Dancing to a different tune

I spent the weekend in Norman, OK, serving as a guest speaker at the SLIS annual alumni event there (nice idea!). I used the occasion to present the case for moving beyond the fault lines of typical LIS discourse (you know, paper versus digital, the traditional versus the technological etc.) so that LIS educators and professionals might actually engage with the big questions facing us in society (the emerging cyberinfrastructure, challenges to access, disintermediation, the imminent arrival of the rest of the world onto ‘our’ Internet etc.). I enjoyed the event and received enough push back from questions and comments to know that there are others out there who feel something similar. I enjoyed the trip and met lots of smart, motivated students which gives me confidence in the future. I was also (almost) convinced by Suliman Hawamdeh, a faculty member at OU, that I was really talking about Knowledge Management. Since I’ve always struggled to understand KM, it’s engaging to think that I’ve been doing it all along 🙂 I am heading to the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ conference next week, mostly to try and understand better how this group deals with information, and am getting a similar response from these people, namely, the ideas and views I push about LIS education happen to be central to their world too. Now that’s refreshing — outsiders welcomed into the field with encouragement to share ideas. Nobody in KN or CI seems to care too much about my credentials, my accreditation or my commitment to certain words. Now try that on some of the LIS discussion lists.