Week Thirteen Response

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....