Libraries and Learning
Must Digital Divide?
June 16, 2016
I attended a great conference last weekend on digital scholarship in liberal arts colleges – largely but not exclusively attended by librarians and archivists. It was a perfect combination of small size and great presenters. I am not all that au fait with the tools of the digital trade, but I played with some of them while, at the back of my mind, pondering thought-provoking ideas from Jennifer Vinopal’s opening talk about the values that get entangled in data practices and what we can do to be mindful of our biases. It was a good foundation from which to start. She talked about the political choices that influence data structures and algorithms and the ways meaning changes when messages to a specific audience are intercepted and broadcast to be filtered through a completely different sensibility, which is why digitizing a counter-culture magazine from pre-Internet days can be handy for historians but devastatingly invasive for people who were among friends but now are stripped bare in public. Good stuff to think about.
I took notes on a number of nifty tools and classroom ideas and ways to think about library-faculty collaborations, but here are two meta-ideas that applied to all of the sessions one way or another.
Thought One: It’s instructive to be in a student’s position when learning about technology. There were times when I was lost, or got distracted when other lost people were getting help and I started poking around while I waited and couldn’t find my way back, or when I wondered why what was on my screen didn’t look at all like what the teacher was projecting, or when I was embarrassed to ask how to do something that apparently is so obvious everyone else had it figured out.
Flipping it around, I wondered about how much energy it can take to learn something that’s not intellectually challenging but unfamiliar. One of my favorite sessions involved drawing on pieces of paper. I closed my laptop, picked up a pen, and thought to myself “I’m terrible at this.” But draw I did, and it was strangely relaxing. I never fell behind. My paper never vanished abruptly. Nobody needed help because they weren’t sure which command would help them make their line curve. It was hard to make us stop drawing, and then it was hard to get us to stop talking, but the cool thing was that we weren’t learning about drawing or pens or how paper works, we were learning how to plan digital scholarship collaborations. Which made me think about how my other workshop sessions were about how to help students think about data and history and economics, but often in the foreground was “how do I enlarge this thing? Which drop-down list was I supposed to use, again?”
There’s always some tug between learning “how to” and learning about ideas. How to read a scholarly argument critically has to be learned even if it’s what’s in the argument that matters. How to write one has to be practiced, and the conventions for using