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!