Week 10: Reading Reflection

"Online Webinars! Interactive Learning Where Our Users Are: The Future of Embedded Librarianship" Susan E. Montgomery


My thoughts while reading the beginning of this article were along the lines of "Why does she think she needs to convince people that college students use the internet a lot?" That's pretty much a given. It was a given in 2010, too. She also uses statistics on internet use and cell phone/computer ownership from 2005 and 2006--though it's only been six or seven years, they're very outdated. And they don't take smartphones into account, because smartphones didn't really exist in 2006. Add that to clunky phrases like "as online use by students continues to grow..." (310) and I'm just confused. I can't tell exactly whom the audience for the paper is--I'd assume it's librarians, but then she makes statements like "Librarians are familiar with the value of using Webinars for instruction" (309), which sort of goes against the notion that they don't know or believe that college students do a lot of "online use." She makes a decent argument for why webinars are useful, but I'm not sure it really needed to be made, at least not to the people who are reading this article.

"The Embedded Librarian Online or Face-to- Face: American University’s Experiences" Michael A. Matos, Nobue Matsuoka-Motley, and William Mayer


This essay has a lot of typos, and it's really bothering me. "Verses" substituted for "versus" makes my head explode. I hope it was actually a typo and not a real misunderstanding.


Anyway... I'm not particularly into this idea of moving library collections directly into the departments they correspond to. The article gives a few logistical and administrative ways in which the plan can go wrong, but to me it seems that physically splitting apart the library by topic breaks down the ability of a researcher to make connections across fields. This particularly dangerous in humanities fields where the research for one subject has a large overlap with another. Obviously there are already many specialized libraries for things like film, music, engineering, et cetera... but I think encouraging students to think of the library resources as a whole, rather than considering them as a set of unconnected sections that happen to be in physical proximity to each other, makes for better research.


I do think that the emphasis on building direct relationships with faculty and students in a given department is spot-on, though, and that connecting the collection to the department is important. It should just stay physically in the library.


I feel like I'm overwhelmingly negative in this post... I do think both articles bring up interesting and useful points. The weaknesses are just easier to write about.

I'm also not completely sure how I feel about webinars as a library tool. Both of the articles talk about the need to have librarians accessible often, and via a broad range of tools--the idea of webinars doesn't seem to fit so well to me, because (unlike pre-recorded tutorials or real-time chat) they are time-based and have to be scheduled. Students want individualized answers when they actually need them, and scheduling time for a webinar among other commitments is difficult. I think they're a good teaching tool, but one-on-one interaction and accessibility seems more important to me.


But......... that might just be because it was so hard for me to find time to do one. Archiving past webinars is definitely a huge help.

Week 10: Class Reflection

Last week was one-shot workshop week in class, and I have to say that everyone in my group taught me something totally new... so clearly they were a success!

The workshop that Laura and I did was intended to be an introduction to talking to patrons about ebooks and the issues surrounding them, a topic that we'd noticed was conspicuously absent from most of the blogs and had only been briefly mentioned in class. In my opinion, engaging patron interest and action in issues like these is key to deciding how we as librarians deal with them--after all, the ebooks are there (or not there) for the patrons.

Our 'icebreaker' went over extremely well... because it involved construction paper. People made some awesome signs to alert patrons to the ebook situation, and we posted a few of them in the SI lounge after class, to remind our friends and classmates that books do still matter (do I sound bitter? I'm only a little...). People had great ideas, and they definitely set the tone for the rest of our session. We'd have liked to have some more discussion about the ethics and advantages of involving patrons in this sort of discourse, but that will have to wait until we have more time.

Our whole group was primarily concerned with issues related to activism and the changing role of libraries, so everything worked together well--it was like our own little conference on controversy in libraries! Mary and Ashley once again provided a break from the theme (they had the only non-death-related reading for the book club) with a fun lesson on how to craft a thesis statement.  I had fun reimagining my Pretentious English Major youth.

Week 9: Class Reflection

I love reading everyone else's blogs before I write mine, because you all give me so much more to think about than I'd come up with on my own! This post is sort of an amalgamation of things I expressed in comments on your entries from this week.

Last week in class we discussed the Toronto Public Library's decision to put advertising on the back of their due date slips (I think the fact that we don't just call these 'receipts' is interesting, by the way). About half the class was against it, but there didn't seem to be a lot of agreement as to why it was such a bad thing. Terms like "slippery slope" and "commercializing" were thrown around--but the only really convincing con I heard was from the article we read in class. It suggested that legislators, seeing a library producing some revenue of its own, would take this as a signal that the library didn't require public funding--rather than as a last-ditch attempt to make up for an already-scanty allocation. This fits in with what I thought of reading Mary's entry, in which she (rightly) stated that worrying about libraries being empty of patrons is not the most effective use of our time. I agreed with her, but also realized that libraries being full and vibrant doesn't necessarily mean they stay funded.

The only thing we have to be afraid of is that legislators, school boards, and universities don’t necessarily know that–and they’re the ones with the money. It’s encouraging to me that every time Ohio’s evil state government slashes funding to libraries (I gather this happens elsewhere too, but I’m most familiar with my home state), there’s a huge amount of public outcry. Unfortunately it doesn’t always accomplish much. So, we don’t need to worry that nobody will come to libraries, or that they’ll fade away from lack of interest–but we need to make sure the legislators know that as well as we do, and have no excuse to take money away from the very important resource we provide.

I'm not positive that putting ads on due date slips will cause this to happen--especially if libraries communicated to legislators exactly why and under what ideology and constraints they are implementing this measure. Creating a discourse with the people who hold the purse strings is every bit as important as communicating with patrons--because, unfortunately, individual voters only have so much power, and governments have quite a lot.

Additionally, I think a lot of the backlash against the advertisements comes from a wish to see libraries as non-commercial, and a knee-jerk feeling that all advertising is a bad thing. What if the ads were for local animal shelters, or charitable organizations, or local businesses that have been part of the community for decades? The strip club example in class was hilarious, but realistically there would be plenty of space for librarians and administrators to decide who can advertise on library paper. I don't see this as being in conflict with the directive to provide free and un-censored information, because advertisements are unsolicited--unless patrons ask for strip club ads, in which case the library might have a bigger problem.

Week 6: Reading Reflection

The two Library Journal articles assigned this week, by Barbara Hoffert and Beth Dempsey, both focus on the new types of book club culture that center around libraries. One of the key ideas is that libraries do well to provide some sort of book club kit, or being able to provide a selection of thematically/topically related books for a club that does not all want to read the same thing. The Ann Arbor District Library provides Book Club to Go kits, which include ten copies of a book, a copy of the DVD (if available), and some supplementary materials in relation to the author and material. They also include evaluation forms, which allow readers to give the library feedback on the kit. I haven't looked into these kits very closely, but now I'm intrigued--I haven't seen them circulate very much, but I bet they do, since Ann Arbor is exactly the sort of community the Dempsey article mentions as being enthusiastic about book clubs (educated, well-off, et cetera). The titles are predictable, Water for Elephants, The Kite Runner, and easy classics like The Great Gatsby. Good books, but ones that people are likely to have read before, either in school or picked up off a bestseller list. Most of the books mentioned in the two articles are more ambitious, or more obscure. I imagine this works best when there's one person, a librarian or other type of leader, selecting the material and giving a rationale for that selection.

I'm not particularly familiar with book clubs, but I imagine them (at their best) to be pretty much like all the literature classes I took in college. Without anyone actually trying to teach anything directly--since literature classes are always a combined effort to situate the historical fact of a given writer/text and further the critical reading and writing skills of students (literature studies is all about transfer)--but with pretty much the same result. At their worst, they would probably make me tear my hair out--but I've had classes like that too. It's all about the people who are there. I'm up for trying one.

Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching reading: beyond the plot." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.

"Reading is invisible," writes Metzger. There aren't drafts to check, and no ability to command a student, "show your work," like in a math class. As soon as I read that statement, I thought, "that's what's wrong with reading education! That's why it doesn't work!" 
 

To bring in our discussions about data-retention and test-based teaching (and employ some of Metzger's conclusions along with my own speculation): those "bad" methods aren't the greatest way to teach most things, but they're also better than nothing. When it comes to reading, though... reading is purely skill, not factual knowledge (you can argue that knowing the alphabet and having some command of phonetics works this way, but knowing those things doesn't necessarily mean you can read in a meaningful sense). The institution of reading comprehension tests is a way to gauge whether people can read, but they don't (unless they're really, really craftily written) reveal anything about how they read--so unless a teacher is particularly intuitive, how are they supposed to know where things have gone wrong?

The description of the Socratic Seminar seems clever to me, and like something that would work really well to engage a group of non-proficient readers... but like something that would have people already comfortable with literature chomping at the bit (well, that's my feeling, anyway), and so should be not be used as a panacea teaching method. So I'll leave this article with one hysterically true fact: "Cinderella is not about foot fetishes or love throughout the universe."
 

The other article on Socratic Seminars, by Lynda Tredway, seems to focus on using them to compare different texts, rather than to excavate a single excerpt (Can I add here that I hate when teachers use excerpts instead of whole novels or stories? Sure, you can learn analytic skills from them, but you're cheating the text out of true criticism and the students out of a comprehensive understanding of what they're reading. What works for nonfiction does not always apply to fiction.), which starts off in a good place by assuming that making connections between two texts is the point of the lesson, rather than something to be done later once one has honed one's skills on a single piece of writing. I'm not sure that being able to solve ethical quandaries is what I'd list as the main goal of education, but I'm willing to consider it as a serious aim.

Last but not least... Mark Prensky's proposition that a school lead the wave of the future by getting rid of all its paper books, and forcing students to do likewise. This is the third or fourth time I've read it, and it still makes me want to laugh myself sick. Not just because he very deliberately misunderstands both the idea of hypertext and the complications of producing digital texts, but because he is just so. darn. proud. of. himself. So I'll save my snark for class.

Week 3: Reading Reflection

Bawden, David and Lyn Robinson. "The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies"Journal of Information Science 2009 35: 18.  
This article caught my eye because it seemed like something that would be assigned for SI 500. It draws some interesting--if well-traveled--parallels between the current tech/data boom and other historical events like the invention of printing. It also suggests that many of the perceived problems with contemporary information practices are defined and exaggerated by those in the information profession, and asserts a need to verify the existence and importance of these problems before mounting efforts to repair them. I do not like the accusatory tone the article takes on this point, but I agree that in some cases we may tend to spot problems that are only momentary and will be resolved by the simple fact that humans are adaptable creatures. The authors seem to agree with this, tracing problems of information overload from antiquity through the present, not as an escalating problem but as an ongoing and ever-changing constant.

Buschman, John. "Information Literacy, 'New' Literacies, and Literacy." The Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 95-118. 
This article takes a look at shifting approaches to information literacy among the academic community. In particular, this includes the exposure of privileged, academic forms of literacy and attention to emerging and marginalized texts and readers. There is also a strong emphasis on distancing the connotation of "information literacy" from what Buschman sees as the historic form--the actual ability to read text. I think this is a smart move, especially since both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled forms of literacy are facing plenty of problems right now. And the fact that a distressing number of Americans can't read at all is a separate problem from the fact that some other Americans can't successfully navigate a web search. By separating the two, there is a better chance that real problems can be isolated and addressed.

Lorenzo, George, and Charles Dziuban. "Ensuring the Net Generation is Net Savvy." ELI PAPER 2: 2006. September 2006. 
This paper is basically an explication of challenges in information literacy faced by people--namely college students--who are so accustomed to having web access that they don't think about how they make use of it. Most of it is familiar, and it's the sort of topic that gets thrown around at SI on a daily basis, but it's nice to have it all laid out in one place. Some of the ideas in the article definitely show the wear and tear of six years, but most of it seems relevant to the current situation.

Week 3: Class Reflection

A concept that really struck me in class last week was the separation between teaching people who are your students versus teaching people who are you peers. The former is a pretty well-explored subject, so I'll leave that out for the moment, but the latter is a situation that comes up a lot without necessarily being discussed, or at not least anywhere I can hear.

With a few exceptions (tutoring jobs), everyone I've ever formally or academically taught anything to has been either my peer or, in some cases, my superior. In the case of the latter it is usually a matter of showing a boss or professor how to use a piece of technology they haven't encountered before. This sort of instruction tends to be fairly quick and more or less informal--they look over my shoulder while I click through whatever it is they need to understand, and then I go back to whatever I was doing and they go on to use the tool I've just explained to them.

When it comes to teaching peers, though, I feel like I have a deeper experience. Being the sole English major in a social circle packed with engineers meant that I spent a good portion of undergrad helping people patch up papers and lab reports, often from scraps that could only very loosely be defined as coherent writing. I always demanded that we go over the piece together, rather than just fixing it myself, so that they could see why I made the changes I did, and maybe learn how to do it for next time. I don't mean to make my friends sound illiterate--they were all very intelligent people, and I needed their help just as often as they needed mine. They just weren't writers. We were peers, more or less alike in age and experience and status, but I had a skill set that most of them lacked completely.

Despite the lingering awe-of-the-reference desk that some library patrons seem to exhibit, it seems to me that most of them see librarians as some hybrid of teacher and peer. Especially in public libraries, our jobs are likely bounded by similar hours and similar wages to a great number of our patrons. Some classes have encouraged me to approach library customer service in an open, direct manner that suggests a peer-type relationship to the patron, while others have suggested a more directly teacher-like strategy. My personality is more suited to the former option, and so I am thinking about my college friends and their lab reports--when I helped them edit their papers, they helped me write code for my blog, or figure out the calculus for a particularly brutal astronomy class. We traded.

So what am I trading with library patrons when I help them? The only thing I can think of is that all experience of this type is helpful--the more people I help, the more resources I am familiar with and the more able I am to interpret the kinds of questions that patrons ask. Do you think there's something else, or is it mostly a one-way exchange?

Week 2 Reflection

In our first class we discussed the importance of teaching in libraries, and how the place of the librarian has in many cases shifted from behind the reference desk to more mobile, personal interactions. My entire interest in the field hinges on this shift--before I decided to become a librarian, I was planning on being a professor. I love teaching, and I'm starting to think I am going to like teaching as a librarian more than I'd like teaching as a professor. Of course, I'm aiming for a combination of different types of teaching--college-level courses on literature (if I'm as lucky as my old boss at the Fales Library) as well as day-to-day tasks like showing patrons how to find the resources they need.

The text on creating one-shot library workshops seems like a useful one, though it's a bit difficult to gauge from just one chapter. Some of the language rubbed me the wrong way, especially the assertions that certain things will automatically go wrong, and that people won't be able to get along peacefully--I'm sure the author only means to cover worst-case scenarios, but this sort of pessimism always gets to me (being constantly told "you're going to have team conflicts" in 501 while my team got along fantastically didn't work for me either). There seems to be an assumption that the hypothetical team members have never worked together before, which seems unlikely to me. Most libraries don't have a big enough staff for people in the same department to be total strangers to one another.

That said, the ADDIE method seems like a solid guideline for this sort of project, and probably for most other types of project. The emphasis on background analysis is key, since in many cases this sort of workshop would be initiated simply by pinpointing a needed piece of instruction. Analyzing the situation will allow the workshop-creator to see the problem in context, and possibly identify related topics that can be incorporated into the lesson plan. The production of a workshop template that can be modified for future use and shared between different instructors is another excellent point, and justifies the rather extensive amount of time needed to go through the ADDIE process. In the case of the online tutorials mentioned in Johnston, creating a high-quality initial product is essential, as it will be used more or less without oversight by a librarian or other instructor.

Overall, I think the One-Shot reading does a lot to acknowledge the time and budget constraints that librarians attempting to implement these methods, but doesn't necessarily give solutions to these limitations. Perhaps the rest of the book provides strategies for working around a paucity of resources as well as concrete examples of how to implement the very appealing strategies presented in this excerpt.

Week 1 Reflection

This post (and others in the future) consists of reflections on sections of the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, which can be found here.

Chapter 1

The idea that teachers need to pay attention to the preexisting notions students bring to the classroom is extremely important, and not just in the case of small children who may or may not know that the Earth goes around the Sun. The (wonderful, beautiful, inspiring, irreplaceable, and potentially incredibly dangerous) advent of the internet means that all sorts of information is available to anyone with web access and a bit of curiosity. A well-educated person knows that not all the information is valid, and has a general idea of how to figure out what is fact (or at least useful opinion) and what is random raving, but young students and adults who haven't learned the kind of skepticism that comes as second nature to academics of all stripes can easily end up with information that is at best confusing and at worst dead wrong. When taking a student's preconceived notions into account, a teacher's job is not only to repair faulty ideas but to impart the methodology for evaluating ideas and their sources at all times. The ability to critique not only ideas suggested by texts or other people but one's own ideas is a critical skill for being a consumer of information in any context.

From my experience, I feel like schools focus on citing sources more than vetting them--I have sat through at least two anti-plagiarism lectures per year since I started college in 2004 (not to mention all the threats and stern faces they applied to the topic in high school), but only a handful of instructors have offered strategies for choosing and evaluating research materials. This aligns with the book's proposition that current educational methods are too focused on assignment performance rather than actual learning. A student who is writing a paper based on his or her own conclusions and gathered information is far less likely to plagiarize than one who is trying to construct a "perfect" answer to a pre-set question (producing the paper he or she thinks an instructor wants to see).

One of the most important roles that librarians can fill is picking up where teachers fail and presenting students with the means to perform thorough and effective research, both in academics and areas of personal interest. Unfortunately, limited time and resources mean that librarians often do not have time to impart this knowledge, even if students have time to hear it. In my high school experience, school librarians were mostly called in to reinforce the endless anti-plagiarism spiel and to point students at a small handful of resources that were quickly discarded by anyone writing something deeper than a ninth grade term paper. In college, they were so busy dealing with circulation issues and explaining MLA citations to confused undergrads that they didn't do much beyond answer specific questions. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, seeing as budgets and time aren't going to magically multiply any time soon, but I think increased communication between teachers/professors and librarians is probably the key.

My last thought on this chapter is that I must have had a much better (high school) education than it felt like I was getting, at least compared to the educational styles that this book is critiquing. It still bored the heck out of me on a regular basis, but at least I know they were trying?


Chapter 2

This chapter focuses on the way that experts in a given subject approach problems within their field, as opposed to the methods used by novices in the same field. The fact that expertise on a topic does not confer the ability to teach that subject is one of the most prominent points, and one that I think deserves further discussion. The last tech class I took was taught by a professor whose ability to clearly (and humorously) explain the very basic programming concepts he was teaching made a somewhat startling contrast to his seriously impressive CV. Part of his advantage, he explained, is that he is not a natural programmer--he is talented and has many years of experience, but he came to the field because it was fascinating, not because it was intuitive for him, so he learned it in a way that was probably much like the simple, systematic way he taught it to us. He wasn't trying to teach us to be experts, but to think like experts--using a set of basic tools and strategies to approach problems in context, rather than individually.

I've found throughout my education that the most important quality in an instructor is a somewhat unacademic enthusiasm for a subject--having an emotional response to a topic keeps people a bit off balance, causing them to constantly reevaluate their position. Being able to observe an instructor's shifting thought processes is one of the best learning tools I've ever found, because it allows me to mirror and to reform those processes in my own mind. Sometimes my conclusions are the same, and sometimes they're different, but an expert who can make his or her own cognition transparent has a much better chance of actually teaching a novice than one who cannot reveal the way that he or she comes to conclusions. For this reason, I have a particular love for lecture-style classes, but only with a teacher whose lecture has this sort of openness. It is similar to the function of a seminar class, where different people's thoughts and opinions combine to bring the group as a whole to a new perspective.

Where do librarians fit into this? Well, as librarians, our primary enthusiasm is for information (at least in theory). By drawing students/patrons into our methods for finding information, we can show them how to think like an information-gathering professional in a personal, tailored way. Like the programming professor above, we can show people how to approach research as a set of strategies and methods applicable to any situation, rather than a means for finding the quickest, simplest answer to one specific problem.