Cloud Computing
I love the concept of production tools available without being tied down to a licensed and expensively purchased suite of software. I am not tied to my computer at work or home. The ability to access, edit, plan, expedite and implement whatever I’m working on from wherever I am makes me positively giddy! However…..
I am guilty of promoting Google applications almost exclusively. I simply haven’t investigated elsewhere. I’m disappointed in me. I should know better. I’m the librarian, I should have alternate resources available to offer my patrons so they have choices/options to best suit their specific needs. I am the information specialist after all!
Jenny makes an observation in her blog that puts me as an information specialist in the spotlight:
Teaching critical skills about the cloud will become just as essential as teaching how to evaluate a website, even more so as products continue the march to becoming services. …..We should see this for what it is — an expansion of our traditional role to teach people how to use information well, and we should lead, not just with good models, but with help understanding and dealing with the ramifications of all of this.
Yes I need to prepare and provide access to a curriculum that teaches our community how to use this new technology well and intelligently. Providing portals to the many and varied options available and arming patrons with knowledge to choose a methodology to protect their data or at least be aware of the possible ramifications of putting themselves out there in the clouds is my job.
Personally, I’m walking the tightrope with cloud computing. Exhilaration, anxiety, fascination, abject terror….I’m beginning to think I have multiple personalities when I try to decide what I my dominate emotional and intellectual reaction is the cloud computing. I guess I’ll have to take Robin McKinley’s words to heart and forge forward despite trepidation, “The scariest things are in our own minds.”
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