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.