Information dojos

Dig this:

"[Darn] right libraries shouldn't be book-lined Internet cafes. They should be book-lined, computer-filled information-dojos where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy, where initiates work alongside noviates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up."

That's from a Cory Doctorow impassioned guest-post imploring us to embrace the notion of libraries as maker-spaces. He reasons:

At first blush, the connection between makers and libraries might be hard to see. But one of the impacts of building your own computing devices (a drone, a 3D printer, and a robot are just specialized computers in fancy cases) is that it forces you to confront the architecture and systems that underlie your own information consumption. Savvy librarians will know that our access to networked information is mediated by dozens of invisible sources, from the unaccountable search algorithms that determine our starting (and often, ending) points, to the equally unaccountable censoring network "filters" that arbitrarily block whole swathes of the Internet, to underlying hardware and operating system constraints and choices that make certain kinds of information easy to consume, and other kinds nearly impossible.

I like that. He reminds us, also, that:

Today's tinkerer work in vast, distributed communities where information sharing is the norm, where the ethics and practices of the free/open source software movement has gone physical.

His rationale that we should "go physical" to better understand the technology systems that restrain us and that set us free resonates with me as I see our community of technology "consumers" with little understanding or interest of what lies behind their connected world.

So let's add to our tools of inquiry and understanding. If they build it, they will grow.

Thanks for the lead, Jim.