Issue 79: Educational Technology Futures, Social Media Legislation, Apollo 11 Launch at 50

Issue 79: Educational Technology Futures, Social Media Legislation, Apollo 11 Launch at 50

Welcome to the re-inaugural issue of
DLTJ Thursday Threads.
Counting backward, there were
78 previous issues
(all by the most recent still need to be converted from the old WordPress style of formatting) with—all told—several hundred references and commentary.
Here at the start of 2022, I’m making a resolution to restart
Thursday Threads
with links and thoughts about library technology, general technology trends, and internet culture.
What EDUCAUSE’s 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Mean for Libraries
Legislation in the Works for Social Media Regulation
Relive the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Launch…Projected onto the Washington Monument!
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What EDUCAUSE’s 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Mean for Libraries
The EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues take an optimistic view of how technology can help make the higher education we deserve—through a shared transformational vision and strategy for the institution, a recognition of the need to place students’ success at the center, and a sustainable business model that has redefined ‘the campus.’
—
Top 10 IT Issues, 2022: The Higher Education We Deserve
, EDUCAUSE
Let’s start with this report from EDUCAUSE from a panel of its members that reviewed survey results on what they see as the big educational technology issues for the year.
I cover this report in more depth in a
separate
DLTJ
article
, but I think it is useful to provide some of the headline commentaries here.
First, these IT leaders anticipate an acceleration of the role of technology in teaching and learning.
The pandemic has spawned a new recognition of how big the cohort of «non-traditional» students is—part-time learners, remote learners, asynchronous learners, etc.
Instructional technologists will certainly be called upon to support new tools and new roles; the academic librarian’s instructional experience and traditional «high-touch» approach to supporting users can be an asset for institutions that choose to tap that capability.
There is recognition that we are all tired and stretched as well as the reality that one-time emergency money is drying up.
Still, there is room for growth for academic libraries seeking to re-form their mission for a new era.
Legislation in the Works for Social Media Regulation
Washington is awash in proposals for reforming social media, but in a narrowly divided Congress, it’s little surprise that none have passed. Many Democrats believe that social media’s core problem is that dangerous far-right speech is being amplified. Many Republicans believe that the core problem is that the p…