Reflecting on Library 100
What was the take-away?
When I registered for the online course Library 100 mid-semester, I was not really sure what to expect. Perhaps at the beginning I was just trying to take a more straightforward course that was not overworking and interesting. And that’s true for the most part. The course, however, was much different in many ways from what I expected it to be because of the simple fact I had never taken an online course before. Despite it being online, I felt very immersed in the work we were doing simply because it was mainly on topics that I felt like I was actually interested in. So was there more work that I expected to have in this class? Yes. Did I enjoy doing it? Way more than I thought I ever would.
This first take-away from this course that I found was the ideas mainly focused on Aaron Swartz and the idea that “knowledge is power.” We often take advantage of it being students at a great university, but having a good education is irreplaceable. That’s why politicians, researchers and experts all refer to education as “The Great Equalizer.” Limiting access to knowledge on the internet only stifles the growth of communities and creates more of a rift between lower and higher income communities. Many of the pieces we read and watched discussed how it does not make sense that access to knowledge online has become so expensive considering how research for those publications is funded generally by government grants and the taxpayer money of American citizens. Knowledge is arguably the most important thing for people to have access to… So why is it that most people don’t have access to an ocean of it?
The other take-away that I found most important when conducting my research is to investigate the credibility of everything we consider using for our work. Misinformation is a vicious cycle on the internet and there are many harmful sources that do not provide credible or honest information. Oftentimes that information is intended to mislead you, or the person may adamantly believe that what they are writing is true. But the most important thing to do in this situation is make sure that the information is credible. Despite the extra effort you must put in to prove that a source is indeed credible, the guidelines we used in this course I will continue to use for my future works in other classes.
Overall, there were many take-aways from this class I never expected I would realize. Those two were possibly the most important to me, but there are others that are just as valuable to our endeavors as aspiring students at Wake Forest.
