University of Guelph Chief Librarian Mike Ridley was in Houston, Texas, during the Knowledge Ontario Ideas Forum but his “next big idea” has resonated strongly since the May 21 event. He spoke of making the leap from the information age to the age of imagination – an emerging world of smart information, built on social networks and a participatory architecture, where context and relationships give depth and coherence to knowledge. This will require new platforms and toolsets for collaboration and a whole different set of challenges.

“Ubiquitous information and global high-speed networking” brought by the “much-touted information age that is so 10-minutes-ago were the challenges of the last decade,” says Ridley. Now, he suggests, in this creative time, the new focus could be on pooling and applying our collective intelligence to real-world problems. The challenge is to find creative and innovative solutions – or at least build capacities to better understand and deal with the issues.

The Ideas Forum gathering turned this creative spotlight on Knowledge Ontario itself. Coming out of the day-long event and its preceding online discussions, Knowledge Ontario has license to boldly imagine possibilities that takes us beyond the walls of libraries and knowledge institutions – while recognizing that libraries and library staff are indispensable to the task. It calls us to build partnerships with museums, archives, and cultural organizations as well as business and other sectors where there are synergies and mutual interests.

Knowledge Ontario was sparked by Ridley and many others 10 years ago at a similar event, an OLA policy forum. Conceived initially as the Ontario Digital Library, tremendous visionary and volunteer energy went into launching and securing funding for what became the organization and its various projects. Along the way, the vision broadened. Now, KO works as an engine, collaborating with 6,500 public, school, university, college, and government libraries across Ontario through five services that engage and inform Ontarians. Digital services include: Ask (chat research help), Connect (transforming online catalogues), Learn (teaching digital literacies), Our Ontario (discovery of history and culture), and Resource (licensing a core set of online databases).

Big Ideas

Steve Paikin of TVO’s The Agenda masterfully wove together a morning panel that brought together clips of big ideas with those offered by other big thinkers in the room, a number of which revolved around 21st-century learning. Rob Dowler of Ontario’s Ministry of Government Services highlighted that access to broadband is critical to ensuring equity of access, and that learning is less about memorizing facts and more about assessing and analyzing information and synthesizing it as it applies to real world situations.

Both Annie Kidder of People for Education and McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak stressed the importance of context rather than simply content. Annie noted that in some respects talk of 21st-century literacies is a return to earlier ages in which knowledge was more clearly grounded in a cultural and historical context. The difference now is that new social media tools offer ways for communities to think together and to share this with the rest of the world. And Jeff spoke of 21st-century fluencies that have emerged, such as media and geo-spatial fluencies. He argues for libraries to learn from the experience of museums in developing curated content – allowing context and meaning to make sense in a cultural time and place.

Big Ideas about KO

Recommendations for Knowledge Ontario that emerged out of the day include:

• Creating a statement of principles, values, and beliefs that could be endorsed by constituent groups, associations, etc., as indicating a sense of commitment and ownership.

• Creating new structures to emphasize fundraising and allow the board to have a strategic focus on funding, alliances, and partnerships. Developing viable cost-sharing models where library and other sectors contribute roughly 1/3 of total costs.

• Becoming an enabler of social knowledge creation for people and communities – a platform designed to unleash the creativity and imagination of communities of learners and digital citizens.

• Developing tools to make it all easy and personalized, boosting the recognition of Knowledge Ontario (such as iKnow applets).
The ideas of the Ideas Forum have percolated throughout the summer and KO’s board will be taking them up in coming weeks. You’ll find summaries, photos, videos, and ongoing conversations on KO’s new website: knowledgeontario.ca.

KO’s Wide Conversation

Knowledge Ontario operates through broad collaboration and the Ideas Forum was a sort of focus group of stakeholders. But we didn’t want the conversation to begin or end there so a social media strategy was adopted to begin a broad discussion. Discussion threads were posted on the Library Networking Group. A lot of people looked but few commented. So we switched tacks and concentrated the discussion in three scheduled “ideas slams,” using Ning online space. The topic of gaming in education engaged the international #educhat Twitter forum and dominated the site so much that evening that Twitter asked what was going on and sent stats.

The conference itself was wired and people were encouraged to bring their computers. Panelist Jeff Trzeciak was brought in via Skype. We live-streamed the panel and had 200 viewers in Ontario and beyond; we got Twitter questions from as far away as Australia; our photos are on Flickr; and we had reporter/bloggers live-blog the event. As a final step – still available online – we posted everything back for comment.

Louise Slobodian is with Communications and Marketing at Knowledge Ontario. lslobodian@knowledgeontario.ca