Rooms of Purpose: MLSC

The Library is home to countless resources designed to help students achieve their full learning potential. Located inside Edmon Low, the Mathematics Learning Success Center in no exception. The MLSC supports the Library's mission to be a hub for learning and innovation. Our educational reach spans far beyond checking out books. The Library is a one stop shop for all types of scholastic resources, from 3D printing to mathematics tutoring. There are hardly any limitations to what a student can achieve inside the Edmon Low Library.

Established in 1985, the math facility fosters a learning environment for students looking to complete class assignments and advance their mathematics skills. The MLSC was built as part of the Success in Undergraduate Mathematics initiative, an OSU program dedicated to the enhancement of student learning and success in undergraduate mathematics. All undergraduate students looking to complete a degree are required to earn a math credit, meaning that student success in mathematics is not only encouraged but also necessary at OSU. The need for mathematics spans far beyond majors pertaining to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Other majors, including strategic communications and graphic design, require mathematics as part of the degree plan.

The MLSC has been housed in the Library since the center's relocation in 2013. The MLSC's new home is an 8,000 square-foot area on the fifth floor of Edmon Low. The center is composed of small study rooms, one large study room and a massive computer room that is stocked with 126 laptops. The MLSC has 15 laptops separate from the lab that students may check out to use in other areas of the facility as well. Lastly, the MLSC has calculators and mathematics textbooks for students to borrow while they work.

Prior to the move, the MLSC was located in Classroom Building. The small area where the center was housed was no match for the demand from students needing mathematics tutoring. There was often a 45 minutes wait just for students to enter the MLSC. Luckily, the insufficient resources and lack of space were both addressed when the tutoring center moved to a spacious portion of the Library's fifth floor.

The Library was eager to open its doors to the MLSC, knowing that the center would motivate students to enter Edmon Low and travel through the building. Many freshman take classes that require tutoring hours at the MLSC, which means that new OSU students must enter into the Library in order to complete their course assignments. The MLSC's location inside Edmon Low is mutually beneficial for both the mathematics department and the Library. The MLSC prompts students to enter the Library and witness all that the building has to offer while the Library provides the MLSC with enough space to handle the large influx of students who need mathematics tutoring.

The MLSC has a diverse tutoring system for a wide range of class levels. Services are offered for classes such as College Algebra, Calculus III and Differential Equations. There is also a designated schedule when instructors will come tutor at the MLSC in specific courses. The instructor tutoring schedule is on the MLSC website so students can look up their desired course, find the specific professor and attend the tutoring session at the designated date and time. MLSC tutoring is a way for students to get help in a personalized and focused setting.

Public review sessions are also held on a weekly basis at the MLSC. There are about 10 to 15 sessions available each week, with more sessions during test weeks. Exam reviews are livestreamed to the MLSC Youtube channel for students unable to attend the sessions in person.

From the laptops and calculators to the extensive tutoring and review schedule, the MLSC equips students with the resources to succeed. The influence of the MLSC spans farther than meets the eye, past the initial success of completing a challenging homework assignment or acing an intimidating exam. It's a way for students to interact with their peers and fellow classmates, as well as with professors and faculty.

There are also over 30 student employee opportunities at the MLSC, including desk jobs and tutoring positions. On-campus jobs are an excellent way for students to learn how to balance multiple responsibilities, function in a professional environment and sharpen communication skills. The partnership with the MLSC is a testament to the Library's dedication to student success and academic excellence, both in the classroom and in the workplace.

Posted by Tatum Wallace, Electronic Communications Intern for OSU Library Communications

Symbiotic Intelligence: How A.I. May Create Cooperative Education in the Future

A recent publication in the World Economic Forum titled “The Future of Jobs” asserts that over 5 million jobs may be lost to robotization by the year 2020. YouTube channel CGP Grey, a channel that specializes in discussing various concepts in depth, has created a fascinating video discussing just how technological advances can outpace human efforts:

This video raises many intriguing - and possibly unanswerable - questions. For those of us working in the library space some of those questions might include

• How will robotization and digital intelligences affect the way library services are provided? 
• Where will the librarian fit in with all of this? 
• How will those people whose jobs have been phased out utilize a library? 

As CGP Grey’s video posits, digital entities capable of learning, interacting, and producing creative output can accomplish quite a lot. It’s conceivable that even this blog post could someday be written by a well-educated computer intelligence rather than the intern with a penchant for procrastination. That said, it’s entirely possible these advances could see the creation of more effective libraries, more effective librarians and all around more effective learning experiences.

The path to creating smarter, stronger and more capable machines lies in replicating our own psychological learning needs. The conundrum this presents is that the human learning process is an innumerable sum of different ethereal mental mechanisms.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes a bulk of these processes as "unsupervised learning." Zuckerberg has invested a great deal of time and capital into the development of artificial intelligence, making it one of Facebook, Inc.'s largest development projects.

In a recent Facebook status update about his aspirations for artificial intelligence development, Zuckerberg said, “Unsupervised learning is learning how the world works by observing and trying things out rather than being told what to do... It's key to building systems with human-like common sense because it doesn't require a person to teach it everything they know. It gives the machine the ability to anticipate what may happen in the future and predict the effect of an action. It could help us build machines that can hold conversations or plan complex sequences of actions... We fundamentally do not understand how general learning works... Until we solve this problem, throwing all the machine power in the world at it cannot create an AI that can do everything a person can.”

This is to say that the human mind is a vast, complex and unique thinking machine that cannot be defined by sheer horsepower. Understanding all of the mechanisms in which it learns is the key to not only the creation of artificial intelligence, but also more effective learning and teaching practices. A thinking machine can not only learn from human teachers, but also teach human learners.

Imagine the impact such an entity could have on a library. Makerspaces, writing labs, research, database optimization, all manner of workshops, all could see a dramatic overhaul of how they're performed, delivered and absorbed by they're audience.

As for the librarians, certain functions librarians perform such as the analyzing, management and acquisition of materials or information and data processing could foreseeably be delegated to thinking computers in the future, but the more human functions of librarians - those directly involved with enlightening and educating the users of the library - need not be replaced because such functions are best fostered by human relationships.

For example, people like to use Siri, but no one really respects Siri as a person. "She" is not a mentor, or a teacher, or a researcher or a friend. "She" doesn’t recognize her user’s learning process or where it might be stumbling, and can only provide feedback in the form of suggestions of what "she" believes they might have meant based on her programming. Digital intelligence may be able to replicate operational functions, but the human capacity for learning requires a set of intangible qualities. A machine capable of learning and teaching may enhance a human's education to a degree, but it takes a human to best understand a human.

What does the development of artificial intelligence mean to you? How do you foresee it affecting your role in the library? How will education utilize intelligent technologies? Share your thoughts in the comments section.