Holley Cornetto
 
Professor. Librarian. Writer. Student of all things interesting and extraordinary.
 

As our society becomes increasingly connected by technology, a firm understanding of information and communication technologies is essential to performing the duties of an information professional. Keeping up to date on emerging technologies is important for professionals, and can be achieved through professional development, intellectual curiosity, and going to conferences, reading blogs, or engaging in other activities designed to introduce people to new technologies, or even to demonstrate new ways to use technologies that are currently available.

 

During my MLIS coursework, I was introduced to many technologies, as the assignments throughout my courses were designed to challenge students and encourage them to try new things. In INFO 240, I learned HTML5 and CSS. This was the first time I had ever experimented with web design, and I learned that it was much less complicated than I had thought. I went on to take two sections of INFO 246 (Information Technology Tools and Applications - Advanced), one with a focus in PHP, and the other with a focus on Web 2.0 and Social Media.

 

In addition to web design, blogs, and social media, I also had exposure to tools like Canvas, Zoom, Jing, and Screencast-o-matic. Using these tools to communicate and collaborate was essential, particularly during group projects that sometimes required creative methods since my timezone is EST, and many of my fellow students and professors are in the Pacific time zone. Google docs and hangouts played a vital role in several of these group projects, but after each instance, the group work got easier because of the exposure to many technical communication tools.

 

According to Dr. Sandra Hirsh’s book, Information Services Today: An Introduction, although there are still many traditional library jobs available, the number of positions for information professionals outside of traditional libraries is also increasing. In order to take advantage of these opportunities, information professionals should develop a skill set list, which will allow professionals to better assess the types of careers they may wish to pursue (House, 2015). Part of this skill set list should necessarily involve emerging technologies and communication technology.

 

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Reports are released each year with technological challenges for many industries. Most relevant to information professionals are the reports on the higher education industry and the library industry. The Horizon Reports divide up technological challenges into groups that distinguish the challenges by level of complexity. They identify three levels: Solvable Challenges, Difficult Challenges, and Wicked Challenges. These reports offer a glimpse at the direction that information and communication technologies are heading, and what practitioners can and should be doing to prepare for or solve these challenges.

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Evaluation

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Knowing the different technologies that exist is not enough on its own. In addition to learning about new information and communication technologies, it is also important to understand key functions. Using technology for the sake of using technology can be counterproductive, and may not elicit the desired outcome. For example, let us assume that you work in a library that wants to start up a social media presence. After much deliberation, it is decided that the library will start an Instagram account because of Instagram’s popularity as a social media site. As an information professional, it is vital that you consider why you want to incorporate social media, and find the most appropriate tool to fit those needs. If your institution wanted to use social media to advertise events and programs, or if the users that you want to reach are older, Instagram might not be the best tool for the job. This demonstrates why evaluation is important - you must be familiar enough with the technology tools to understand how they might (or might not) work for the particular circumstances of your institution. Evaluation will save time and effort, ensuring that the technology tools that you put to work are appropriate to the needs of your institution.

 

Evidence:

 

The first piece of evidence that I submit to demonstrate my mastery of this competency is a response piece that I wrote as an assignment for my INFO 204 class. The assignment had us pick a reading that introduced an emerging technology and to discuss that technology in the context of how it is relevant to information professionals. For my assignment, I chose a discussion about the Semantic Web which appeared in the “Managing Technology” chapter of Sandra Hirsh’s Information Services Today: An Introduction. This piece of evidence demonstrates my mastery of this competency by showcasing my understanding on the semantic web, how information is found and accessed, and by demonstrating my ability to critique and evaluate an emerging technology.

 

The second piece of evidence that I submit to demonstrate my mastery of this competency also comes from my INFO 204 course. The culminating project in this course was professional synthesis project. For the project, we were directed to choose a topic, and then use a communication technology tool to present the topic. For my topic, I chose emerging technologies, and for my presentation tool, I decided to build a website. The document included here has a link to the website that I created, as well as a short video demonstrating how I used new technology to build the website from scratch. This demonstrates my mastery of competency H by showing my ability to understand, present, and use information and communication technology tools to convey information to others.

 

The third piece of evidence that I submit to demonstrate my mastery of this competency is a blog post that I created for my SJSU iSchool blog. In the Spring of 2018, I served as a peer mentor for students entering the MLIS program. In this blog post, I outlined some of the communication technologies that I have relied upon the most to complete the MLIS program. It was my hope that providing this post for students entering my section of INFO 203 would encourage them to look at the technologies that they are using, and challenge themselves to explore different methods of communicating information and completing projects.

 

For this competency, I am including one final piece of evidence, also taken from my peer mentoring experience. As a peer mentor, one of the things that I had to do was to edit and update the course Canvas site. This was challenging for me, as I had only ever used Canvas as a student. Learning to edit pages, grade assignments, and use the instructor’s dashboard was a learning curve for me. One of the aspects of this experience that I enjoyed was using Feed Informer to create a feed on our course site for all of the new blog posts made by students. This helped students feel connected to one another, and it gave them a central place to come and check for updates from classmates. The document that I am submitting includes the list of steps that I had to take to create this news feed, and a screenshot capture at the end of the document demonstrating the final result. This piece of evidence demonstrates my mastery of competency H by showcasing my ability to use emerging technology tools to foster a sense of community in our INFO 203 course.

 

Conclusion

 

Some of the most valuable things that I learned in the MLIS program at SJSU were the vast amount of technological and communication tools that are available. Many of these tools are available for free online. Here I have highlighted just a few of these tools, but there are many others. From creating videos, presentations, and audio recordings to building websites and conducting international meetings, information and communication technologies will continue to impact everything that information professionals do. Understanding how these technologies work plays a role in being able to decide which types of technology will work best for your needs.