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Would you like Frey with that?
Feb. 6th, 2013 02:51 pmLast week, I had an Ex Libris board meeting in Toronto. Travel is always a bit iffy at this time of year but I do like to attend the January board meeting as it's held just before the Ontario Library Association (OLA) annual conference, making my journey more worthwhile.
There were some excellent speakers at the conference, my favourites being the authors (Louise Penny, Linwood Barclay, Miriam Toews...) but one high-profile speaker left me a little underwhelmed: Thomas Frey, "Senior Futurist" and Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute, as well as being Google's top-rated futurist speaker (according to the OLA programme book). It left me wondering what a "junior futurist" would do - maybe they can't see quite as FAR into the future? Or the images they have of the future are blurrier?
He began his talk by stating that we are a society very focused on the past and to a lesser extent on the present. So he gave us the image of a person walking backwards into the future. Hmmm. Is that why bookstores are focusing less and less on conventional paper books and more and more on e-books and gifty items that have little or no relevance to books, reading or literature at all? Is that why smaller independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops are having such a rough time of it these days? Is that why independent CD stores like Compact Music and Grigorien are downsizing and HMV is bankrupt or at least verging on it? I would suggest that Frey read an essay from a collection entitled "Of Root and Branch" by the late Sam Neill, professor of library science at the University of Western Ontario, in which he argued that a library's MAIN business was promoting books and reading, not "information". It was actually quite a risky thing for Neill to write, as Western's library school prided itself right from its inception in the late 1960s on being an early adopter of information technologies.
Frey also predicted that we would soon see PhDs independent of literacy (of course, some cynics would argue that we're already seeing that). His rationale? Reading is merely one means out of many to absorb and process knowledge. It's the UNDERSTANDING and LEARNING that is crucial, he argues, not the reading process - and that can be done by listening to an audio file, watching a screen, etc. Now, I guess I'm old-fashioned and backward-looking and all, but I always thought that as one's education progressed, it became less about memorizing facts and more about learning HOW to LEARN. And surely even nowadays, reading is one vital tool in your toolkit of ways of learning. What about learning another language, as many postgraduate programmes used to require? A language is to a great extent a tool, but there also seems to be some persuasive evidence that bilingual and multilingual people may be capable of more complex THOUGHT and PERCEPTION as well.
One of Frey's predictions had to do with "teacherless education", a practical solution to a worldwide shortage of teachers, especially in the world's more troubled, war-torn or poverty-stricken regions. He went on to suggest a system of "microcredits", with perhaps 100 microcredits being equivalent to one regular postsecondary credit. Now, I'm very much in favour of helping people to help themselves, of imparting practical knowledge, and even of using nontraditional means to impart that knowledge. Not everything we want or need to know is going to be part of a degree programme or a professional designation. But when you DO want some sort of degree or diploma or professional or occupational credential, you can't just pick a smidgen from here and a smidgen from there and hope that there will be a proper integrity to the whole! I'm reminded of that Monty Python sketch where a joke was so funny that people died laughing so that when it was translated, they had to parcel out one word to each translator. Or what about sharing a great work of art with the world by divvying it up into millions of spatters of paint and putting one spatter in each art gallery worldwide? Ever heard of symbiosis, the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
He spent quite a bit of time of the new 3-D printers, predicting that one day in the very near future, we'd be printing off artworks, buildings and tonight's dinner. Tonight's dinner? Isn't there the little matter of ingredients? The geeks are fond of saying "Garbage in, garbage out" and in this case I guess it would be cardboard in, cardboard out! Of course, a number of his suggestions were probably tongue-in-cheek, which is certainly where I would stash my cardboard dinner until I had the opportunity to spit it out somewhere.
In terms of libraries themselves, Frey feels that it's more important for them to lend generators than lend books. And if he's set foot in a library lately, he would certainly be aware that they already do lend out much more than just books. They lend things like family passes to museums and pedometers and toys. To that extent, the future really is here.
Perhaps I'm being a little unfair. It makes sense that if you're going to talk about the future of libraries, you would ask people outside the library community about what they want their library to be. Otherwise it's just one big librarians' love-in where we pat ourselves on the back and say how great we are while the rest of the world ignores us. And futurism, I would guess, is to some extent about making wild and wacky predictions that are just so wacky they might come true. Is truth stranger than fiction? More to the point, are there still people outside the library community who are ready to plead the case for the continuance as well as enrichment of some of the more traditional library roles?
There were some excellent speakers at the conference, my favourites being the authors (Louise Penny, Linwood Barclay, Miriam Toews...) but one high-profile speaker left me a little underwhelmed: Thomas Frey, "Senior Futurist" and Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute, as well as being Google's top-rated futurist speaker (according to the OLA programme book). It left me wondering what a "junior futurist" would do - maybe they can't see quite as FAR into the future? Or the images they have of the future are blurrier?
He began his talk by stating that we are a society very focused on the past and to a lesser extent on the present. So he gave us the image of a person walking backwards into the future. Hmmm. Is that why bookstores are focusing less and less on conventional paper books and more and more on e-books and gifty items that have little or no relevance to books, reading or literature at all? Is that why smaller independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops are having such a rough time of it these days? Is that why independent CD stores like Compact Music and Grigorien are downsizing and HMV is bankrupt or at least verging on it? I would suggest that Frey read an essay from a collection entitled "Of Root and Branch" by the late Sam Neill, professor of library science at the University of Western Ontario, in which he argued that a library's MAIN business was promoting books and reading, not "information". It was actually quite a risky thing for Neill to write, as Western's library school prided itself right from its inception in the late 1960s on being an early adopter of information technologies.
Frey also predicted that we would soon see PhDs independent of literacy (of course, some cynics would argue that we're already seeing that). His rationale? Reading is merely one means out of many to absorb and process knowledge. It's the UNDERSTANDING and LEARNING that is crucial, he argues, not the reading process - and that can be done by listening to an audio file, watching a screen, etc. Now, I guess I'm old-fashioned and backward-looking and all, but I always thought that as one's education progressed, it became less about memorizing facts and more about learning HOW to LEARN. And surely even nowadays, reading is one vital tool in your toolkit of ways of learning. What about learning another language, as many postgraduate programmes used to require? A language is to a great extent a tool, but there also seems to be some persuasive evidence that bilingual and multilingual people may be capable of more complex THOUGHT and PERCEPTION as well.
One of Frey's predictions had to do with "teacherless education", a practical solution to a worldwide shortage of teachers, especially in the world's more troubled, war-torn or poverty-stricken regions. He went on to suggest a system of "microcredits", with perhaps 100 microcredits being equivalent to one regular postsecondary credit. Now, I'm very much in favour of helping people to help themselves, of imparting practical knowledge, and even of using nontraditional means to impart that knowledge. Not everything we want or need to know is going to be part of a degree programme or a professional designation. But when you DO want some sort of degree or diploma or professional or occupational credential, you can't just pick a smidgen from here and a smidgen from there and hope that there will be a proper integrity to the whole! I'm reminded of that Monty Python sketch where a joke was so funny that people died laughing so that when it was translated, they had to parcel out one word to each translator. Or what about sharing a great work of art with the world by divvying it up into millions of spatters of paint and putting one spatter in each art gallery worldwide? Ever heard of symbiosis, the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
He spent quite a bit of time of the new 3-D printers, predicting that one day in the very near future, we'd be printing off artworks, buildings and tonight's dinner. Tonight's dinner? Isn't there the little matter of ingredients? The geeks are fond of saying "Garbage in, garbage out" and in this case I guess it would be cardboard in, cardboard out! Of course, a number of his suggestions were probably tongue-in-cheek, which is certainly where I would stash my cardboard dinner until I had the opportunity to spit it out somewhere.
In terms of libraries themselves, Frey feels that it's more important for them to lend generators than lend books. And if he's set foot in a library lately, he would certainly be aware that they already do lend out much more than just books. They lend things like family passes to museums and pedometers and toys. To that extent, the future really is here.
Perhaps I'm being a little unfair. It makes sense that if you're going to talk about the future of libraries, you would ask people outside the library community about what they want their library to be. Otherwise it's just one big librarians' love-in where we pat ourselves on the back and say how great we are while the rest of the world ignores us. And futurism, I would guess, is to some extent about making wild and wacky predictions that are just so wacky they might come true. Is truth stranger than fiction? More to the point, are there still people outside the library community who are ready to plead the case for the continuance as well as enrichment of some of the more traditional library roles?
