Legal Research

Mike Ridley at ACRL

My friend Mike Ridley who is CIO and Chief Librarian at the Univeristy of Guelph and all round top innovator serves one useful purpose in my life - he makes me look conservative!

Check out the reporting in Library Journal about his speech at ACRL.

Some nuggets:

Will we one day be able take a pill to, say, learn French?
Ridley: "Post-literacy is powerful, desirable."

"Simply put, machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence. Literacy, he noted, is simply a tool, and as humans develop new technology to deal with complex problems, it will spell the end of literacy. ?Post-literacy is not a decline in a literacy,? he stressed. ?This will not be a dark age, but a powerful desirable thing.? "

"Computer-mediated" reality coming
The downside? "Imagine a world of ?neuro-hacking? or ?mind-spam.?

"Toward the end of the session one librarian suggested that the future Ridley sketched might, just might, hold an even greater place for librarians. ?Spoken like a desperate, literate person,? Ridley responded, ?wired to think that knowledge has to be managed and organized.?"

Bravo Mike!

Love it!

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on March 26, 2009 (boomark / email).