We are all (freakily) connected

I recently (well, a couple weeks ago now) got back from a 10-day silent Vipassana course which, among many other impacts, challenged some of my previous ideas about the nature of sanghas. I’ve been mulling over some ideas about Buddhist pedagogy and I thought I’d post on that topic when I get around to it.

But the weirdest thing just happened that reinforced the notion that everything truly is connected to everything else, and I couldn’t resist sharing the weirdness. Last weekend at the fabulous Green River Festival I had the opportunity to hula hoop for the first time in, oh, thirty-some years. I always considered myself an inadequate hula hooper, so I was delighted when I was actually able to keep the thing going for more than a few seconds. It turns out that adult-sized, weighted hoops are the key. With them, I was able to learn some pretty cool tricks after just a couple days of constant practice and obliviousness to injury.

In spite of the fact that I had some pretty impressive bruises on my hips by the time I got home, I immediately started searching for online hooping resources. I’m obsessed. So far, I’ve found hundreds of hooping videos on youtube, learned how to make a hoop for a fraction of what I paid for the ones I bought at the festival, and started reading hooping.org magazine. I had no idea such a hooping community existed! In my online travels, I found (and skipped over) many websites advertising hoop performers for parties and events. One that stuck out in my mind was Miss Saturn. I smiled at her clever name, but didn’t give her another thought. Until today.

After putting it off forever, I’ve finally begun to assign useful tags to my bookmarks in del.iciou.us. I’ve bookmarked a ton of blogs over the years that I don’t actually read anymore (if I ever did in the first place), and it’s been fun to rediscover some of them….while others make me wonder what I was thinking when I bookmarked them. Though I don’t ever remember reading it, I must have bookmarked Edward Champion’s blog because it was linked from a blog I actually do enjoy periodically by Maud Newton. I had no idea what Champion writes about, so I visited his blog. And today’s entry includes a reference to Miss Saturn! How weird is that!?

I can’t imagine that Miss Saturn’s is actually one of the most popular sites on the Internet, one that everyone mentions or links to and I somehow missed it. Of course it’s more likely that the fact that the sites I’ve bookmarked are linked to each other reflects some common theme or interest of mine. But I can’t see a clear connection between Champion and Saturn. Just a coincidence, I guess, or a reminder that everything is ultimately linked together somehow….and in more and more possible ways in what David Weinberger calls the “third order of order” – aka the digital world. Freaky.

intellectual architecture

I’ve been thinking a lot about information architecture lately, both because we’re in the process of redesigning our website at work, and because working on my own website(s) has gotten me thinking more about IA. My only real regret from library school is that I never took an IA course. Several of my friends traveled from Western Mass to Boston each week on semester for an IA course, and I jealously listened to their discussions about it during our lunch break on the following Saturdays.

The topic came up again in a new book group, many of whose members are grad school classmates. We’ll be reading Ambient Findability, a book I’ve been wanting to get to for ages. In the meantime, findability.org led me to an interesting article by Grant Campbell.

The article drew me in because of my renewed obsession with IA, but what really grabbed me was the following passage:

IA professes to be a field of practice, and aspires to be a field of study. As a field of practice, it has no great need to define an intellectual foundation of its own; as a field of study, it can’t live without one. If IA is a field of practice, it simply needs to combine ideas wherever they can be found into a set of practices and skills that others find useful. If IA is a field of study, it requires a distinct field of discourse, with both canonical and resistant texts, multiple voices, and a constellation of methods of inquiry. As a field of practice, IA can lift whatever it wants from philosophy, computer science, architecture, graphic design and library science; as a field of study, IA must appropriate and redefine those things into a common discourse.

I realize I might get in trouble for saying this, but….couldn’t the same be said about library science? Having had an über-intellectual major at an elite college as an undergrad (not entirely a good thing), I was surprised by the almost total lack of attention paid to the intellectual foundation of librarianship when I was in grad school.

Some fellow students and I came together to form a “philosophy of librarianship” reading group, but there was so little written on the subject within the field of library science that finding material to discuss was challenging…..Then the group seemed to be taken over by a couple of philosophers on steroids who seemed most interested in out-muscling each other intellectually, and who moved our discussion so ridiculously far from the practice of librarianship, that I lost interest. One of the things that drew me to librarianship is that it is a field of practice as well as a field of study. But as Campbell says about IA, if it is to be both, it needs an intellectual foundation.

It’s always been disturbing to me that so much of the literature of library science is embarrassingly bad…at least by the standards of other more established fields of study. One of my grad school professors complained about the abundance of what he called how-I-done-it-good articles and the lack of serious research studies. Not to mention the lack of real theory! Campbell talks about the growing pains involved with developing an intellectual discourse in the field of IA. I think librarians need to be prepared for those same growing pains, even though we count as one of the “parent fields” that Campbell thinks is further along in the process.

But the question remains for me: how do we develop an intellectual discourse? Is it happening in our literature and at our conferences, and I just don’t recognize it? Is it happening in our library schools and I somehow missed it in my program? Or is there something else we need to do to move the process along?

Anyone?

virtual sanghas

I was just catching up on some of the professional reading I never seem to get to during the academic year, and I came across an interesting interview with Henry Jenkins in the March 2007 issue of American Libraries. There’s actually a lot more of interest in this issue than I usually find, including the cover article, “Mattering in the Blogosphere: Cybrarians Speak Frankly About Their Online Lives,” which features some of my favorite librarian bloggers, like Jessamyn West who writes Librarian.net and Jenny Levine who writes The Shifted Librarian, and some I’ve just now added to my I-wish-I-had-time-to-keep-up-with-all-these-blogs list.

The Jenkins interview caught my attention because he makes the same point that a couple colleagues and I recently made during the general education review process at my college. We want to get people thinking about students as producers as well as consumers of knowledge, and we want that concept included in our general education competencies. Because, let’s face it, even if our students graduate with excellent research skills, and the ability to use a variety of technology, we do them a disservice as future workers and citizens if we don’t educate them to produce knowledge in ways that are ethical, creative, and informed about the context in which they work.

Jenkins says, “traditional literacy and research skills are no longer sufficient. We should no longer consider young people to be media literate if they can consume but not produce media. It’s like confusing penmanship with composition.” Or maybe like confusing the ability to read with composition? Jenkins goes on to discuss the social skills necessary in online environments such as Second Life, and how librarians can participate in helping students to develop those skills. Which got me thinking….

Are we talking about virtual sanghas here? In Buddhism, the sangha is the community of Buddhist practitioners – monks and nuns, certainly, but also lay people in many traditions. Along with the Buddha (the enlightened one, or the potential for enlightenment in each of us) and the dharma (the teachings), the sangha is one of the “Three Jewells” of Buddhism. If we want to use the word very loosely, any community of people sharing a common practice, tradition, or goal could be considered a sangha (The American Library Association as a sangha for librarians?). And certainly online Buddhist/spiritual sanghas exist already in the form of sites like Dharmaweb and Zaadz. But there’s something about the nature of the  collaborative relationships in online communities in general – as distinct from many face-to-face communities – that makes me want to think of them as sanghas.

At my regular meditation sit, the facilitator often says “thank you for your practice” to the participants at the end of the meditation session. The idea is that the practice of each member of the community, student and teacher alike, is offered as a gift, a form of dana (the Pali word for “generosity”) that benefits the entire community. Students and teachers are collaboratively engaged in this mutually beneficial project of meditation.

Similarly, on most social networking sites, you don’t have to have particular credentials or experience to offer your insights. Everyone has equal airtime and (theoretically) equal authority to contribute, and everyone has equal access to potential enlightenment. The very structure of the communication  discourages the audience vs. expert distinction that we might find face-to-face at a conference or professional meeting. We are all audience and we are all expert. Of course there are problems associated with this egalitarianism, made famous by the regular Wikipedia scandals, for example.

A friend just sent me the link to Instructables, where you can search for or offer instructions for everything from getting rid of a sunburn to creating a computer mouse out of an actual taxidermy mouse (seriously, and not my favorite), reminding me that the social networking opportunities on the Web truly are endless…And reinforcing both Jenkin’s point that students still need to “acquire very traditional research skills that will allow them to discern the quality of information they are acquiring from various sources,” and my own growing realization that in addition to training students to be good producers of information, my role as an instruction librarian is likely to move more and more towards focusing on evaluation and less and less towards focusing on the mechanics of the search process itself.

And this is an important role. But I also need to remember that, in a sangha, the process of personal discovery of each member is not only crucial to that individual’s enlightenment, but important to each other individual’s journey, and the growth of the community as a whole. We are all teachers. We are all students. Many of us in education claim to believe that, but is it reflected in the way we teach? A question for another day…

Hello world!

Wow, here I am in the world of blogging. I’m still working on the look of the page, trying to match it to my website, buddhabrarian.org. Then I’ll have to figure out what I want to talk about in the worlds of Buddhism and Librarianship…..