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…
