Week 13 Reading and Webinar Reflection

First, the webinars: we were lucky to go near the end, so we had the chance to see a lot of our classmates' webinars and adjust ours to include things we really liked about theirs. For example, a couple of the webinars had a single chat moderator who stayed on the chat the entire time, and greeted participants by name as they logged onto the webinar. We thought that worked really well to make people feel engaged and included, so we did that. Overall, I thought most of the webinars seemed to go really well. As with any kind of instruction, I think it's a good idea to be open to questions but not NEED them to fill up time; having a lot of material, some of which can easily be cut out if necessary, is a good way to accomplish that. We didn't make it to 30 minutes, but we made a valiant effort. I think a couple of our evaluations mentioned that we moved a little too fast; I know when I get nervous, I talk very quickly, which could have been part of it. Anyway, overall the webinars were a good experience, although scheduling time to view enough of them was a challenge.

This week's readings made some things about this course's structure more clear (I always wondered how KF was commenting so quickly on new blog entries, and now I know!) but as far as including the ideas as part of my work, I think it'll be a few years before I'm in any position to do that. I like the idea of making professional development a more collaborative and active process, instead of just logging hours in a classroom listening to someone explain things, but I don't think I'll have anyone to train for quite a while. I think these readings might have been more valuable to me at the beginning of the course, because they make some of the philosophical underpinnings of what we've been doing more clear, and it would have been nice to have that roadmap as we went through.

Since I'm pretty sure this will be my last entry in this blog, I just want to wrap it up by saying how much I've enjoyed this class; I've had a chance to get to know more of my classmates than I would have expected, and I've learned a lot of the kinds of things that academic libraries are looking for in their new hires. So thanks to all of you for making this such a great experience!

Week 12 Class Reflection

I seem to remember that we were supposed to blog about last week's class, but it doesn't say anything about it on the syllabus. I know we don't have any readings for this week, and since we spent most of last week's class talking about the webinar, which my team won't do until tomorrow, I don't have a whole lot to say. The process of putting the webinar together has been good so far; I like how the slides are coming together, we're opening with a neat little video, and we met with Greg G. at the Copyright Office to get feedback on our information. He was very helpful and made a couple of good points that we integrated into our materials.
Anyway, by next week I'll have done our webinar and seen four others, so I think I'll have a lot of understanding about those to share here, but for now I'm kind of tuckered out and I'm going to save my energy for putting on a super-exciting webinar tomorrow.

Week 11 Twitter and Class Reflection

Wow.
So, Twitter.
...
That's a whole lot of words coming at you, very fast. I'm not sure why SI 500 hasn't consisted entirely of talking about Twitter, because it's the epitome of information overload. I think the toughest thing for me to sort through right now is that I have a couple of friends from undergrad who are very entrenched in Twitter, updating several times each hour, all day long. I'm sure there's got to be some good way to sort people out and only see the stuff that's relevant. Maybe TweetDeck will be helpful? Using the #si643 hashtag 5 times this week was a challenge, since I don't really understand Twitter etiquette yet (Twittiquette?) and I don't want to accidentally screw things up by retweeting wrong or whatever. Oh, and the AALL followed me the first day I signed up, which is nice (and I'm sure they follow all of their members who follow them, so it's not a big deal) but it's kind of a lot of pressure, too. I feel like, if I say something, it had better be good enough for the AALL to read.
There are some good things, though. A whole lot of academic law libraries and academic law librarians tweet, so I'm following them. A couple of the librarians are pretty great, and I'm getting a little geek crush on them. Like the one who works at UIUC and does roller derby; I totally want to be her friend. AALL posts job openings, too. I'm hoping that the academic law libraries will as well, or maybe that someday I'll go to a job interview and someone will say, "Oh, I've read your tweets! They are so funny and insightful! You're hired!"
Or, you know, something like that.
As for last week's class, I really enjoyed hearing Paul Courant speak. I have to be honest, though; I don't feel any more certain about what embedded librarianship is or how it's applied in different contexts. The definitions of it vary so much from person to person that I think in order to have a meaningful discussion about it, you have to first set the parameters of the term; that would probably be a great seminar for a conference. And the more I use the phrase "embedded librarianship," the less I like it; it reminds me of ticks. They get embedded, too, if you go walking in the woods without your pants tucked into your boots. I'm sure it's one of those topics that's going to be trendy in librarianship, though, and I'll be glad I know what people are talking about when they discuss it.
Finally, I'm excited about the webinars; being able to choose which ones to attend will be nice, because it will let me nerd out about copyright some more. And we're talking about Creative Commons licensing, which I understand a little bit but will be able to learn a lot more about while we prepare the presentation.
Last thought: I'm sorry if I'm really inarticulate right now. Do you ever pick up the language and cadence of first-person narrators when you read a book, just temporarily? I didn't have the discipline to hold off on starting Feed until after finishing my homework, so I'm about 100 pages in and I think it's making me a bad writer today. It's very good so far, and thought-provoking (particularly in light of this week's 500 reading about ubiquitous computing) but the voice is kind of seeping into my brain and making it hard for me to form a sentence that doesn't use the word "like" or end in a question mark.

I Am Appalled.

As a scholar, a former attorney, and of course, a Badger, I find the GOP's abusive FOIA request for Professor Cronin's emails completely inappropriate. So do some other folks. And I'm posting this here because it's something that should concern anyone who will one day work in the public sector; that includes a lot of us in 643.

Week 10 Reading and Class Reflection

Last week’s class

I think the one-shot workshop was a good warm-up for the webinars, since it really drove home some of the issues faced by both the presenters and the audience. As a presenter, I felt a little frustrated to have such a big topic and so little time, and was glad that we put together handouts for our audience, since those made me feel like the things that we didn’t get to discuss would be available to them if they wanted to learn more. In the scope of our workshop, the quizzes that we opened with weren’t very useful by themselves, but they would have been fantastic if we actually were going to do a series of workshops. For example, a lot of people thought that ideas were protected by copyright, and the implications of that alone would make a great workshop.

As an audience member, my favorite workshops were those that taught something. Having a specific, manageable lesson made a workshop feel more relevant and more streamlined than having a vaguer goal of raising awareness or discussing an issue without trying to resolve anything. Our own workshop fell more on the “raising awareness” side, which I feel bad about considering that I preferred more educational workshops as a participant. I think having a nice balance of prepared presentation and group discussion was a positive as well. And a final observation: as much as I love cupcakes, they are a terrible idea for a situation like this. They’re messy and take more concentration to eat than cookies do, and dealing with the wrappers and napkins distracted the audience a little. Next time, they get nothing but a Werthers.

AALL Webinar

This was one of the few AALL webinars available to members for free, and it purported to explain the resources available with an AALL membership, which I thought might be useful since I’ve only been a member since October, and I’m sure there is information on the website that I haven’t explored yet. Unfortunately, most of what I learned from the webinar was what NOT to do in our upcoming webinars. For example, the screen consisted entirely of slides throughout most of the presentation; although the presenters referred to handouts that pre-registered participants received, there was no way to access those if you viewed the webinar from the archive, as I did. There were two brief polls during the webinar, one asking how long the participants had been AALL members and one asking which social networking tools were used by participants. The last 4 minutes or so consisted of a Q and A session, but the questions asked weren’t visible to participants; only the presenters could see them, and they repeated them back. Basically, the webinar consisted of presenters reciting a script over a series of Powerpoint slides. Aside from those few minutes of questions and the polls, there was no interactivity; if I had set aside time to attend this when it was scheduled, I would have been pretty upset, since the lack of interactivity meant that it wouldn’t have been any more helpful live than it was archived. I think interactivity really is key in producing an engaging webinar, and I hope to include live chat that is open to everyone in the webinar that we produce. I think the most irritating thing about the AALL webinar, though, was that it didn’t teach me anything new; all of the information that they presented is easily available on the website, so there was no educational value for me. So besides interactivity, I think the most important ingredient in a successful webinar is a definable take-away for the participants; people are likely to enjoy this kind of experience more when they can walk away from it feeling better-informed than they were when they logged on.

This Week’s Readings

Speaking of things that didn’t teach me much of anything, the Montgomery article would probably have felt a lot more revelatory back in January, before I spent several months immersed in technology applications for librarianship. Even then, the tone would have seemed a little out of date; I’m surprised that this was published in 2010, since most of the technology described has been around for years. The painstakingly thorough explanation of Facebook and sentences like, “If you want to connect with a college student today, go online,” would have made this feel outdated several years ago. I guess the references to Twitter were more contemporary, but even that has been around for a while now. I appreciate the intentions behind the piece, and that it tried to explain the relevance of embedded librarianship, but I think that the intended audience for this is a different kind of librarian than the kind SI produces: someone much less comfortable with social networking and emerging technology than are my peers and I.

How People Learn Chapter 7 raised some great points about the importance of knowing your subject matter when you teach. I imagine that the public library people won’t have found much value in this (or did you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!) but I thought it highlighted an issue I’ve been thinking about lately: how can an academic librarian effectively teach students how to research a discipline in which the librarian hasn’t been thoroughly trained? I’m getting a lot out of SI, but there’s absolutely no way I’d be prepared to teach law students if I hadn’t gone through law school myself. Worse yet, if I were going to become a law librarian without going to law school, I doubt if I’d have any idea how much knowledge I didn’t have. You’d have to learn on the job, which would make you basically useless for the first year or two. Why on earth does anyone hire a law librarian without a JD? In a law firm, librarians hardly ever have JDs; even in academic law libraries, they’re helpful but not always required. How can those librarians initially provide great service without knowing not only research methods but also the structure of the law itself? And yet, somehow that system must be working. Law firms are all about the bottom line, so it stands to reason that they hire librarians from whom they can get the best research at the most reasonable cost. What am I missing here?

And I know it probably sounds like I’m patting myself on the back an awful lot, but it’s actually more like breathing a sigh of relief that I’m not grossly under-qualified for the career I’ve chosen. By the time I graduate from SI, I’ll have almost ten years of post-secondary education under my belt. It feels good to know that most of that time and money wasn’t wasted, and that it will make me a better librarian.

I got a LOT out of the American University article about embedded librarians, though, mostly because it challenged my perception of what an embedded librarian would be. I guess one of the nice things about law librarianship is that law libraries are almost always either within or right next to the law schools that they serve; as an academic law librarian, I’ll probably be lucky enough to be physically present with the students and faculty. The online component is less well-established, though; I think most academic law libraries now provide reference via chat, usually on Meebo, but the business librarian in this article seems to have struck a great balance, complementing his physical interactions with the business school with his virtual ones. This article actually gave me kind of a genius idea, maybe, but I’m not going to write about it because I don’t want to jinx it. If it pans out, though, I will let you know. J Anyway, this was definitely my favorite of the readings. The nice thing about getting near the end of the semester is that all the disparate practical skills and pieces of information we’ve been accumulating for the past several months are starting to come together to form a coherent picture; this article really made that clear to me.

Week 9 Class Reflection

No reading this week, right? I'm pretty sure that's what the syllabus said, but it seems like such a lucky break that I keep thinking I must have read it wrong. Not that I don't usually enjoy our readings-- I do!-- but we have a paper due for 500 on the 27th, and having a chance to get a head start on it this weekend is awesome.

Anyway, without readings to think about, I've got last week's book club, last week's class, and the preparation for the one-shot workshop to cover here.

Book Club

There were a lot of good things about the book club: everyone chose readings that were interesting, and all of those short fiction pieces were a nice change from the usual things that we read and discuss in SI. There were cookies, which is always a win. And we had some pretty active dialogues about some of the stories. I don't think most of us had much success pretending to be high school or junior high students, but we tried. Overall, it was a good exercise, and I had a fun time with it; I don't really think I learned anything that I'll apply to my future employment, but not everything has to be totally on-point to be worthwhile.

Class

I really enjoyed hearing Bobbi Newman speak. I noticed that some people seemed to think that her refusal to become vehement about either side of the debate was somehow dishonest or fence-sitting, but I appreciated it. I like that she gave us an honest view of the HCOD situation without letting emotional appeals cloud the issue. Also, I appreciated getting new information regarding some publishers' refusing to sell or lease e-books to libraries at all. I really hadn't known that was going on, and it definitely makes the HarperCollins vs. libraries face-off even less black and white than it originally seemed. I think that a well-reasoned response to the situation requires an acknowledgment of the merits of arguments on both sides, and I also think that such an approach is the first step toward a satisfactory resolution.

I've been doing a lot of research on negotiation strategies lately for a project, and two major things from that research came to mind here. First, studies show that in negotiation, the initial "anchor" that is set will have an effect on the outcome, even if one doesn't intend for that to happen. HarperCollins set the anchor at 26 loans, so prior to this, in order for libraries to feel like they'd "won," they would have to negotiate for more than 26 loans out of a single e-book. Thinking about other publishers who won't allow e-book lending at all, however, forces a reevaluation of the anchor-- the number 26 is no longer the biggest problem, and HarperCollins might not even be the real enemy.

The other negotiation-oriented issue that I was thinking about is that parties with a strong attachment to one side of an issue can be irrational and stubborn, and often believe that their position has greater merit than it actually has. Research shows, however, that if those people are forced to actively consider the opposing view, e.g., write a essay arguing for that view as strongly as possible and supporting the argument with evidence, their own positions become less polarized. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes allows you to compromise more effectively, which improves outcomes for everyone involved.

Basically, what I'm saying is that this HCOD issue is one that gets people pretty fired up, obviously, and it would be easy for the opposing sides to get so emotionally attached to their individual positions that they couldn't effectively negotiate a positive outcome. Bobbi's balanced perspective seemed to me like one that can help prevent that from happening.

Prep for this week's One-Shot Workshop

FUN. We're talking about copyright versus ethics, and putting together the information for the workshop has got me nerding out a little. I'm excited for the presentations, and to see what other groups have come up with. And I don't want to ruin the surprise, but I think there's a solid chance that there will be baked goods involved, so if you're in our group, save some room!

I Wholeheartedly Endorse This Plan.

Exam time just got awesome at Yale Law.

Week 8 Reading Reflection

I had actually never read the ALA’s code of ethics until today; strange, right? I think it’s one of those things that just slipped through the cracks. Honestly, I was a little arrogant when I approached it, thinking that there really couldn’t be much there. I think that’s grounded in my experience as an attorney; before you’re admitted to the bar, you have to pass an exam on professional responsibility, and you can take a full semester course in law school to prepare if you want to. I didn’t, but I did study for quite a while before taking the MPRE. So next to that, the ALA’s code of ethics actually is kind of lightweight, in terms of how much information there is to deal with. But even though it’s brief, I could see how there actually could be some significant ethical quandaries in librarianship.

For example, I remember the outcry when the Library of Congress blocked Wikileaks, and as I was reading I thought, “They must have updated this to make a point about the situation.” But then I saw the date, and realized that it had been this way when the Wikileaks incident occurred. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to balance your clearly-stated ethical principles as a librarian with your obligations as a government employee; I’m glad I’m not the one who had to make that judgment call. I think the code does a good job of addressing potential problems in general enough terms to make the principles broadly applicable. I also think the position on intellectual property is a little bit of a cop-out, since 17 words are hardly sufficient to give librarians a real idea how to deal with potential copyright issues, but that’s just my hang-up.

As for the reading on creating a library assignment workshop for university faculty, I don’t really have much to say. I loved that it was included here, and I definitely recognized some of my experiences as an undergrad and as a grad student among the descriptions of assignment types. I can see this being really useful when I start working as a librarian, and I’ve filed it away for then.

Since I’m one of the people who couldn’t make it to class last week, I obviously don’t have any thoughts on the book clubs so far. But I’ve gone over our readings for Monday’s book club, and I’m struck by how different the stories are; I’m looking forward to hearing what my classmates have to say about them.

HCOD

Oh boy.

So, I had already read quite a bit about this issue, but it had all been commentary and calls for boycotts. This time around, I read the official statements from HarperCollins and OverDrive, as well as discussions by a few blog authors on both sides of the issue. And… this is kind of a mess.

First of all, I think that people should probably stop invoking the First Sale Doctrine. It doesn’t work here; HarperCollins has been very careful to make it clear that e-books are licensed, not sold, which takes them out of the realm of the First Sale Doctrine. One of the reasons the FSD came into being was that a physical work is hard to track after its initial sale, so just as a matter of practical policy, it doesn’t make sense to let a copyright holder try to control a work after it’s purchased. But a license is another beast altogether; you can call this morally unjustifiable, but you simply cannot call it illegal.

Having said that, do I think that this stinks? Yes. I do, and not even for the sake of the library or libraries with which I’ll someday be affiliated; as Jason Griffey pointed out, the impact of this on academic libraries is likely to be negligible. But it will be rough for public libraries, and some of the possible repercussions and/or “solutions” (I’m looking at you, Martin Taylor) are unacceptable. Not to mention that posting this information on a site called “Library Love Fest” is so ridiculously ironic that it blows my mind.

So the only remaining question is, what do I think should happen here? Well, here comes capitalism to the rescue: voting with your wallet is a solid way to fight back. It might even do some good; at the very least, HarperCollins might bend a little as a way to pour oil on the choppy waters of public opinion. Putting the squeeze on public libraries is like kicking a puppy because it bit you with its tiny little puppy teeth; even if you think you’re in the right, no one else is going to agree with you. Unless they hate puppies.

Boycott aside, I think that to resolve this to everyone’s satisfaction, we really are going to have to stop treating e-books like traditional books. I know that some librarians argue that the unpredictable nature of the licensing will make it impossible to budget, and that’s a fair point. Eventually, I think this situation will go the way of so many research databases currently used in academic libraries—subscription services. Instead of licensing a single title and lending it 26 times before re-purchasing, I think that libraries will purchase a general license annually, covering a set number of “loans” of any of the books in the catalog. Maybe publishers will create different tiers within that catalog, adjusting price structure based on the contents of each tier. This would allow libraries to create a predictable annual budget while still letting publishers and authors profit from their work; authors’ profits could be determined in a manner similar to that used by the RIAA in their licensing.

This idea probably has lots of flaws; if it were perfect, someone in the industry would presumably have suggested it already. Or maybe it's been suggested lots of times, and I just haven't read enough to know it. HarperCollins definitely didn’t make the brightest move in the world here, and I don’t think the precise boundaries of their current position will stick. But as multiple bloggers noted, we can’t treat e-books like their paper brethren. The new medium demands a new approach to lending, and I hope one can be developed without too much ideological bloodshed.

****

See, I promised last week that I’d make up for the short and crabby blog entry with a long one this week; I think it’s fair to say that I delivered (if anyone is even still reading at this point.)

Week 7 Reading and Class Reflection

This is definitely going to be my shortest blog post of the semester, because I don't really have anything to say right now. I'm in the group that's doing the 3/14 presentations, and I'd like to have those readings fresh in my mind for next week, so I'll be reading them next weekend. Could I read them now to blog about them, and then again next week to prepare for the discussion? Probably. But that doesn't seem very efficient, considering that I sometimes struggle to make it through the week's reading ONE time, never mind twice. So... I hope this doesn't sound lazy, but since my spring "break" consisted of approximately 40 hours of law library duties in D.C., punctuated by sleepless nights set to a soundtrack of world's most incompetent street musician trying to play the Sesame Street theme song on his saxophone, I'm just not in a place right now where I have time or energy to spare. That being said, even if spring break wasn't really restful or rejuvenating, it was an amazing learning experience, and I'm really glad I went. I'm just not going back to school with a whole new lease on life or anything.

And speaking of learning experiences, I also don't have anything to say about the one from last week's class, because there was so much unplowed snow that I couldn't get out of my driveway. You've got to love Michigan winters. D.C. absolutely had that going for it-- I got to wear flip flops! Outside!

So, I apologize if you were looking for some carefully considered ruminations on the book club readings or the guest speaker from last week; I promise a blog entry chock-full of reading reflections next week (although, again, none on this week's class since I won't be there tomorrow due to other academic obligations.)

Week 6 Reading and Class Reflection

I enjoyed all of the readings this week, but they were easier for me to digest individually than all in one big bite.

Metzger

Two things in this passage really stood out to me. First, when she mentioned that before the Socratic Seminars, students who discussed a piece of writing would then understand it—but wouldn’t be able to apply those strategies to a later piece of writing. I immediately thought, “Aha! They’re not able to transfer the knowledge!” And then I thought, “The way that I am transferring my knowledge about transfer!” And then it got a little too meta, and felt kind of like when you face two mirrors toward each other and they reflect back and forth into infinity. So I dropped that train of thought.

Second, I appreciated the point she made about how sometimes the teacher’s presence in a discussion derails it. I was noticing the same thing in another class last week; we were ostensibly having a discussion, but in reality, it was just a series of comments directed at the teacher. Few people were responding to one another, and when they did, they didn’t seem very self-assured about it. It felt like no one knew how to build on other students’ comments, and instead could only respond to them with a contrary statement, if they acknowledged them at all. I think that good group discussion is a skill that’s not much more developed in many grad students than it is in freshmen; I could use some work on it myself.

Hoffert

Some of the suggestions in here were great; I definitely liked the idea of having a book club based on a theme, instead of on a single book. I think there’s more potential for a variety of viewpoints that way. However, one part of this piece has NOT aged well: the discussion of bringing authors in to speak via videoconferencing. Even five years ago, when this was written, videoconferencing was apparently a big hassle that required cumbersome equipment. Basically, Skype has rendered that entire section of the article pointless. Also, the talk of conference calls seemed dated, since there’s rarely any reason to use conferencing technology that doesn’t include video anymore.

Tredway

I had a friend visiting last week; she was considering SI, and she wanted to tag along to my classes. Like me, she has a JD, but she graduated more recently than I did. Her immediate reaction to hearing that I had a 3-hour class was horror. She asked, “How can you stand three hours of lecture and questions?” I responded by reminding her that, “We don’t use the Socratic Method here.” That was basically the equivalent of me telling someone who thought she was about to witness an execution that, “We don’t use capital punishment here.”

To a law student, the Socratic Method is generally seen as a weapon used to force compliance with reading assignments and terrorize the unwary. There are a few professors who approach it the way that this article describes—at least, pretty close—but the Socratic Seminar described in this article would work best in a small class, not in a massive lecture. In the legal world, the Socratic Method usually means picking people (either at random or according to an unarticulated system) to answer specific questions about a case. It’s more of a spot-check to be sure people have done the reading than an actual give-and-take. Have you ever seen The Paper Chase? It’s pretty close to that. Seriously. I had a Torts professor during my first year of law school who seemed to think that it was actually supposed to be called “Socratic Hazing.” It didn’t really feel like a Thursday morning unless someone left the lecture hall in tears.

All of which is to say: the Socratic Seminar sounds like a lovely idea, but based just on the name, I was terrified of it. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my classmates choose to put it into action.

Last week’s class

I wasn’t sure how useful it would really be to discuss the evaluations of McGonagal, but that ended up being my favorite part. In the process, I reached some conclusions that I just hadn’t seen before about the role of various questions for different evaluators; questions that tested comprehension would probably be of little use to the event organizer, but they would be a goldmine to McGonagal. Likewise, McGonagal is unlikely to care about the crowd’s feelings on temperature and sound quality, but to someone at the library who is tasked with maintaining the infrastructure of the presentation, that information would be valuable. I know these aren’t ground-breaking ideas, but I hadn’t considered them before.

Also, I just wanted to mention that I’m super-excited to be learning more about book clubs this week, because in another class, I’m part of a group that’s evaluating book clubs at a public library. It’s time for some CROSS-POLLINATION IN MY HEAD-GARDEN. (…um. Yeah. Midterms have got me a little loopy.)

Darnton

Since this is for the Socratic Seminar demo, I don’t know if I should say much about this article or not. But I do have three thoughts to share:

1. 1. Finally a piece that really delves into an issue facing academic libraries! Exciting!

2. 2. Any day on which I learn a new word (jeremiad) is per se a good day.

3. 3. Having that many books easily available in digital format, for FREE, would be unbelievably cool. Copyright issues be damned.

Week 5 Reading and Class Reflection

The thing that stood out to me about class on 2/7 was watching and assessing the video about gaming providing a way to save the world. Based purely on the speaker's presentation, I'm skeptical; it seems like the kind of research claim that's great for getting grants but not really that practical in reality. I don't know much of anything about gaming, though, or saving the world, so maybe her ideas are actually both brilliant and accurate. But the group assessments of the video were interesting (as well as being, you know, the point of the whole thing), especially because that activity really demonstrated to me how differently people can see the same topic. The variety of organizations for the questions kind of blew me away; it never even occurred to me to use any organizational structure other than the one we had, but other groups went in very different directions.

As for this week's reading from HPL, when I look at it broadly, there are some useful ideas that I could see having applicability in an academic or public library. For example, demonstrating a skill, explaining the rationale behind it, then having students practice that skill in various ways to improve transfer seems like it could be as helpful in a workshop as in a classroom. The book did a good job of explaining how the ideas of understanding and transfer work, particularly in the contexts of math and science. But because the examples tended to emphasize those disciplines, I had to do a little bit of extrapolating to apply the text to the kind of work I plan to do. This, though, was the idea that seemed most valuable to me:

Teachers can help students change their original conceptions by helping students make their thinking visible so that misconceptions can be corrected and so that students can be encouraged to think beyond the specific problem or to think about variations on the problem.

This is a great idea-- and one that we're clearly putting into practice in this class. We read the theories in the book, write about them to show how we're thinking about them, and then discuss them in class. The same approach could be modeled in a lot of different kinds of classes and workshops, and I think it would improve comprehension and the transfer of skills. Along those lines, the Wiggins and McTighe article presented a concrete example of how to put the ideas from HPL into action; the specifics are probably not useful for me, but the broad outlines of the implementation are good.

All in all, this week's readings were useful for someone in SLM or planning to work in an academic library, and if I ever have the freedom to influence the structure of lessons, I could see integrating these ideas into them.

Week 4 Reading and Class Reflection

Readings

This week’s readings addressed learning environments and formative assessments. While the learning environments reading was interesting (particularly the history of literacy standards) a lot of it wasn’t very relevant to what I’ll be doing in my career. Legal education has a lot of traditions, and I not only don’t think I could change the system in response to ideas about learner-centered environments, I don’t think I’d want to. However, the Sadler reading seemed very relevant in some respects, and I found some parts of it thought-provoking.

Reading about formative and summative assessment, and the merits of different kinds of assessment or evaluation in a learning environment, I struggled a little to reconcile some of the ideas to my own experiences in education and my future in academic law librarianship. There have been some situations, during my undergrad as an English major or in a couple of SI classes, in which I think the focus was truly on mastery learning. But the most formative educational experience I’ve had was law school, and that initially seems like the antithesis of mastery learning, at least on a class-by-class basis.

Most law school classes follow the same template: courses are taught by lecture, usually Socratic (with varying degrees of malice and schadenfreude, depending on the professor) and grades are decided by a single exam at the end of the semester. There is no feedback from the professor during the semester, and even among classmates, there isn’t much of an opportunity to gauge your mastery prior to the exam, because the mandatory curve creates a highly competitive atmosphere that doesn’t encourage collaboration in most cases. This approach to education is actually pretty consistent with legal practice as a whole; a professor once told me that, as lawyers, we had to develop a “bathtub memory” that we could fill with the relevant area of law when needed, and then just as quickly empty to make room for the next batch of knowledge. No one can hold everything that she’ll need to know in her head throughout her legal education and practice, so the goal is to learn quickly, have excellent short-term recall, and then let go of the information when it’s no longer necessary.

This would seem to facilitate the opposite of mastery learning, and that’s not an inaccurate way to view it, if you’re just talking about a single class in Torts or Property. But if you view law school as an entire educational experience, with the goal being information literacy (in terms of being able to research law effectively) and the development of that bathtub memory, then final exams (as well as the sample briefs and memos written in legal research classes) can be take on the characteristics of a formative assessment, with each one serving as a gauge of your progress in “thinking like a lawyer.” Successful law school graduates will have mastered that skill by the time they graduate.

What does this mean for me, as a future law librarian? My role in instruction will probably be minimal; at best, I’ll teach some legal research and writing classes, or assist students at the reference desk. But being able to view law school in the framework of a series of formative assessments does provide a wider perspective on the significance of those tasks, and I think that’s a perspective that a lot of law students could benefit from as well.

Last week’s class

I liked seeing other people’s podcasts, but what I liked even more was listening to my fellow students assess them. No one is actually as critical of other people’s work as they are of their own, and I think it’s easier to approach your own task with minimal anxiety when you know that you won’t be held to the same standards that your inner evaluator has.

The discussion of information literacy and its meaning was helpful in some ways, although trying to craft new definitions of it that didn’t use “use” felt more like an exercise in diplomacy and compromise than anything else. But I think being exposed to the ways that people in other sub-specialties—like public or k-12 librarians—view information literacy is valuable, because those are perspectives that might never occur to me alone.