Reflection on the weekend

It's been nice to work with my group in person, although hashing out our research question and figuring out how to divide up the work took much more time than I thought. And about halfway through our group discussion, I realized that I'd been trying to shoehorn my true interest (content and collections, specifically data harvesting initiatives and making content accessible) into our topic, which was supposed to be about how in the digital age, the blurring of institutional boundaries is both created by and impacts users. I would argue that the efforts to harvest data and present it globally on the Web fits into this topic well. Fortunately, we were able to narrow our scope significantly, and will be doing two case studies and a literature review about collaboration between various types of institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, schools, and so forth.

I struggle in class with finding a way to voice my opinions without being offended by others in the class who may be quite opinionated. My concern is that if I don't speak up, my silence could be assumed to be agreement, which it may not be. Some of our discussion focused on whether the West is trying to project its values onto developing nations in seeking to design policy for bringing about knowledge societies. The materialism of the West was criticized as a product of capitalism, with capitalism as the culprit behind the current economic recession. I think that it's the freedom of expression and emphasis on human rights that allow for capitalism and democracy, and that both of these are the means for individuals to reach their full potential in a knowledge society.

I'm taking a class this spring with another Overland Park cohort, and I've found this cohort to be much friendlier and welcoming to non-cohort folks. It probably helps that this class is smaller, so discussion is more comfortable and less likely to be dominated by one or two people.