Podcast

The Lost Art of Conversation

Technology is often viewed as a double edged sword: it makes life easier but it also has the power to threaten jobs, privacy, and human connections.  Yale University & Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute polled industry experts in 2016 and found that machine intelligence (A.I.) will replace all human jobs by 2136. Despite statistics like this, I’d like to make the case that there are many ways that technology actually revitalizes communication. The next few posts will explore tech tools, like podcasts, that encourage rather than diminish human connections. Podcasts are everywhere, even TV legend Levar Burton recently announced his upcoming podcast: “LeVar Burton Reads.” That’s right, the host of Reading Rainbow who encouraged us to read as children is back, 2.0 style, with a podcast where he will read a “piece of short fiction.” A very brief history of the term “podcast”: Ben Hammersley, a British Journalist, invented the…

Original Content

No Rules

Librarians are great at making rules. Maybe it’s in our blood or maybe it’s the nature of public service. Whatever it is, creating rules comes naturally to many of us. But don’t worry, this isn’t a post about how to make the rules, it’s about how to avoid them. We recently introduced a new digital media space at the Robert Morgade Library in Stuart, Florida. The idea lab includes tablets, laptops, and cameras that can be checked out; a flexible space that encourages collaboration; tech classes that go beyond our traditional computer classes; as well as three iMac computers and a flight simulator. With all this technology, you would expect to find people lining up, but we’ve actually noticed that our patrons seem intimidated by these new tools. In 2012 the first idea lab opened at the Peter & Julie Cummings Library, but the idea of a digital media lab…