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I’ve been fascinated with startup culture for a long time and as I considered all the changes happening in academic libraries (and higher ed) the parallels were quite stunning.

we are being required to rethink/rebuild/repurpose what a library is and what it does. The next twenty years are going to be an interestingly chaotic time for the history of our institutions.

In concise terms: startups are organizations dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This sounds exactly like an academic library to me. Not only are we trying to survive, but we’re also trying to transform our organizations into a viable service for 21st century scholars and learners.

According to Babson Survey Research Group, 65 percent of all reporting higher education institutions said that online learning was a critical part of their long-term strategy, and over 6.1 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2010 term—an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.

A post-LMS world does not suggest that the LMS is obsolete but, rather, that the practice of evaluating learning outcomes through a traditional LMS as the sole means for knowledge acquisition is obsolete. The original design of the LMS was transactional and largely administrative in nature, hence the “M” in “LMS.” The function of the traditional LMS is to simplify how learning is scheduled, deployed, and tracked as a means to organize curricula and manage learning materials.

LMS 3.0 design focuses on four essential applications: learning grids; e-learning intelligence; content clouds; and open architecture.

Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.

We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.

The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.

Peer evaluation:  You must do your assignments satisfactorily to fulfill your contract.   Each week, two or three students will work as a peer group in charge of leading our joint education for two or three classes.  During that unit, the peer leaders will assign readings as well as writing or multimedia assignments--and they will be charged with determining if each student has satisfactorily completed the assignment.   They will be charged with providing written feedback on all assignments.  Their goal will be to ensure that each student satisfactorily completes the assignment and they will work with each student to make sure they succeed.

How to Crowdsource Grading, I described this method: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading

SYLLABUS We will be co-creating a syllabus in this course.  Professor Davidson will begin, there will be several special guests or other events, but the remainder of the course content will be assigned by peer-leaders charged with offering a challenging, creative, informative, inspiring, participatory educational experience (No Talking Heads Please!) for the class.   Peer-led classes might that involve reading/seeing/listening to/experiencing imaginative works (including scientific papers,) attending lectures, visiting art museums and going to concerts together, or visiting businesses and community organizations to understand how these literacies are changing.  I will get us started with some readings and a museum visit and a collaborative public wiki-based writing assignment.   We have a number of exciting visitors coming this term.   The rest of the syllabus will be filled out by the peer leaders and will evolve over the course.

Fry, Amy, and Linda Rich. 2011. Usability testing for e-resource discovery: How students find and choose e-resources using library websites. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37, no.5: 386-401.

(1) Our story begins with RSS feeds (in my case via Google Reader) and Twitter. Lots of reading material turns up every day through these initial filters. Some of it I can tell immediately I don't need to follow up on, but if I see something that's even potentially interesting I send it to ...

(2) Instapaper. What a great gift Instapaper is. The bookmarklet makes it trivially easy to send articles to Instapaper from your browser, and the better Twitter and RSS clients for the iPad and iPhone

(3) What I read in Instapaper I pass along to one of three destinations. If I have no further use for an article or post after reading it, I simply trash it. If I decide I'd like to share something in the article with others, I post it to my tumblelog.