Glossary

Virtual Collaboration – Technologies allow us to easily connect with others, to share our ideas and creations, as well as to work together despite physical distance.  Being able to fully utilize new technologies to work together and to work productively will continue to be important as we find ourselves in a rapidly changing future.

Cross-Cultural Competency - Working in libraries with our internal and external customers we have the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of people: people of different ages, with different linguistic, social and cultural backgrounds, with different skills, talents and approaches.  Now and in the future we will need to continue to come together around our shared goals but also see the ways in which our differences can make us stronger and more innovative.

New Media Literacy – So much content is available to us online and at our fingertips.  We can easily create and share our own content and make it available to a wider (world-wide?) audience.  Now and in the future, we will need to have the skills to critically interact with new media.  How do we evaluate user-generated text, audio and video?  What makes one tweet better than another?  How can we use new media in a deliberate way – not just because it’s fun, but because it can also best communicate our ideas?

Computational Thinking – We have access to more quantitative (i.e. objective, numerical or statistical) information and more data than we sometimes know what to do with!  Although we have applications that can help us track data, it will become more important that we can make sense of data and be able to make decisions based on what the numbers tell us.

Cognitive Load Management – We are surrounded by information that can be accessed in a multitude of ways and that reaches us through a variety of media.  Sometimes this can be overwhelming, feeling like we can never catch or keep up.  It is important, most especially since we work in libraries, that we are able to filter out the noise and find what is most valuable or useful.