one: Wait, why is it week thirteen? Wasn't the last entry for week eleven? Don't people usually skip thirteen and not twelve? Rest assured, I haven't developed dodecaphobia; we just didn't have a class meeting last week due to the webinars we all put on. Speaking of...
two: the webinars! Ours was not a total disaster. We did go first, and as such we had some technical difficulties which other groups managed to avoid, such as having our slides in the wrong format and having to present them via webcam. Our webinar topic was on serving Latin@s in the library, and the people who showed up for our webinar (all six of them, including everyone in the webinar group going right after ours) seemed to find it very informative. Our feedback centered mostly on the technical issues we were having, which was a fair point. I don't think that it's my favorite method of presenting, and I can't imagine trying to do it all by myself rather than as a team, but I'm glad to have gotten a bit of experience with it now when all that's at stake is a grade, not my job. The other groups' webinars that I attended also went off well. The most common problem was technical -- Elluminate decided to keep cutting out the audio for a second, and then make people sound like chipmunks as it tried to catch up with real time! It also kicked people out of the room randomly. Some of this is probably Elluminate's fault, and some of it was probably our internet connections. So the moral of the story is, only webinar when you've got a really strong internet connection.
three: this week's readings were all about designing strategies to help people teach themselves. Which I think is really important for us as librarians -- aren't we here to help people be life-long learners? And isn't part of being a life-long learner being able to teach yourself, with or without a scaffolding? And seriously, even if instruction is now part of our job description, most of us don't get classroom time, which means that designing environments in which people can learn is really important. As a public librarian, I kind of want to adapt the Learning 2.0 program described in the Blowers and Reed article for my patrons, to complement the computer classes that the library will already be putting on. And since it's Creative Commons, I can! Just need to put in the effort... ADDIE here I come....
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Week Eleven Response
All about Twitter:
one: you have no idea how tempting it is to write this post entirely in haiku. I have neither the time nor the mental energy at the moment to stick to such disciplined form, though, so I'll be blogging tonight in my normal, rambling fashion.
two: This week, in lieu of more academic readings, we were all required to make Twitter accounts, build a network of at least 25 people/entities related to our career paths and aspirations, and tweet or retweet at least five times, using the #si643 hashtag. My account is under @llpollac.
three: Twitter: the web interface --- I agree with everyone that says that it's suboptimal. Especially for this class assignment where we're supposed to be retweeting things with an added hashtag, since the web interface won't let you edit the text of a retweet. I was using Hoot Suite, which I'm also not a fan of. It's all sliding menus and frames. Maybe in that case I just need to have a bit more time to learn the interface better, but both the web interface and Hoot Suite seem clunky for something that's supposed to be so light. I've heard good things about Tweet Deck, but I refuse to download software to my computer for this assignment. I'm resentful enough about having to make two new social media accounts.
four: Twitter: building a network --- I started out with the bloggers from the key blogger assignment, and branched out from there, aided in a large part by the Twitter web interface's "similar" function. The frustrating thing was that I don't know who any of these people are, especially not by Twitter handles, and the information provided on their profiles really isn't enough to tell whether this is someone I want to be spammed by. Like, for example, take @mechalibrarian. His profile is "R. Bruno (mechalibrarian), New York. I'm a librarian in NYC who knows what the heck a diacritic is" with a picture of a man that we can probably safely assume to be R. Bruno, or at least his avatar. What does that actually tell you about these people? And the first page or so of tweets are of limited utility, because they're just as likely to be about some conversation they're having with someone else entirely or to be just plain minutia than to be something substantive. I ended up guessing and adding people with cool handles or that seemed to be both following and being followed by the bloggers that were the seed for this social experiment. I have no idea of what their interests are or anything, even after going back a few pages into some of their tweet backlog. I can make educated guesses about a few of them, based on which conference they seem to be tweeting/retweeting, but I would hardly call that conclusive evidence.
five: Twitter: the following experience --- As bad as I feared it would be. I'm semi-voluntarily overhearing a bunch of people that at best I barely know through their other online presences and at worst are total strangers (with the exception of @activelearning, of course) talk about things that I don't have the context for. It's like walking in on the middle of a conversation that's been going on so long, they don't need to define their terms anymore. And the minutia. Oh, the minutia! I don't care where people are going for lunch, whether there's wireless in the exhibition hall, or that someone is reading today's copy of the New Yorker. And short of defollowing people, there seems to be no way of improving the signal to noise ratio, which is so. much. in favor of the noise.
six: Twitter: the tweeting experience --- Why does anyone care what I have to say? I've made more than the five required tweets or retweets, and they feel like they're being fired off into the void. I don't have anything particularly valuable to say as far as original content goes, and what's the value of repeating what someone else has already said verbatim? When I say "RT @gigglesigh: #plwaconf The world is changing a lot faster than our public libraries are adapting to that change. #si643", what does that actually do? Serious question, someone please explain it to me. I understand that the purpose of it is supposed to be to move ideas around quickly, but what use is simply repeating something without the opportunity to add your own ideas or commentary to it? And in 140 characters, that's barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone trying to add something to someone else's idea. Instead, retweets seem to get tossed around mindlessly, and I'm not sure what they are actually doing. Also, I'm sure that it is possible to fit beautiful, coherent, fully developed messages, even arguments, into the space of 140 characters. As this blog entry might hint to you, I have not reached that degree of virtuosity yet. How do you say anything worth listening to in 140 characters? Less than that, by the time you subtract any hashtags and links in your post.
seven: My overall reaction as a private citizen --- Information overload!!! Death by 140 characters!!! Drown in the minutiae of people you don't even know!!! See your brain contract to the size of a text message!!! There's an obvious pun to be made about Twitter users!!! On a more serious note, while there are some people who fall to Twitter naturally, I am not one of those people. It just seems like even if something is being said, it drowns in the mess of all the other conversations you just can't filter out. I don't like having everything come in in chronological order, all muddled together; I'd rather see what one person has to say and give them my attention. I don't like how little substance there seems to be. Unless I know the person from an off-line acquaintance or from more substantive media, reading someone's Twitter feed doesn't give me any idea of what they're like, let alone what their interests, passions, and grand ideas are. And it all seems to be pointing outwards, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when all I see are descriptions and shortened links, what does that tell me if I choose not to follow those links? With a longer format, at least you can give a more substantial summary and some of your own thoughts, instead of just an implicit "I think this is interesting." Also, and this is just my baggage, I don't need another website, especially one that updates frequently. If I know that something is there, and that it changes, I have a hard time keeping myself from compulsively checking for updates. I'd managed to get myself off of all the Cheezburger Network sites, and Texts From Last Night, and so forth, and now I wasn't even given a choice about whether to take up with Twitter. Even if I delete my account at the end of class, I'm still going to know that it's there, and even if I know that there's nothing of substance, I'm still going to want to go back and check it.
eight: How I still might be able to make this a positive experience --- Even before this class, I did follow a couple of Twitter feeds in my Google Reader (the ALA joblist and a web cartoon that doesn't update very often), so I know that they can be useful, if used in the right way. And I've gone to a couple of public figure's websites to look at their Twitter feed in the box on their page, so there's another way that people can access Twitter if they don't want to deal with Twitter in its entirety. I have a feeling that for me personally, treating a few entities' feeds like any other RSS feed is the most useful and manageable. It's good for when someone is trying to push out a feed of information, but really really doesn't work as a conversational or critiquing tool. As a tool, I guess that having a Twitter is kind of essential now for libraries' online marketing and branding. And pushing information onto the Twitter feed is probably a good way to reach a lot of people at once, like all of you people who were on Twitter already or have become enamored of it after this week. As long as it doesn't become the only way that people can find out about something, I guess it's all good.
tl;dr --- We used Twitter this week, I don't particularly like it, but it's probably useful in some circumstances.
one: you have no idea how tempting it is to write this post entirely in haiku. I have neither the time nor the mental energy at the moment to stick to such disciplined form, though, so I'll be blogging tonight in my normal, rambling fashion.
two: This week, in lieu of more academic readings, we were all required to make Twitter accounts, build a network of at least 25 people/entities related to our career paths and aspirations, and tweet or retweet at least five times, using the #si643 hashtag. My account is under @llpollac.
three: Twitter: the web interface --- I agree with everyone that says that it's suboptimal. Especially for this class assignment where we're supposed to be retweeting things with an added hashtag, since the web interface won't let you edit the text of a retweet. I was using Hoot Suite, which I'm also not a fan of. It's all sliding menus and frames. Maybe in that case I just need to have a bit more time to learn the interface better, but both the web interface and Hoot Suite seem clunky for something that's supposed to be so light. I've heard good things about Tweet Deck, but I refuse to download software to my computer for this assignment. I'm resentful enough about having to make two new social media accounts.
four: Twitter: building a network --- I started out with the bloggers from the key blogger assignment, and branched out from there, aided in a large part by the Twitter web interface's "similar" function. The frustrating thing was that I don't know who any of these people are, especially not by Twitter handles, and the information provided on their profiles really isn't enough to tell whether this is someone I want to be spammed by. Like, for example, take @mechalibrarian. His profile is "R. Bruno (mechalibrarian), New York. I'm a librarian in NYC who knows what the heck a diacritic is" with a picture of a man that we can probably safely assume to be R. Bruno, or at least his avatar. What does that actually tell you about these people? And the first page or so of tweets are of limited utility, because they're just as likely to be about some conversation they're having with someone else entirely or to be just plain minutia than to be something substantive. I ended up guessing and adding people with cool handles or that seemed to be both following and being followed by the bloggers that were the seed for this social experiment. I have no idea of what their interests are or anything, even after going back a few pages into some of their tweet backlog. I can make educated guesses about a few of them, based on which conference they seem to be tweeting/retweeting, but I would hardly call that conclusive evidence.
five: Twitter: the following experience --- As bad as I feared it would be. I'm semi-voluntarily overhearing a bunch of people that at best I barely know through their other online presences and at worst are total strangers (with the exception of @activelearning, of course) talk about things that I don't have the context for. It's like walking in on the middle of a conversation that's been going on so long, they don't need to define their terms anymore. And the minutia. Oh, the minutia! I don't care where people are going for lunch, whether there's wireless in the exhibition hall, or that someone is reading today's copy of the New Yorker. And short of defollowing people, there seems to be no way of improving the signal to noise ratio, which is so. much. in favor of the noise.
six: Twitter: the tweeting experience --- Why does anyone care what I have to say? I've made more than the five required tweets or retweets, and they feel like they're being fired off into the void. I don't have anything particularly valuable to say as far as original content goes, and what's the value of repeating what someone else has already said verbatim? When I say "RT @gigglesigh: #plwaconf The world is changing a lot faster than our public libraries are adapting to that change. #si643", what does that actually do? Serious question, someone please explain it to me. I understand that the purpose of it is supposed to be to move ideas around quickly, but what use is simply repeating something without the opportunity to add your own ideas or commentary to it? And in 140 characters, that's barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone trying to add something to someone else's idea. Instead, retweets seem to get tossed around mindlessly, and I'm not sure what they are actually doing. Also, I'm sure that it is possible to fit beautiful, coherent, fully developed messages, even arguments, into the space of 140 characters. As this blog entry might hint to you, I have not reached that degree of virtuosity yet. How do you say anything worth listening to in 140 characters? Less than that, by the time you subtract any hashtags and links in your post.
seven: My overall reaction as a private citizen --- Information overload!!! Death by 140 characters!!! Drown in the minutiae of people you don't even know!!! See your brain contract to the size of a text message!!! There's an obvious pun to be made about Twitter users!!! On a more serious note, while there are some people who fall to Twitter naturally, I am not one of those people. It just seems like even if something is being said, it drowns in the mess of all the other conversations you just can't filter out. I don't like having everything come in in chronological order, all muddled together; I'd rather see what one person has to say and give them my attention. I don't like how little substance there seems to be. Unless I know the person from an off-line acquaintance or from more substantive media, reading someone's Twitter feed doesn't give me any idea of what they're like, let alone what their interests, passions, and grand ideas are. And it all seems to be pointing outwards, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when all I see are descriptions and shortened links, what does that tell me if I choose not to follow those links? With a longer format, at least you can give a more substantial summary and some of your own thoughts, instead of just an implicit "I think this is interesting." Also, and this is just my baggage, I don't need another website, especially one that updates frequently. If I know that something is there, and that it changes, I have a hard time keeping myself from compulsively checking for updates. I'd managed to get myself off of all the Cheezburger Network sites, and Texts From Last Night, and so forth, and now I wasn't even given a choice about whether to take up with Twitter. Even if I delete my account at the end of class, I'm still going to know that it's there, and even if I know that there's nothing of substance, I'm still going to want to go back and check it.
eight: How I still might be able to make this a positive experience --- Even before this class, I did follow a couple of Twitter feeds in my Google Reader (the ALA joblist and a web cartoon that doesn't update very often), so I know that they can be useful, if used in the right way. And I've gone to a couple of public figure's websites to look at their Twitter feed in the box on their page, so there's another way that people can access Twitter if they don't want to deal with Twitter in its entirety. I have a feeling that for me personally, treating a few entities' feeds like any other RSS feed is the most useful and manageable. It's good for when someone is trying to push out a feed of information, but really really doesn't work as a conversational or critiquing tool. As a tool, I guess that having a Twitter is kind of essential now for libraries' online marketing and branding. And pushing information onto the Twitter feed is probably a good way to reach a lot of people at once, like all of you people who were on Twitter already or have become enamored of it after this week. As long as it doesn't become the only way that people can find out about something, I guess it's all good.
tl;dr --- We used Twitter this week, I don't particularly like it, but it's probably useful in some circumstances.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Week Ten Response
One: last week's workshops.
Our workshop came off last week about as well as was expected. It was not spectacular, but it wasn't an utter disaster either. I think that I prefer teaching skills to teaching facts (our workshop was basically a compliance workshop on CIPA), though, or maybe it's just that when I'm teaching skills, I know what I'm doing. People on the evaluations mostly said that they learned something, though, so I guess we must have done a decent job. One issue that came up was how to respond to out-of-scope questions that we didn't know the answer to. For a CIPA: What Your Library Needs To Know To Keep Its Funding workshop, I don't think that not being able to answer questions about the social justice ramifications of the legislation is necessarily a fair criticism.
Two: How People Learn ch. 7
The first thing that jumped out at me while reading this chapter is the description of Elizabeth Jensen's class debate, specifically that the first speaker was "a 16-year-old girl with a Grateful Dead T-shirt and one dangling earring" (162). Why is this relevant? Especially since neither the gender nor the apparel of the other members of the class is described in any way, except for the judge, who is "a wiry student with horned-rimmed glasses" (163) [Note that the judge is described as a "student", not a "boy" or a "young man", and that his gender is only known through the possessive pronoun used to describe his relationship with the gavel. Also that the description of him is buried in the middle of the paragraph, while the description of the girl begins her paragraph]. Highlighting her gender and appearance does not seem to serve any legitimate purpose, but instead seems to be trying to say something about the student by playing on stereotypes of people who wear that kind of attire (not that I'm entirely clear what that would be in this context. Something along the lines of, gee whillikers! Elizabeth Jensen's so great, she even reaches the hippie stoner kids! And girls!). But the fact that the student's gender and clothing choices are featured prominently, while those of the other speakers in the debate are elided, reads to me as an example of how women are always marked and their bodies put up for public approval. #completelymissingthepoint
Back on topic, I appreciated the take that teaching different things requires different skill sets, instead of teaching being a Thing That One Can Do regardless of the circumstances. I know from the workshops we presented last week that just because I can teach Girl Scout stuff to Brownies (first through third grade girls) doesn't mean that I can teach other stuff to adults as well, even if I were to know the stuff I'm trying to teach down cold.
Three: Embedded librarianship
I found the discussion of embedded librarianship really interesting. I know that in my undergrad experience, I had limited direct interaction with the librarians in an academic capacity (I worked in the library, so I saw them much more often in a professional capacity). We had a library orientation at the beginning of freshman year, and a librarian came into our senior seminar to show us discipline-specific resources for researching our theses, and that's about it (I used their online resources and pathfinders a great deal though). I wonder how my experience in this regard would have been different if the library had had more of an embedded librarianship model. Or even if I were in a different major, where the library was located in the same building as the classes were held in, like the music and science libraries were. Though I do wonder if using "online webinars" (calling the department of redundancy department) would have been effective in my school, which had no distance learning options whatsoever. What's the point of bringing the librarian in via webinar, instead of walking the thirty feet from the library to have them there in person?
Also, the number of grammatical errors and generally bad writing in the Matos piece makes me feel much confident about my future life, that maybe you don't have to be such a good writer to get academically published, if articles written like this can slip through. #completelymissingthepoint
Our workshop came off last week about as well as was expected. It was not spectacular, but it wasn't an utter disaster either. I think that I prefer teaching skills to teaching facts (our workshop was basically a compliance workshop on CIPA), though, or maybe it's just that when I'm teaching skills, I know what I'm doing. People on the evaluations mostly said that they learned something, though, so I guess we must have done a decent job. One issue that came up was how to respond to out-of-scope questions that we didn't know the answer to. For a CIPA: What Your Library Needs To Know To Keep Its Funding workshop, I don't think that not being able to answer questions about the social justice ramifications of the legislation is necessarily a fair criticism.
Two: How People Learn ch. 7
The first thing that jumped out at me while reading this chapter is the description of Elizabeth Jensen's class debate, specifically that the first speaker was "a 16-year-old girl with a Grateful Dead T-shirt and one dangling earring" (162). Why is this relevant? Especially since neither the gender nor the apparel of the other members of the class is described in any way, except for the judge, who is "a wiry student with horned-rimmed glasses" (163) [Note that the judge is described as a "student", not a "boy" or a "young man", and that his gender is only known through the possessive pronoun used to describe his relationship with the gavel. Also that the description of him is buried in the middle of the paragraph, while the description of the girl begins her paragraph]. Highlighting her gender and appearance does not seem to serve any legitimate purpose, but instead seems to be trying to say something about the student by playing on stereotypes of people who wear that kind of attire (not that I'm entirely clear what that would be in this context. Something along the lines of, gee whillikers! Elizabeth Jensen's so great, she even reaches the hippie stoner kids! And girls!). But the fact that the student's gender and clothing choices are featured prominently, while those of the other speakers in the debate are elided, reads to me as an example of how women are always marked and their bodies put up for public approval. #completelymissingthepoint
Back on topic, I appreciated the take that teaching different things requires different skill sets, instead of teaching being a Thing That One Can Do regardless of the circumstances. I know from the workshops we presented last week that just because I can teach Girl Scout stuff to Brownies (first through third grade girls) doesn't mean that I can teach other stuff to adults as well, even if I were to know the stuff I'm trying to teach down cold.
Three: Embedded librarianship
I found the discussion of embedded librarianship really interesting. I know that in my undergrad experience, I had limited direct interaction with the librarians in an academic capacity (I worked in the library, so I saw them much more often in a professional capacity). We had a library orientation at the beginning of freshman year, and a librarian came into our senior seminar to show us discipline-specific resources for researching our theses, and that's about it (I used their online resources and pathfinders a great deal though). I wonder how my experience in this regard would have been different if the library had had more of an embedded librarianship model. Or even if I were in a different major, where the library was located in the same building as the classes were held in, like the music and science libraries were. Though I do wonder if using "online webinars" (calling the department of redundancy department) would have been effective in my school, which had no distance learning options whatsoever. What's the point of bringing the librarian in via webinar, instead of walking the thirty feet from the library to have them there in person?
Also, the number of grammatical errors and generally bad writing in the Matos piece makes me feel much confident about my future life, that maybe you don't have to be such a good writer to get academically published, if articles written like this can slip through. #completelymissingthepoint
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Week Nine Response
one: Last class, Bobbi Newman (@librarianbyday) spoke to our class via webinar. Truly an example of "ask and ye shall receive." I definitely appreciated getting to hear Bobbi's perspective and getting to see the software we're going to be using to do our webinars before we actually have to produce programming with it. However, I found it hard to follow what she was saying after a while, probably due to the poor audio quality and the fact that we couldn't see her. Life needs to be subtitled, darn it!
two: No readings this week, since we're all busy creating our one-shot workshops to deliver tomorrow. Josh and I are presenting on the Children's Internet Protection Act. I have to say that I am approaching this workshop with slight trepidation, since most of my formal teaching experience in the past has been along the lines of teaching Brownies basic knife safety skills (aka how to not have your first graders kill themselves with pocket knives), camp songs, and edible fires, and teaching adults something more academic seems like it would require a rather different skill set. It's also difficult because there's no real community need we're responding to for our workshop; it's just pretend with our classmates, which makes it difficult to really assess what we want people to get out of it. But it will probably go just fine, and if not, it's only 20 minutes out of my life anyway.
two: No readings this week, since we're all busy creating our one-shot workshops to deliver tomorrow. Josh and I are presenting on the Children's Internet Protection Act. I have to say that I am approaching this workshop with slight trepidation, since most of my formal teaching experience in the past has been along the lines of teaching Brownies basic knife safety skills (aka how to not have your first graders kill themselves with pocket knives), camp songs, and edible fires, and teaching adults something more academic seems like it would require a rather different skill set. It's also difficult because there's no real community need we're responding to for our workshop; it's just pretend with our classmates, which makes it difficult to really assess what we want people to get out of it. But it will probably go just fine, and if not, it's only 20 minutes out of my life anyway.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Week Eight Response
one: I really enjoyed the book clubs last week! There was a lot of good discussion going on, and it was great to have a couple of hours to talk about non-academic stuff with other people.
two: Library assignments
I thought that this was a great example of how to show people what the library can and cannot do for you (or your students). Maybe there's some way at public libraries to do a similar outreach to area teachers to avoid some of the same issues from K-12 students? (and to convince them that database articles should count as print sources, or at least not as websites, as I've heard horror stories about?) A couple sentences from the article intrigued me, and I wish that the author had explained or investigated further. The first statement was in the phrasing of assignment section, under misinformation: "deliberate negative reinforcements, such as an instructor who feels that, since he or she finds the library confusing and hostile, students should be educated on this fact of life." I wish that there had been some further explanation of this, or at least some examples, because I'm having a hard time visualizing what this would look like in terms of assignment guidelines. The second was feedback from the workshop, the person who said that the workshop "served to show participants the schism in educational assumptions between liberal arts and hard sciences." I'm curious to know what the participant meant by this, mostly since I'm from a liberal arts college that occasionally had something of a battle of egos going between the sciences and the humanities. But I guess that's a feature of feedback forms, that you get incomplete information that you'd really like to know more about what they meant, but you're never going to get that information.
three: ALA Code of Ethics
double-plus good. (sorry, couldn't resist). Seriously, I like the ALA Code of Ethics, and reading it for the first time was one of the things that made me sure that I wanted to be a librarian. The point that I can see myself having the hardest time with, though, is article VII: "We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources" -- what happens when I have a Fred Phelps-ish patron walk in requesting help finding materials saying that gays are an abomination and are going to roast in hell, just as an example. I hope that I'd find some way to serve them in a professional manner, but some issues are too personal to be easily disattached from.
four: the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess
a) I have real problems with Pattern Recognition saying that as a small academic library (HarperCollins doesn't publish for the academic market) with abnormally low circulation (!), the new policy would cost them a whopping $194.85, so libraries should stop whining. Ze does go on to say that it's still a terrible move from a political/rhetorical perspective, but seriously, (1) your library has little in common with the ones that stand to lose the most from this policy, and (2) if the plural of anecdote != data, the singular of anecdote really doesn't.
b) Is the argument that just as physical books have a finite lifespan and have to be repurchased, ebooks should also have a lifespan, even if it has to be artificially enforced (since it's not like the format suddenly became obsolete, or that each time the book gets checked out, it slowly corrupts the bits that store the books data, or something) a valid one? Maybe, but it feels a lot to me like Yahoo putting the shelf back in. If there's no reason inherent to the format to impose these limits, I think that it's really limiting the full potential of the medium, and that the people who don't try to impose limits derived from older media onto digital objects are going to be the ones who come out ahead.
c) Neil Gaiman makes a good point that the best way to get people to buy things is to give away free samples. I know that I rarely buy a book from a bookstore that I haven't read already, or at least read a lot of books by that author. Libraries are where people discover new books for no risk, and I wish that HarperCollins would remember that.
d) There's a traceback on Free Range Librarian in Hungarian. That's when you know something is really a big deal, when it jumps out of the Anglophone sphere and into a translingual dialogue.
two: Library assignments
I thought that this was a great example of how to show people what the library can and cannot do for you (or your students). Maybe there's some way at public libraries to do a similar outreach to area teachers to avoid some of the same issues from K-12 students? (and to convince them that database articles should count as print sources, or at least not as websites, as I've heard horror stories about?) A couple sentences from the article intrigued me, and I wish that the author had explained or investigated further. The first statement was in the phrasing of assignment section, under misinformation: "deliberate negative reinforcements, such as an instructor who feels that, since he or she finds the library confusing and hostile, students should be educated on this fact of life." I wish that there had been some further explanation of this, or at least some examples, because I'm having a hard time visualizing what this would look like in terms of assignment guidelines. The second was feedback from the workshop, the person who said that the workshop "served to show participants the schism in educational assumptions between liberal arts and hard sciences." I'm curious to know what the participant meant by this, mostly since I'm from a liberal arts college that occasionally had something of a battle of egos going between the sciences and the humanities. But I guess that's a feature of feedback forms, that you get incomplete information that you'd really like to know more about what they meant, but you're never going to get that information.
three: ALA Code of Ethics
double-plus good. (sorry, couldn't resist). Seriously, I like the ALA Code of Ethics, and reading it for the first time was one of the things that made me sure that I wanted to be a librarian. The point that I can see myself having the hardest time with, though, is article VII: "We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources" -- what happens when I have a Fred Phelps-ish patron walk in requesting help finding materials saying that gays are an abomination and are going to roast in hell, just as an example. I hope that I'd find some way to serve them in a professional manner, but some issues are too personal to be easily disattached from.
four: the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess
a) I have real problems with Pattern Recognition saying that as a small academic library (HarperCollins doesn't publish for the academic market) with abnormally low circulation (!), the new policy would cost them a whopping $194.85, so libraries should stop whining. Ze does go on to say that it's still a terrible move from a political/rhetorical perspective, but seriously, (1) your library has little in common with the ones that stand to lose the most from this policy, and (2) if the plural of anecdote != data, the singular of anecdote really doesn't.
b) Is the argument that just as physical books have a finite lifespan and have to be repurchased, ebooks should also have a lifespan, even if it has to be artificially enforced (since it's not like the format suddenly became obsolete, or that each time the book gets checked out, it slowly corrupts the bits that store the books data, or something) a valid one? Maybe, but it feels a lot to me like Yahoo putting the shelf back in. If there's no reason inherent to the format to impose these limits, I think that it's really limiting the full potential of the medium, and that the people who don't try to impose limits derived from older media onto digital objects are going to be the ones who come out ahead.
c) Neil Gaiman makes a good point that the best way to get people to buy things is to give away free samples. I know that I rarely buy a book from a bookstore that I haven't read already, or at least read a lot of books by that author. Libraries are where people discover new books for no risk, and I wish that HarperCollins would remember that.
d) There's a traceback on Free Range Librarian in Hungarian. That's when you know something is really a big deal, when it jumps out of the Anglophone sphere and into a translingual dialogue.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Week Seven Response
one: I really enjoyed the speaker from AADL. I kind of want to check out some of the books she brought in about book clubs (especially the one that was half book clubs, half recipe book) now. I also thought that it was interesting how universally liked books don't make for very good book club books, because people don't really say anything about them other than "I liked it. It was really good." Which I suppose makes sense, because I know that I will pull a book I don't like to bits, but all the same, if I'm going to spend my non-existent free time reading something, I kind of expect to like it, useful conversation about it later be dammed. I guess I'm not a very good candidate for book clubs.
two: Having seen a Socratic Seminar implemented now, I'm still not sure that I'm a fan. Maybe some of this could have been ameliorated if the entire group were involved in the discussion, rather than a small subset in the front of the class panel style, but the seminar still seemed rather stilted and like an oral examination, rather than the depth of discussion and involvement the readings lauded so highly.
three: The other groups for our book group session have selected some interesting readings for our meeting. Two of the four readings for our group are by Edgar Allen Poe, which I find to be rather improbable, even controlling for how he's a well-known short story author whose work is in the public domain. Just wondering how the groups were put together.... Anyways, I'm looking forward to the discussion tomorrow night.
two: Having seen a Socratic Seminar implemented now, I'm still not sure that I'm a fan. Maybe some of this could have been ameliorated if the entire group were involved in the discussion, rather than a small subset in the front of the class panel style, but the seminar still seemed rather stilted and like an oral examination, rather than the depth of discussion and involvement the readings lauded so highly.
three: The other groups for our book group session have selected some interesting readings for our meeting. Two of the four readings for our group are by Edgar Allen Poe, which I find to be rather improbable, even controlling for how he's a well-known short story author whose work is in the public domain. Just wondering how the groups were put together.... Anyways, I'm looking forward to the discussion tomorrow night.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Week Six Response
one: I enjoyed having a chance to bounce ideas around of what we all were reading for our blog issues assignment. I can't possibly read everything, even with the help of Google Reader, so it was really nice to get a sense of what was going on in Library Blogland other than the four authors that I was following.
two: The idea of Socratic seminars sounds interesting. But the idea of being in a fishbowl while half the class critiques how well I'm discussing is majorly setting off my social anxiety buttons. It's one thing to be self-monitoring the quality of my contributions, another to have a general idea that the teacher is observing everyone for a participation grade, and quite another thing entirely to have half the class explicitly taking notes on whether you're talking too much, or not enough, or not being insightful enough, etc. And the quality of discussion that Metzger reports her class achieving with the Socratic seminars is what I remember from my high school English classes without putting people into fishbowls, though since I went to a selective all-girls Catholic high school, that might not be a fair basis for comparison.
three: I found the article "The Book Club, Exploded" really exciting. I have to say that I have never participated in a book club, apart from the book-club style small reading groups unit my sophomore year of high school, so I've never really thought about the possibilities of book clubs, even though I'm from Seattle, one of the article's model cities! I like the idea of arranging book clubs thematically, so that the club is more about a set of ideas than one particular book. I think that that could draw in people who think that book clubs are going to be like high school English redux, especially if it's marketed as being an idea/theme group rather than a book group per se. But there's also value to the old everyone reads the same book formula. I'd imagine that one of the nice things about that kind of a group is that when you refer to something in the book, everyone knows what you're talking about, which isn't always the case the rest of the time.
two: The idea of Socratic seminars sounds interesting. But the idea of being in a fishbowl while half the class critiques how well I'm discussing is majorly setting off my social anxiety buttons. It's one thing to be self-monitoring the quality of my contributions, another to have a general idea that the teacher is observing everyone for a participation grade, and quite another thing entirely to have half the class explicitly taking notes on whether you're talking too much, or not enough, or not being insightful enough, etc. And the quality of discussion that Metzger reports her class achieving with the Socratic seminars is what I remember from my high school English classes without putting people into fishbowls, though since I went to a selective all-girls Catholic high school, that might not be a fair basis for comparison.
three: I found the article "The Book Club, Exploded" really exciting. I have to say that I have never participated in a book club, apart from the book-club style small reading groups unit my sophomore year of high school, so I've never really thought about the possibilities of book clubs, even though I'm from Seattle, one of the article's model cities! I like the idea of arranging book clubs thematically, so that the club is more about a set of ideas than one particular book. I think that that could draw in people who think that book clubs are going to be like high school English redux, especially if it's marketed as being an idea/theme group rather than a book group per se. But there's also value to the old everyone reads the same book formula. I'd imagine that one of the nice things about that kind of a group is that when you refer to something in the book, everyone knows what you're talking about, which isn't always the case the rest of the time.
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