“It is easy to fall in love with technology. It is equally easy to fear it. [...] Those who are immersed in a techno-savvy, technophilic community are far more likely to embrace technology than those whose social world is shaped by other patterns of consumption and communication. People’s practices are also shaped by those around them. There are cluster effects to socio-technical engagement. In other words, people do what their friends do.
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Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It’s really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen.
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There are also no such things as “digital natives.” Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don’t. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning.
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Understanding technology requires learning.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don’t use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do. [...] Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife.
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Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea.

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

Fokussiert werden während des Online-Tutorials: LibraryThing (als einziges Web 2.0 Tool), Google Scholar und Worldcat – beides Recherchetools, wobei Worldcat in registrierten Bibliothekenbeständen sucht. Und natürlich Zotero – dieses Firefox Plugin scheint Christian Kohls Liebligs-Tools zu sein. (ich verwende es übrigens auch :) )

Insgesamt ein sehr interessantes Tutorial. Vermisst habe ich die Vorstellung von scholarz.net – diese webbasierte Plattform fürs kollaborative wissenschaftliche Arbeiten ist auf jeden Fall interessant, obwohl das junge Projekt noch zahlreiche Schwachstellen aufweist.

Außerdem zum Thema:

• Vergleich der Literaturverwaltungsprogramme von Tobias Schächtelin (PDF)
• Literaturmanagement Portal