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.
Monday, January 31, 2011
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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