STEM at Cal State East Bay: A conversation with University Librarian Linda Dobb
- September 1, 2010
Over the past several months, I’ve spoken with three of our four deans — from CEAS, CBE and Science — regarding Cal State East Bay’s evolving STEM education initiative, sharing our conversation with you through this column. After the fall quarter begins, I plan to resume that conversation with the new interim dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, Kathleen Rountree. This month, I was pleased to have an opportunity to discuss the central role our library is playing and will continue to play in our transformation into a center of STEM education with Interim Associate Provost and University Librarian Linda Dobb.
Traditionally, the library has been an important measure of a university’s quality. Dobb and I agreed that although today’s library bears little resemblance to those of the past, it is still the heart of any academic institution. I explained that in my view, it’s a window to the world’s knowledge base, a place to harness the information explosion.
We discussed how, in the past, information searches were place bound and time intensive. Simply put, if you wanted information and answers, you had to go to the library to search for and request a printed publication or, more recently, a videotape or CD-ROM. Information was physically tied to its media. But times have changed. Information is now available instantaneously, online, from myriad sources. The role of libraries has therefore changed dramatically. They function today as knowledge commons — places to collaborate, consult, and learn how to learn and search — where students and scholars learn how to find what they are after, even in the face of an explosion of too much information.
Library as metaphor for higher education
A library — like a university — was once place bound, a fixed physical location, set hours, and regular routines. Just as universities are moving into virtual realms, today’s university library is increasingly virtual. Thanks to advanced technology, Internet connections and electronic databases, a library is, as Dobb says, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week — even when the building is closed.
“What we see happening in education today has happened in the library first,” Dobb said, drawing clear parallels to the transformation we’ve envisioned for Cal State East Bay. The university’s STEM education vision calls for an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to teaching, learning, and research. As Dobb pointed out, libraries are at their best when — despite the classic categorization by subject matter — they remain true to their inherent interdisciplinary nature. The modern library serves as a model for what we need the university to become to provide the best education for the 21st century.
A comprehensive library has three primary responsibilities: to preserve past knowledge for study and perspective; to serve current needs of education and research; and to stay ahead of the technology curve to predict and adapt to the information needs of the future. This last charge, as Dobb points out, is what universities are most challenged with. But rather than resisting change, libraries have embraced it
“Librarians are some of the earliest adopters,” Dobb explained. “They know the best practices in information and data, to serve educators and students in presenting all kinds of information. In a sense, the library is a metaphor for the challenges facing higher education, as well as the opportunities that embracing new technology and practices represent.”
Research and information literacy
In today’s global economy, people need new competencies to succeed. They must learn how to learn continuously, keeping abreast of changes in their professions and in the technology they use to do their jobs. As I’ve discussed before, familiarity with STEM subject matter is a critical part of this skill set, as is the ability to manage information properly. Students and professionals alike need anywhere-anytime access to an entire universe of information. And they need expert help as well as state-of-the art tools to search, mine, and assemble or repackage data into new knowledge bases.
“The librarians’ job is bringing the world’s information to its patrons,” Dobb says. The library and its staff are some of the university’s greatest educational resources. Their training and expertise, as much as the databases and computers, is what connects our university to the global knowledge base — while connecting the world to CSUEB.
As Dobb explained, the University Library is the first line of support for research. With the library’s information resources, faculty and students can cast a wider net and retrieve up-to-the-minute results from thousands more sources than could be contained in one campus. The library also promotes our research externally, making it available and public to academic networks, highlighting our faculty leaders and student scholarship.
This is critical at any university, but even more so at a STEM-focused university where the subjects are so information-intensive. STEM subjects offer volumes of historical data, as well as current research and emerging connections that update almost daily. We must manage all this information while providing students and faculty with the tools to locate, learn from, and apply it. As Dobb says, that has, in fact, always been the role of the library as an institution. “Libraries teach information literacy, and science information literacy, no matter what the tools,” she said.
In the past, access to information was limited. But as anyone who has used an online search engine can attest, the problem now is too much information — Google may be easy, but the thousands of results can be overwhelming. Information literacy allows students to assess and pinpoint the information they need in this glut without wasting valuable time or following false leads.
With all this data at our fingertips, the library plays a valuable role in not merely collecting but cataloging and organizing information. “There’s a lot of room for expansion in the way we centralize information resources at the university,” Dobb says, which also touches on how we are planning the integration of a STEM Education Complex into the Hayward Campus. The integrated STEM courses we envision for Cal State East Bay will not be limited to one class or one college, and will need more than just science or engineering texts. Learning won’t be limited to one book or set of course materials. Dobb and I envision our library leading the way in making textbooks “obsolete” in favor of custom, interdisciplinary instructional material for STEM-infused curricula.
Teaching the teachers
Cal State East Bay’s STEM education initiative is unique in that it encompasses much more than teaching STEM disciplines. It includes partnering with business, industry, government and schools to build a robust P-20 “cradle to career pipeline” of students interested in and prepared to study STEM successfully — and who will graduate prepared for the challenges of an increasingly technical workplace. We recognize that this, in turn, requires educating and training a new generation of teachers how to inspire in young students an interest in STEM and to prepare them for success. The library plays a central role in meeting this last goal of our three-part STEM education strategy.
Traditionally, developing lessons has been time and labor-intensive. It has required a significant time investment to find and use materials, as well as a certain amount of infrastructure and overhead to have the means to share them with a class. But while new Internet resources including multimedia-rich content are now widely available and accessible to non-specialists, many faculty are not yet comfortable with or adept at using them.
Dobb says this is where library staff, again, play a critical role. “Tools exist now beyond what many faculty already know,” she said. “We help teachers cope and change, so they can use new sources of information to create new knowledge bases, online courses, and learning tools for students.”
It’s also key, Dobb said, to reach those studying STEM in teacher education programs, to prepare them to connect with the students of today and tomorrow. “These future science teachers are going to classrooms with kids whose abilities to learn are shaped by the delivery of information,” she said. “It’s not just information literacy we can teach, but the best ways to deliver information.”
Learning at the speed of change
The traditional model of a library was based on what you could own. Worth and value were determined by its collection size. Now the important thing is not ownership but access; in a technologically connected library, the location of materials is irrelevant. Streaming video, e-books, database connections, online periodicals and virtual labs make the library’s collection both larger in scope and smaller in size.
With libraries less constrained by physical storage needs, rather than eliminate or shrink the space, we must rethink its use, Dobb explains. “The location, physically, still matters as a connection point. It’s safe and inviting, there is personal assistance, and students have access to technology and computers and equipment — all with an integral social or community element. At Cal State East Bay, we’re even going to have a Starbucks,” she added.
Dobb notes that to be most functional, a library also must be highly flexible. “At CSUEB, we are creating different types of spaces each year, as students change,” she says, noting that in recent years some computer terminals have been removed to add places for students to plug in their own laptops, creating more spaces for collaborative learning — another key workforce skill.
Dobb and I predict that over time, our library will be the new intellectual student union of the “vibrant University Village” we are becoming. It will serve as a gathering place that is not only a welcoming and familiar social center for all students, but also an ideagora, imagineria, and collaboratoria — a hub of cooperative exploration, teaching, learning, and problem solving.
Above all, the library now and increasingly in the future will be about learning to learn, much as our STEM education initiative will be. In tomorrow’s technical workplace, information literacy, technological fluency and STEM competency will be much more critical for success than rote facts or high test scores. Our regional and national economic competitiveness hinges upon a workforce that can learn at the speed of change.
I thank Linda Dobb for participating in this conversation and providing another important view of what STEM education will bring to the university. And I thank the library staff as well; they embrace the spirit of our STEM initiative, as an interdisciplinary and forward-thinking endeavor.
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