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!
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
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.
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.
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