The latest "Smart Talk" interview features David Weinberger, thought-leader, writer, technologist, and a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Co-Director of Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab.
Weinberger talks with Alison Head about what the rise of networked knowledge means for educators, librarians, print publishing, and for the rest of us and the very act of knowing.
"Students need help in gaining the skill to discern what's worth believing and what's hucksterism and wish fulfillment. This is an age-old need exacerbated by the Net's eroding of homogenous authority (for better and for worse)," explains Weinberger.
"But I think educators and librarians have an especially important role in not only steering students to authoritative sources. Given the human temptation to hang out with ideas that are familiar and unchallenging, librarians have a special role to play as guides to sources that also disturb us, challenge our hidden assumptions that celebrate difference and disagreement."
PIL is a national study about the information-seeking behavior of today's college students, co-directed by Alison Head, Research Scientist in the iSchool and Berkman Fellow at Harvard, and Mike Eisenberg, Dean Emeritus and Professor in the iSchool, and funded, this year, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).