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
I agree with you that libraries should carefully evaluate whether or not webinars are a valuable tool for their library versus having in-person workshops (then again, they should be doing with with any of their services!). I was, however, thinking that webinars could be useful for academic libraries who may not have enough staff-power to meet demand for in-person instruction.
ReplyDeleteDetails are meant to engage and call attention, which is exactly what the descriptions of the students do; whether or not they are apt descriptions, they produce a picture for the reader that slows reading down to allow more thought. As far as the Montgomery article, I think it's meant to be a general article that convinces librarians that online services and presences are important for the new college students these days, thus it is basic and spells everything out. Also, the Matos et al. article was a good piece with insights; unfortunately many publications of all types end up with some form of mistakes and typos, either from the author or even added in the editing process and they can't be entirely avoided.
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