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.