Improve Society

Thread 5 Improve Society

The mission is to improve society, which is quite huge for me. I never thought one day what I do would improve the society. Have I ever improved before?

I worked as a concierge in a bank. I provided guest services, maintained the hall, answered questions and resolved guests’ complaints. I researched data collections for facial recognition and tested programs in technology institutes. I monitored employee attendance and recorded vacation and personal days in IT corporations. I managed campus school boards and produced freshmen handbooks and school journals in my undergraduate. During my work in these days, I helped patrons in a bank, I helped develop applications in tech institutes and I helped inform people what’s going on in our school. So what I did before also improved society a little bit, but I didn’t realize till today.

In my opinion, job positions are created to improve society. In essence, all working human-beings are improving society. The difference is the approach. New librarians improve through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities as Dave point in the Atlas. Other careers may not. But they are still improving. For example, databases or search engines we use to retrieval information for patrons are developed by programmers besides librarians providing IT services. Those programmers develop these systems to improve society in other way. I don’t know how to describe it, but obviously it’s not facilitating through knowledge creation. So we librarians are unique. Actually, I had some talks with my friends about this topic one afternoon. They didn’t agree with my point that all working people are improving society.

I really like the story in the action part, the story about knowledge creation. Any conversations between anybody, if agreements are made during the conversation, knowledge is created, right? What if people know little about the field? What if they are idiots? (No offense.) That’s why this world needs librarians. We librarians are here to guide conversations to improve society~

Ok, I want to improve society by sharing my first painting. lol~ I'm learning Sai. Have to admit that the color is really weird.

Communities

Thread 4 Communities

I’ll start with my favorite dialogue from this thread.

---“So what exactly should I be doing?”

---“Ask your community.” (From the Atlas P83)

Librarians improve knowledge creation in their communities, so they should provide what their communities need by asking their communities. “What we do is a joint agreement with our communities. Why we do them, that’s ours. That is what makes us a profession.” (The Atlas P84) Librarians shape their services by asking their communities, in other words getting their communities involved. It’s participation. The participatory librarianship in my opinion is like extrinsic motivation. Sounds like librarians compel their communities to participate. And participation needs a member, turns into a conversation, and then creates knowledge.

Talking about participation, in my experience, I never participate in any other conversations with librarians, except for greetings. I often ask my friends or roommates for advices, such as “is there any books on HCI?” or “I can’t find it, could you help me?” I think the librarians both from my province public library and undergraduate school library have no sense of making conversations. They will never speak to you, if you don’t ask questions. Though the pressure of participation may occur during the interaction between librarians and patrons, librarians should invite patrons to conversations to create knowledge.

While librarians change their communities, the pressure of participation occurs. Members need to be active in the learning processes. It’s the first form of the pressure from the Atlas. In 605 last week, one of the reading materials is “I Can't Tell You What I Want, But I'll Know It When I See It”. (Author: Goodrum, Abby A, Fall 2005) It talks about the importance of reference interview, and librarians must provide service to help members figure out what they want. It’s quite difficult to find what members from communities want, and how to translate their information into verbal expression. Also, you can never know what they may ask. In the reference interview part for IST605, when I was playing the role of reference librarian, the patron came in and asked me a question. I got stuck. I never thought I might face that kind of question, I could hardly answer it. I think that’s one of the pressures from participation.

When I play archery, I felt pressure.

It’s taken last year when I was traveling in the Ancient City of Ping Yao China. It's fabulous!

Facilitating

Thread 3 Facilitating

In this thread, Dave said, there are four means to facilitate: access, knowledge, environment and motivation. I think motivation could be difficult to facilitate, compared to the others. Motivation, which contents intrinsic and extrinsic, is related to personal characteristic. If people don’t want to make a conversation, I don’t think anything we do could facilitate knowledge creation.

I love the ending story very much! I never thought this kind of story could happen in real life. Actually, I love the idea of training people to manage themselves. In my IST 601 group, our topic was poverty. My group talked about the idea, and finally we came up with our project. It was named Learn & Launder. According to my partner, homeless do their own laundry for free at shelter or Charity does laundry for them. But limited number of laundry machines is available. So providing more free laundry services could greatly improve the lives of the impoverished, we assumed.

There are tons of ways to get free stuff all over the world and internet, but the impoverished do not have the access to them. Our project is to offer a detailed list of free resources all over Syracuse including free clothes, places to take showers, especially focuses on free laundry facilities. We use information technology to build a huge information system, the impoverished come in and sign up, wait for multiple hours for laundry. They can use our system for education, and also get access to exclusive job listings. Information updates daily by employers from companies cooperate with us.

They would be trained to work for this project. Places for the project are located in impoverished neighborhoods, so the access is provided. The system and instructors could be the source of knowledge creation, and the environment would be safe to them. I think the project seems to facilitate the impoverished by four means.

I found a face icon generator online, and made my own, it's cute ~

Here's the link:
http://www.icongenerators.net/oval.html

Knowledge Creation

Thread 2 Knowledge

This chapter talks about knowledge, which comes from conversations. How people interact with the real world based on knowledge is the importance. The mission of new librarians is to help people learn, in other words, we need to get people involved in conversations. So we face two factors, conversants and languages.

In the class, there is a question. If the information from the conversation is not true, should it be knowledge? As conversations here are generalized, in my opinion, after exchanging information and making agreements, whatever you gain from the conversations should be called knowledge. Because you get something new about the world, it is the knowledge.

In conversation business, we should know how to start a conversation, how to use the data, how to get people involved in a conversation, not just inform them. It seems not easy for me to deal with conversations. ^ ^

What interests me most in this thread is the user based system. I’ve designed some simple systems in my undergraduate study. My project for graduation was about mathematic experiments based on HCI (Human Computer Interaction). There was a user, an interface, a collection of data, and an algorithm as it described on the Atlas. But I have to say, I didn’t pay much attention on users. All I had concerned was the system. It worked, and I finished my project. I don’t think technicians care about what users want, therefore there are UI teams, or product managers in corporations.

It seems I don’t have much to talk about each thread, I really feel terrible. T_T

I brought my Sony Nex 5R with me today, on my way home, I took some pictures.

This is what people see~

This is what I see without my glasses~ Haha