualized instruction, and course-related instruction in the mid-20th century.  With online web technologies, bibliographic instruction evolved into “information literacy.”   The advent of the computer in the “information society” shifted from finding information in a physical library to searching for information using virtual online databases.
Yet, despite raving reviews of Generation M’s computer skills and constant connectivity and social networks, there continues to be (perhaps even more so) criticisms by academics and especially by employers that new graduates lack basic writing, communicating, and higher order information skills such as analyzing and evaluating content.    While Generation M might be tech-savvy, and used to 24/7 ubiquitous “anytime, anywhere” technologies, they are not necessarily so sophisticated in using this technology, especially in cases where information literacy skills that require critical evaluation of their found materials.
Digital literacy, in many ways, is the new paradigm of librarianship, perhaps an evolution of information literacy of the necessary for the early Web.  What a librarian was once a specialist in a subject area, be it a bibliographer of reference sources, drawing on his deep knowledge of books and creating finding aids for their patrons in the physical library, new generations of librarians must adapt to social media technologies, electronic books, e-Readers, providing grey materials, forging pathways in open access publishing, synthesizing thoughts into pithy blog entries, connecting with fellow colleagues across the world through social networks, delving into legal topics such as the Google Books court case, not to mention integrating existing cataloguing rules into the new web frontier.   Indeed, the librarian of the 21st century has evolved to the point where the profession is ready to have its voice heard in a new “digital strategy” movement.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Michio Kaku and the Future of the World


Michio Kaku is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and he writes extensive online blogs and articles.  Kaku's new book is an extension of his previous book, Physics of the Impossible.  Rather than talkin about walking through walls, telekinesis, or time travel, Kaku tackles more salient topics: the future of science and humanity.     In particular, through his interviews with numerous scientists and futurists, Kaku is able to paint a picture of what is in store for us in the next 100 years.

 What really struck me is the end of Moore's Law.  According to the laws of physics, the evolution of technology will eventually come to a halt, thus ending the concept of Moore's Law's exponential growth of computer technologies.  Moore's Law depends on miniaturizing transistors; and at the heart of the revolution is the tiny computer chips, which get cheaper and cheaper with each generation.   At some point, it will be physically impossible to etch transistors smaller than the size of an atom.  Moore's Law will stop when the transistor finally hits the size of individual atoms.  In fact, Kaku predicts Silicon Valley could rust away by 2020 unless a replacement comes along.  Some food for thought -- Physics of the Future is definitely a book worth reading.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The Internet of Things


The basic idea of the IOT is that virtually every physical thing in this world can also become a computer that is connected to the Internet . . .  things do not turn into computers, but they can feature tiny computers. When they do so, they are often called smart things, because they can act smarter than things that have not been tagged.
Imagine a world where cars can "talk" to each other to prevent accidents, or a door that opens based on its recognition of the person in front of it.  Elgar Fleisch is one of the innovators of the future of such technology. His research focuses on the economic impacts and infrastructures of ubiquitous computing.  At the Auto-ID Lab where he and his team develops their work with a global network of universities, an infrastructure for the “Internet of Things” is currently being formulated.   In many ways, there is still a competition between the "internet of things" and the "web of things," and where this is going will be largely determined by experts like Fleish.   In the white paper, The Internet of Things, some important pieces of this vision is already laid out:

1. "Embeddability" - There is a sense that while the internet is based on flashy software, the IOT is invisible.  Whereas the nerve ends of the Internet are fullblown computers that require regular access to the power grid, the nerve ends in the IOT are very small, in many cases even invisible, low-end and low energy consumption computers.  The IOT is about sensing, storing and communicating only a limited amount of information, and often does not even interact directly with human beings.

2.  Networks & Nodes - Although we think we're all "connected," the fact is, we're really not.  While there are about five billion devices such as mobile phones, personal computers, MP3 players, digital cameras, web cams, PDAs, and data servers that serve a world of 6.7 billion people, the reality is that only 1.5 billion are currently using the Internet.   The number of items created each day, consumer products, far exceed anything Internet-related. With an estaimated 84 billion products created each year gives us an indication of just what is not "connected."   With the IOT, think how computer-enabled "things" around us that requires a vastly different and much larger new network infrastructure that is required.

3. Bandwidth - Think the current Internet as a "mile bottleneck" while the IOT as a bandwidth "highway."  Like the early pioneers of the railway, the Internet has been increasing tremendously over recent years with its ability in transporting us on the information highway, with an average household in many countries with a cable-based Internet access with a bandwidth of at least 1 MBit/s.   However, with the IOT, the implementation of emerging technologies such as fiber optics to the home, the bandwidth will soon become as high as 50 - 100 MBit/s.

4. Standards - The academic and industrial communities are currently searching for alternative technologies and standards (e.g. EPC, ucode, IPv6, 6LoWPAN, Handle System, or Internet0) to number and address the "smartening physical world."   There needs to be the identification and addressing of the nerve endings. Because Internet-based identification and addressing schemes require too much capacity to become part of low-end smart things, the IOT's architecture would have to make sure that any tagged object could in principle be accessed by any computer.

5. Machine-centric Universe -  If you think Jeopardy's Watson is a sign of things to come, then IOT would not be far off.  While current Internet-based services are targeted towards human beings as users, (the World Wide Web (WWW), email, file sharing, video, online chat, file transfer, telephony, shopping, or rating), IOT almost completely exclude humans from direct intervention, as the smart things communicate amongst each other and with computers in the Internet in a machine-to-machine way.

6.  Sensing -   Like the economic success story of the Internet, which allowed companies and individuals virtually for the first time to reach out to a global customer base at ridiculously low cost, Web 2.0-based services include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia, only made it even richer. The IOT adds another data dimension, as it allows the  physical world, things and places, to generate data automatically -- where the IOT is all about sensing the physical world.  It provides the infrastructure that for the first time enables us to not only measure the world, but to do it in a cost-efficient means of growing a very finely granulated nerve system of nerve endings.  This is hopefully, what the IOT becomes.