What is your creative vision of how research may be conducted in the future? How will humans find, absorb, and share information in 10 years? 50 years? 1000 years from now?
Tim Donahue
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LIBR 121 Discussion Blog
This blog facilitates online class discussion for LIBR 121 - Electronic Library Research Skills. Each week a new topic and question will be posted by the instructor. Students will then add comments, addressing both the instructor's original post and comments posted by other students. The instructor may guide or change the discussion throughout the week.
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6 comments:
Humans are creative animal. They have developed so rapidly because of their fat learning capabilities. They absorb information, which may be obatined from books, teachings, experiences and computers, and store it in mind as knowledge. Before, books used to be the only one means to access information but now, digitlalized resources, for example oompuetrs, have become friend of human to learn things. I
wonder, how the research will be conducted in the future.
When I think about it, I htink of computerized people. In future, may be, we may not need computers anymore. Central processing Unit, which performs each and every operations in computers may be available as small chips which can be inserted in our brain. If it
happens so, we don't to have to go anywhere or need any equipments to access the information. When we need information, we may activate the chip and when we are done, we may deactivate the chip. In other words, we may be a living computer, whcih can conduct research and gain the required information within a second. These is my hypothetical opinion, who knows what is the future waiting
for us.
I think that in the future, people will take information electronically. We've already developed an item that will be inserted into humans under the skin, and can keep track of them via satalite. I think that we will do something similiar, that sends waves of new information to the brain. This will be something that can be activated with some sort of scanner or plug. Information will then be extracted from the scanner or similiar device, and chosen information will be "uploaded" into one's brains.
Conducting research and finding information in the future is most likely going to be drastically different than it is today. Technology is moving so quickly and coming up with new inventions at such a fast pace that it is very difficult to even contemplate what will happen in the future, especially 1000 years from now. I think that in ten years we will all have hand held devices still, much like the "I" phone except they will be personal computers that can find any information just by the touch of the screen. Research will be extremely accessible and easy to conduct and much of the information will be very through. In fifty years I believe all information will be implanted in some way within our brains and projected to our eyes in some way. This could be done through glasses or simply on the back of the cornia. Finding information will be as simple as thinking about what you want to know. when a thought enters your head it will trigger a chip to find the information. Within a thousand years there will most likely be technology in which you can travel to the place in which you would like to find information on. When you get to this place all of the information will be visible in your head as well as being able to physically be in the place that you are researching. These of course are only speculations and I am very excited to see where technology is going to take us in the near future and hopefully be a big part in the development of some of these ideas.
A realistic vision of the near future will see us as individuals capable of carrying larger and larger quantities of information, utilizing smaller and smaller devises. It appears the only limiting factor to how much information we’ll be able to carry, is how it’s accessed. What I mean is, as long as humans need to “touch” the devise it remains a certain size. So one obvious future “improvement” will be the instant access to stored information onboard our bodies via some internal connection. Another “improvement” would be the continuous uninterrupted access to information stored off the body. This leads to another possible outcome further into the future, one which sees the need for centrally stored (off body-library) info and transmission of that info to individuals an unnecessary extra step. Along those same lines we could see links between all humans, humans able to communicate directly, the instantaneous sharing of ideas through all the senses. I see many limiting factors or qualifiers though.
Having the ability to access or even carry such information, will not give that ability to everyone. It’ll only be available to the privileged. We humans need to take care of our social problems to truly advance our technological potentials. What does it profit the few, if our world is still made up of malevolent dictators and rampant abuse of large segments of our population? We have massively diminishing resources, starvation, abject poverty and total disagreement on how to end these problems. We still kill one another over natural resources, religious differences (even when the same god is worshiped), square footage of land, and even whether brown or browner is purest. My feeling is, before we see very much more in the way of technological advancements, of any far reaching magnitude at least; we’ll need to see a whole lot more “humanity.” Humanity the way God intended but for that to happen we need to know God Himself.
The future is going to be more interactive. There is going to be more virtual reality with every kind of research method. In the future, instead of reading a book about history, you will be able to actually experience history through virtual reality. The options are endless. Even now you can use the internet of your phone, whenever you want, but in the future you will have endless resources with you at all times. Not only on your cell phone, but maybe right in your actual glasses. The option of information being implanted directly in your head is something we can’t imagine, but it is a possibility.
Research will be very different in the future and we can see it changing everyday in our lives. Within 10 years we will probably be very similar to where we are at today, using a combination of the library and the Internet to research our topic of interest. 50 years will probably be still very similar but I can imagine that a move towards all electronic resources will be more of an impact on research at that point, with a visit to actual books in a library probably only for those not yet available on the Internet (i.e. rare books). Even then people will probably still be using the libraries, but mostly to sit at a free computer with free internet. Most would probably imagine that in the world of today, comparatively to when computers became a popular household item, that by now (2008) every house would have a computer and the Internet. Well this is still not the case, nor will it probably ever be. But even if it was I think visiting the library to do the research is going to be essential even 1000 years from now. Not everyone is a genius in research. For example, I have been going to college for 5 years now and this class taught me a lot of new research techniques that I would have never know about had I not talked to a...you guessed it reference librarian! People will always need assistance when doing something new for the first time, and when it comes to research, those that dedicate themselves to working with the universe of knowledge are the best assets. So I think research will be conducted in many of the same ways as it is today. Sure there will be new technologies that help us navigate the universe, but there is no substitute for hands on learning from another human being.
Mike Pasque
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