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

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.

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.

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.