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.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Week Five Response
one: On Video Games and World Salvation
Jane McGonigal made interesting points in her TED talk, but I have to say that I'm not entirely convinced. For one thing, I would have liked a better definition of what she was referring to when she talked about gaming. It seems like at the beginning, she was using gaming to refer to only MMORPGs, but then in her applications stage, she shifted to be talking more about enhanced reality. Both of those are very narrow definitions of gaming which leaves out pretty much every game I've ever played. If that's what she meant to do, that's fine, but then the talk should have been titled "MMORPGs and Enhanced Reality Can Make A Better World," not "Gaming Can Make A Better World." Maybe this is a lack of my transfer skills, but I'm having a hard time applying her hypothesis to how tabletop roleplaying games (such as Dungeons and Dragons), board games (of all sorts, including those along the lines of checkers, Parcheesi, Settlers of Catan, and Arkham Horror), arcade games (such as PacMan or Bejeweled), casual video games (such as Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Super Smash Brothers), and live-action role playing games (such as Swarthmore's annual Pterodactyl Hunt) can save the world. Secondly, I'm not even sure if her hypothesis, even applied only to MMORPGs and enhanced reality games, hangs together. I'm still not quite sure how her model really applies the competencies she claims gaming develops to the real world. Thirdly, she uncritically cited Herodotus in her argument as a historical source. As a classicist, anyone who uses the Father of Lies like that automatically loses a bit of my respect.
two: On Transfer Learning
I found the discussion in How People Learn about how people do things differently in academic vs non-academic contexts really interesting. I would have assumed that being able to do math in a supermarket or selling things on the street would have automatically translated into being able to do the same sort of thing in an academic setting, but apparently it isn't that automatic. But then I think to how I multiply numbers in my head, which generally involves things like factoring numbers and recombining them to get numbers I can keep straight in my head, and it makes a bit more sense. If I were multiplying the numbers on paper, I would go about the problem in a totally different way, by multiplying across by place values and adding the results of each pass. It isn't so surprising after all that someone who's been navigating the supermarket by doing mental math tricks is going to have difficulty applying that knowledge to the more formal mathematics involved in schools. And other subjects mutatis mutandis. I think that keeping in mind this issue of transfer is important for librarians. We've all gone through formal schooling with at least some modicum of success, which means that a large portion of how we go to think is founded on that more formal kind of learning. But many of the patrons we're going to be serving are working from the more everyday, hands-on kind of knowledge. Keeping this distinction in mind can help us in instruction, and drawing connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.
three: On High School Curricula
I can't help feeling that one reason why teachers don't use lessons like the one for teaching about central tendency described in the Wiggins and McTighe article is because they feel like they'd take so long. Going through all the steps in their lesson plan looks like it would take several days, especially in a high school where teachers may only have 45 minutes a day with each class. In contrast, the traditional plan for teaching mean, median, and mode could get covered in two days at the very most. When you have a list a mile long of things you're supposed to do before the end of the year (or even scarier, before the state standardized exams in the spring), are you going to go with the more in-depth teaching for understanding approach, even through it's going to take longer, or are you going to go for covering as much as possible as fast as possible, even if not everyone understands it as well? Unless we can either retrofit the high-stakes tests to test for understanding (or get rid of them altogether) or ensure and convince teachers and administrators that teaching for understanding will lead students to perform as well or better on these tests, I have a feeling that Door 2 is going to be the most popular option.
Jane McGonigal made interesting points in her TED talk, but I have to say that I'm not entirely convinced. For one thing, I would have liked a better definition of what she was referring to when she talked about gaming. It seems like at the beginning, she was using gaming to refer to only MMORPGs, but then in her applications stage, she shifted to be talking more about enhanced reality. Both of those are very narrow definitions of gaming which leaves out pretty much every game I've ever played. If that's what she meant to do, that's fine, but then the talk should have been titled "MMORPGs and Enhanced Reality Can Make A Better World," not "Gaming Can Make A Better World." Maybe this is a lack of my transfer skills, but I'm having a hard time applying her hypothesis to how tabletop roleplaying games (such as Dungeons and Dragons), board games (of all sorts, including those along the lines of checkers, Parcheesi, Settlers of Catan, and Arkham Horror), arcade games (such as PacMan or Bejeweled), casual video games (such as Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Super Smash Brothers), and live-action role playing games (such as Swarthmore's annual Pterodactyl Hunt) can save the world. Secondly, I'm not even sure if her hypothesis, even applied only to MMORPGs and enhanced reality games, hangs together. I'm still not quite sure how her model really applies the competencies she claims gaming develops to the real world. Thirdly, she uncritically cited Herodotus in her argument as a historical source. As a classicist, anyone who uses the Father of Lies like that automatically loses a bit of my respect.
two: On Transfer Learning
I found the discussion in How People Learn about how people do things differently in academic vs non-academic contexts really interesting. I would have assumed that being able to do math in a supermarket or selling things on the street would have automatically translated into being able to do the same sort of thing in an academic setting, but apparently it isn't that automatic. But then I think to how I multiply numbers in my head, which generally involves things like factoring numbers and recombining them to get numbers I can keep straight in my head, and it makes a bit more sense. If I were multiplying the numbers on paper, I would go about the problem in a totally different way, by multiplying across by place values and adding the results of each pass. It isn't so surprising after all that someone who's been navigating the supermarket by doing mental math tricks is going to have difficulty applying that knowledge to the more formal mathematics involved in schools. And other subjects mutatis mutandis. I think that keeping in mind this issue of transfer is important for librarians. We've all gone through formal schooling with at least some modicum of success, which means that a large portion of how we go to think is founded on that more formal kind of learning. But many of the patrons we're going to be serving are working from the more everyday, hands-on kind of knowledge. Keeping this distinction in mind can help us in instruction, and drawing connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.
three: On High School Curricula
I can't help feeling that one reason why teachers don't use lessons like the one for teaching about central tendency described in the Wiggins and McTighe article is because they feel like they'd take so long. Going through all the steps in their lesson plan looks like it would take several days, especially in a high school where teachers may only have 45 minutes a day with each class. In contrast, the traditional plan for teaching mean, median, and mode could get covered in two days at the very most. When you have a list a mile long of things you're supposed to do before the end of the year (or even scarier, before the state standardized exams in the spring), are you going to go with the more in-depth teaching for understanding approach, even through it's going to take longer, or are you going to go for covering as much as possible as fast as possible, even if not everyone understands it as well? Unless we can either retrofit the high-stakes tests to test for understanding (or get rid of them altogether) or ensure and convince teachers and administrators that teaching for understanding will lead students to perform as well or better on these tests, I have a feeling that Door 2 is going to be the most popular option.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Week Four Response
one: props to the folks whose screencasts we watched in class. They were both really professional and did a good job of explaining how to use the tool they were about and making it seem friendly at the same time.
two: on the word "use" -- the reason it's so difficult to come up with a definition of "information literacy" that does not include the word "use" is that it's the most common word in the English language to describe the action/process of taking something and doing something with it for a purpose. So yes, it's an incredibly vague word, but that's how languages tend to work a lot of the time -- common words have a wide range of meaning, determined by the context of where they were used. If you want an great example, take a look at the entry for "ago" in a good Latin dictionary sometime. The entry's at least a full column long.
three: I know all the reasons why peer reviewing (in the sense of looking at them in class, etc, not in the sense of peer-reviewed academic journals) papers is such a good idea. I know that it's good to practice your critique skills on real documents written by people at roughly your level, that reviewing other people's work helps you to improve your own, that it helps reduce teachers' work loads, every reason in the book, but the fact is, I absolutely hate having to look at and comment on other people's work. I never know what to say unless the work in question is really bad, and then I get in trouble for tearing it to bits. I also never seem to get useful feedback from when other people peer review my papers, so the entire process feels like a waste of energy. That's not to say that I've never gotten useful help from friends on my assignments, but it seems to work better if I go to a particular person for help with a particular issue, or even ask a particular one of my friends what they think of something that I've been working on, rather than the "everyone pass your papers to the person on the right" model that I tend to associate with formal peer reviewing in classrooms. I thought that one point that Sadler made was really true -- that it's really hard to say anything about something unexceptional. But for peer review (or anything really), for some reason it's not okay to say, "It was okay. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not going to win a Pulitzer. But it's solid and competent." Why does everything we do have to be outstanding? What's wrong with doing a competent, workman-like job?
four: on connecting teaching/learning with the real world: There needs to be a better way of connecting science-for-school and math-for-school with science-for-real and math-for-real (especially the math, since the disconnect seems to be almost total). I will admit that my experience with science-for-real and math-for-real has been rather limited and second-hand, but it seems to me that there's no connection between science and math as they are taught high-school and lower and what real live scientists and mathematicians do. Science-for-real isn't about memorizing a bazillion factoids, and math-for-real isn't about doing pages and pages of exercises. It's tricky, because to get to what real live scientists and mathematicians do you do need that general background of knowledge, but there's also very little understanding going on about what science-for-real and especially math-for-real even are. I had no idea until I got to college and started hanging out with people taking upper-level math that math was really about ideas and concepts, and that it was possible to be creative and make new discoveries in math, and that there was more to math than pages of cut-and-dried exercises that just got more complicated the further along you got. Maybe I'm trying to argue that upper and lower level math need to be integrated (no pun intended) more, instead of existing as almost completely different domains. But then I think, does everyone need to be able to do upper level math, or should we settle for just everyone being able to balance a checkbook?
two: on the word "use" -- the reason it's so difficult to come up with a definition of "information literacy" that does not include the word "use" is that it's the most common word in the English language to describe the action/process of taking something and doing something with it for a purpose. So yes, it's an incredibly vague word, but that's how languages tend to work a lot of the time -- common words have a wide range of meaning, determined by the context of where they were used. If you want an great example, take a look at the entry for "ago" in a good Latin dictionary sometime. The entry's at least a full column long.
three: I know all the reasons why peer reviewing (in the sense of looking at them in class, etc, not in the sense of peer-reviewed academic journals) papers is such a good idea. I know that it's good to practice your critique skills on real documents written by people at roughly your level, that reviewing other people's work helps you to improve your own, that it helps reduce teachers' work loads, every reason in the book, but the fact is, I absolutely hate having to look at and comment on other people's work. I never know what to say unless the work in question is really bad, and then I get in trouble for tearing it to bits. I also never seem to get useful feedback from when other people peer review my papers, so the entire process feels like a waste of energy. That's not to say that I've never gotten useful help from friends on my assignments, but it seems to work better if I go to a particular person for help with a particular issue, or even ask a particular one of my friends what they think of something that I've been working on, rather than the "everyone pass your papers to the person on the right" model that I tend to associate with formal peer reviewing in classrooms. I thought that one point that Sadler made was really true -- that it's really hard to say anything about something unexceptional. But for peer review (or anything really), for some reason it's not okay to say, "It was okay. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not going to win a Pulitzer. But it's solid and competent." Why does everything we do have to be outstanding? What's wrong with doing a competent, workman-like job?
four: on connecting teaching/learning with the real world: There needs to be a better way of connecting science-for-school and math-for-school with science-for-real and math-for-real (especially the math, since the disconnect seems to be almost total). I will admit that my experience with science-for-real and math-for-real has been rather limited and second-hand, but it seems to me that there's no connection between science and math as they are taught high-school and lower and what real live scientists and mathematicians do. Science-for-real isn't about memorizing a bazillion factoids, and math-for-real isn't about doing pages and pages of exercises. It's tricky, because to get to what real live scientists and mathematicians do you do need that general background of knowledge, but there's also very little understanding going on about what science-for-real and especially math-for-real even are. I had no idea until I got to college and started hanging out with people taking upper-level math that math was really about ideas and concepts, and that it was possible to be creative and make new discoveries in math, and that there was more to math than pages of cut-and-dried exercises that just got more complicated the further along you got. Maybe I'm trying to argue that upper and lower level math need to be integrated (no pun intended) more, instead of existing as almost completely different domains. But then I think, does everyone need to be able to do upper level math, or should we settle for just everyone being able to balance a checkbook?
Monday, January 31, 2011
Screencast
Here's the screencast for this week's assignment. It's a basic walk-through of the Something About the Author Database, produced using Jing. Which, apparently, exports all screencasts it produces as Flash objects, which (1) makes them impossible to edit, or even to open using desktop software (since Flash as far as I can tell needs to run in a browser environment), (2) makes it impossible to add any kind of closed captioning, which makes me feel silly with the fuss I just raised over closed-captions in the previous blog entry, and (3) apparently makes it impossible (or at least difficult, I've found varying opinions on this point, and I haven't actually tried it yet) to upload to YouTube, which (a) allows for a wider audience, and (b) has the option to add optional subtitling.
Oh well. 'Tis done.
Oh well. 'Tis done.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Week Three Response
one: In defense of closed-captioning.
In response to discussion in class and posts in a couple of blogs, I just want to encourage people not to make assumptions about the people who would use closed captions. Closed captions aren't just for the deaf, the way that many people in class seem to be assuming. They're also for people who are hard of hearing, people who have trouble processing spoken language (especially spoken language that's not from a person who's physically present), English language learners whose reading comprehension may be better than their spoken language comprehension, and people who don't have or don't want to use sound on their computers. Also, closed captioning in another language is a way to extend support to speakers of that language without having to produce another resource entirely from scratch. I agree that captions are not always necessary for all people at all times, but I strongly think that they should be an option whenever possible.
@Kristin (or any other readers who may have an answer): do you know if any of the screencasting tools we went over allows for optional captions that a viewer could switch on or off?
two: Weiner, Sharon A. "On Information Literacy in the Library Workforce." Serials Review 36.4 (2010): 204-204.
I thought that this was an interesting article for the Professional Practice in Library and Information Centers class. It's basically asking whether libraries are expecting the same kind of information literacy that outside companies are demanding of their employees. I have to say that before coming across this article, this is something that never would have occurred to me to worry about. I guess I assumed that since we're in the information literacy business (or, at least, information literacy is a major part of our job description), we'd all be pretty information literate, but according to Weiner, that's not necessarily the case.
three: Stern, Caroline and Trishanjit Kaur. "Developing Theory-Based, Practical Information Literacy Training for Adults." The International Information & Library Review. 42.2 (2010): 69-74.
This article suggests that libraries can learn from businesses when it comes to designing educational experiences for adult learners. The authors advocate moving away from traditional educational models, which they describe as being "systematic, cumulative, sustained, and periodically graded for achievement," and towards a training model borrowed from the corporate world, which "focuses on an immediate need or opportunity and builds on the existing expertise, education, or interest of the targeted learner." The article references the ADDIE system of design we looked at last week, which reassures me that the model is widely used and not just a figment of Veldof's imagination.
Feminist/classics geek moment: why is the teaching of adults labled "andragogy" (ἀνήρ = man)? Is there some reason why men are privileged in this process? Is there an equivalent practice of "gynegogy" (γυνή = woman) if only women are involved? Why can't the term be "anthropogogy" (ἄνθρωπος = person), so it includes everyone?
four: Hall, Rachel. "Public Praxis: A Vision for Critical Information Literacy in Public Libraries." Public Library Quarterly 29.2 (2010): 162-175.
This article critiques the place that information literacy holds in public libraries. It observes that teaching information literacy is a big concern in school and academic libraries, but it often gets overlooked in public libraries, or confused with the concepts of life-long learning and user education. The author advocates for centering information literacy as a non-value neutral skill and for librarians to become more assertive while still not positioning themselves as authoritative. I really like the focus on outreach and active programming in this article. I also appreciate the recognition that information literacy isn't a neutral skill -- that people start out from different places and simply knowing how to use a job board isn't necessarily going to get someone a job, for instance. I think that as a profession that seeks to serve everyone, it is important for librarians to be aware of privilege and how access to information plays into it.
In response to discussion in class and posts in a couple of blogs, I just want to encourage people not to make assumptions about the people who would use closed captions. Closed captions aren't just for the deaf, the way that many people in class seem to be assuming. They're also for people who are hard of hearing, people who have trouble processing spoken language (especially spoken language that's not from a person who's physically present), English language learners whose reading comprehension may be better than their spoken language comprehension, and people who don't have or don't want to use sound on their computers. Also, closed captioning in another language is a way to extend support to speakers of that language without having to produce another resource entirely from scratch. I agree that captions are not always necessary for all people at all times, but I strongly think that they should be an option whenever possible.
@Kristin (or any other readers who may have an answer): do you know if any of the screencasting tools we went over allows for optional captions that a viewer could switch on or off?
two: Weiner, Sharon A. "On Information Literacy in the Library Workforce." Serials Review 36.4 (2010): 204-204.
I thought that this was an interesting article for the Professional Practice in Library and Information Centers class. It's basically asking whether libraries are expecting the same kind of information literacy that outside companies are demanding of their employees. I have to say that before coming across this article, this is something that never would have occurred to me to worry about. I guess I assumed that since we're in the information literacy business (or, at least, information literacy is a major part of our job description), we'd all be pretty information literate, but according to Weiner, that's not necessarily the case.
three: Stern, Caroline and Trishanjit Kaur. "Developing Theory-Based, Practical Information Literacy Training for Adults." The International Information & Library Review. 42.2 (2010): 69-74.
This article suggests that libraries can learn from businesses when it comes to designing educational experiences for adult learners. The authors advocate moving away from traditional educational models, which they describe as being "systematic, cumulative, sustained, and periodically graded for achievement," and towards a training model borrowed from the corporate world, which "focuses on an immediate need or opportunity and builds on the existing expertise, education, or interest of the targeted learner." The article references the ADDIE system of design we looked at last week, which reassures me that the model is widely used and not just a figment of Veldof's imagination.
Feminist/classics geek moment: why is the teaching of adults labled "andragogy" (ἀνήρ = man)? Is there some reason why men are privileged in this process? Is there an equivalent practice of "gynegogy" (γυνή = woman) if only women are involved? Why can't the term be "anthropogogy" (ἄνθρωπος = person), so it includes everyone?
four: Hall, Rachel. "Public Praxis: A Vision for Critical Information Literacy in Public Libraries." Public Library Quarterly 29.2 (2010): 162-175.
This article critiques the place that information literacy holds in public libraries. It observes that teaching information literacy is a big concern in school and academic libraries, but it often gets overlooked in public libraries, or confused with the concepts of life-long learning and user education. The author advocates for centering information literacy as a non-value neutral skill and for librarians to become more assertive while still not positioning themselves as authoritative. I really like the focus on outreach and active programming in this article. I also appreciate the recognition that information literacy isn't a neutral skill -- that people start out from different places and simply knowing how to use a job board isn't necessarily going to get someone a job, for instance. I think that as a profession that seeks to serve everyone, it is important for librarians to be aware of privilege and how access to information plays into it.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Week Two Response
The readings about how to use technology to produce better pathfinders and tutorials really interested me. I remember how last semester, in 647, one of our assignments was to create a pamphlet teaching how to use a particular database. Knowing how to use a utility to annotate screenshots would have been beneficial to the assignment, rather than having to use a long text description underneath each of the screenshots explaining what actions the user should be taking. I also thought how the assignment could have been extended beyond producing a flier for the database, which is nice and all, but not something that the average user is going to turn to right away, and instead of or in addition to the flier producing an online tutorial of the sort that a user of an online resource is going to expect to find (and which would fit nicely into our online portfolios, by the way). One thing I worry about for online tutorials with voiceovers, like the one described in the Yelinek et al. article, is how accessible they are to users who, for whatever reason, aren't able to use the sound on their computer. This could be because they are deaf, their computer doesn't have working speakers, or because their only access to a computer is in a public lab where noise is prohibited. If vital information is being provided through the sound, and not duplicated in any other way, like through subtitles or a transcript of the tutorial being made available, then people who cannot use sound are missing out.
I also liked Veldof's discussion of the instructional design process. It does sound overwhelming at first and like a lot of work "just for a workshop," but really, it's just an application of the scientific method to a social science. Make background observations about what needs to be done and the environment in which it must be accomplished, make a hypothesis about the best way to teach the required skills, design an experiment that includes measurable outcomes, carry out the experiment, and use the results from the experiment as background information for your next round of experiments. And with each iteration of this process, the amount of background information the experimenter has increases, making designing and implementing future experiments much simpler.
I also liked Veldof's discussion of the instructional design process. It does sound overwhelming at first and like a lot of work "just for a workshop," but really, it's just an application of the scientific method to a social science. Make background observations about what needs to be done and the environment in which it must be accomplished, make a hypothesis about the best way to teach the required skills, design an experiment that includes measurable outcomes, carry out the experiment, and use the results from the experiment as background information for your next round of experiments. And with each iteration of this process, the amount of background information the experimenter has increases, making designing and implementing future experiments much simpler.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Week One Response
Of expert knowledge and learning...
One of the things that the readings for this week most strongly reminded me of was the transition between the Intro to Computer Science with Robots and the Data Structures classes at my undergraduate institutions. The intro course was focused on learning the fundamentals of Python and basic programming. The class was extremely easy if you could give a clear set of simple, step-by-step directions, and if you could recognize that the problems that were asked on the tests were actually the same as the ones that were done as homeworks and in class, just with different names for the various parts, the same way that you can use the same equations to solve word problems that seem to be about completely different things in lower-level math classes. On the face of it, this would seem to be an example of the expert-level grouping problems around general principles instead of around surface characteristics treated on pages 37-39 of the textbook. It was recognizing that the algorithms underlying the problems were in fact very similar, although the way in which the problems presented themselves seemed on first look to be entirely different.
However, the transition between the intro CS course and Data Structures was difficult for me, showing that perhaps I had not learned as much from the class as I had thought. Where the intro CS course was focused on learning Python and being able to write programs that did something and that worked, Data Structures was much more about understanding how computers represented data on an abstract level and with understanding the reasons why someone would choose to use a particular data structure for a particular application, and then moving from an abstract data model to a representation in the computer's language. I felt lost for the first few weeks, since I felt that very little I learned from the intro class prepared me for working at this level. Being able to figure out that all the word problems asked on the test were really the same problem is an entirely different kind of abstraction than being able to understand how a computer is storing your data in order to design an efficient and logical program.
One of the things that the readings for this week most strongly reminded me of was the transition between the Intro to Computer Science with Robots and the Data Structures classes at my undergraduate institutions. The intro course was focused on learning the fundamentals of Python and basic programming. The class was extremely easy if you could give a clear set of simple, step-by-step directions, and if you could recognize that the problems that were asked on the tests were actually the same as the ones that were done as homeworks and in class, just with different names for the various parts, the same way that you can use the same equations to solve word problems that seem to be about completely different things in lower-level math classes. On the face of it, this would seem to be an example of the expert-level grouping problems around general principles instead of around surface characteristics treated on pages 37-39 of the textbook. It was recognizing that the algorithms underlying the problems were in fact very similar, although the way in which the problems presented themselves seemed on first look to be entirely different.
However, the transition between the intro CS course and Data Structures was difficult for me, showing that perhaps I had not learned as much from the class as I had thought. Where the intro CS course was focused on learning Python and being able to write programs that did something and that worked, Data Structures was much more about understanding how computers represented data on an abstract level and with understanding the reasons why someone would choose to use a particular data structure for a particular application, and then moving from an abstract data model to a representation in the computer's language. I felt lost for the first few weeks, since I felt that very little I learned from the intro class prepared me for working at this level. Being able to figure out that all the word problems asked on the test were really the same problem is an entirely different kind of abstraction than being able to understand how a computer is storing your data in order to design an efficient and logical program.
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