EduBlog Insights

I ended up the day Thursday listening to Will’s presentation, “From Information Literacy to Information Leadership.” It was great to see him again. He talked about how knowledge is shifting. He pointed us to Kevin Kelly’s “Scan This Book! from the New York Times Magazine. Here’s one excerpt:

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you’ll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.

If you haven’t read it be sure to. It talks about the link and the tag as maybe being two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. It goes into how digital technology has disrupted all business models. It’s a very interesting read.

Then Will went on to say that he gets most of his knowledge from his network and how the network works for him. We have to assess the information and see if it is relevant for us. He talked about tagging and how we learn from each other. He said we needed to look at information in a global sense. Look at multiple viewpoints. He broke his presentation into the categories of finding information, assessing information, managing information and sharing information. I’m in agreement with Will that managing information is the hardest one. See his presentation link.
He gave a great overview of the tools that information leaders need to use and ways to use them effectively. As always when listening to Will, I go away with lots on my mind.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.