Reflection on Reading, 15 April

This week's readings, the last of the semester (links require UM log in):

• "When Teachers Drive Their Learning" by Joseph Semadeni
• "The C's of Our Sea Change: Plans for Training Staff, from Core Competencies to Learning 2.0" by Helene Blowers and Lori Reed
• "Planning an Online Professional Development Module" by Kristin Fontichiaro

The Semadeni reading proposed an interesting program: teachers are given time and a framework for professional development during contract hours (what I take to mean school hours). The teachers are encouraged to participate in the program through incentives and administrative support, including monetary incentives. According to Semadeni, teachers are motivated not just by money, but by the ability to choose what they will learn and the opportunity to learn during their normal working hours. That isn't hard to believe - I can only imagine that most teachers would embrace any opportunity to better serve their students, but their demanding schedules, as Semadeni explains, get in the way of professional development before or after school hours. 

Reading articles like this is both inspiring and frustrating. The program seems perfect. The teachers are learning, the students aren't being neglected, and the administration is happy. But then why aren't all schools doing this? Inertia on the part of school boards and administrators? Probably. 

Of course, this article echoes the way that we have been learning in this class, especially the ways in which we have been observing each others' work in addition to completing our own. There hasn't been the element of choice, but that is to be expected when you're taking a course for credit. 

The articles by Blowers and Reed and Fontichiaro (of course) also discuss development programs much like this class. The "Learning 2.0" program discussed by Blowers and Reed is described as "summer reading" for adults, and now that I think about it, that feels about right. We've gone through a list of practical skills for librarians (much like a summer reading list) and done our best to learn each one. A lot of our learning has been self-guided, as Fontichiaro discusses in her article (imagine that). It's interesting to see familiar methods for teaching explained in a library context; maybe when I'm a librarian, I'll institute a similar program in my library. Memes and all. 

For the exactly 0% of those reading this who aren't aware, this is the last blog post required by the course. It will probably be my last post all together - blogging isn't really my thing, it seems. I am on Facebook, though, and Twitter (@kriskottenbrook). And LibraryThing (though I kind of hate LibraryThing and you'd do better looking me up on Goodreads). And Tumblr, but you'll have to hunt me down if you want to find me there.

So, I leave you with the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: "It's over. Go home. Go."

- K

             

Reflection on Webinars

Last week, instead of having a normal class period, we presented a webinar that we had planned in groups over about a week. We also viewed some of our classmates' webinars. This was the first of the practical exercises we've done that I don't feel went half as well as it could have. I observed some possible causes of this both while presenting my own webinar and viewing others'.

First, communicating with people when there is no feedback is much harder than it sounds. And it sounds pretty hard. I had expected that I would be more comfortable just talking to my computer than I normally am talking to a room full of people, but that was definitely not the case. Physically standing in front of a group and talking gives me a feeling of being grounded; I can use body language and read the audience's body language in order to tailor my speech or pacing. When all I had to look at was the slide I was on and an incredibly distracting chat box, I felt like I was speaking into a void. It was like practicing a speech in an empty room, except that people could actually hear me. The webinar that I viewed a couple of weeks ago had seemed scripted, and at the time that was off-putting. But after having to do this myself, I completely understand why people just read off of a script.

An effect of not feeling "grounded" in my presentation was that I sort of oscillated between just talking without thinking much about it and completely losing focus and losing my train of thought. Something that might help with that problem in the future would be to print out a copy of all of the slides so that I could remind myself of the context of the current topic. Just having something physical to hold and look at, rather than notes in a Google doc, might also be helpful.

One main point that I gathered from viewing other webinars (which were all done very well, by the by) was the importance of the slides the presenters used. The instructor had mentioned this before, but it was good to actually see it. It sounds shallow, but I have remembered the presentations with visually engaging slides much better than the ones with slides that were just bullet points on a plain background. Having pretty or dynamic slides to look at also reduced my urge to go on Facebook or do whatever else while the webinar played in the background.

I also noticed that the nature of the webinar format - pre-made slides and voices, but no video - smoothed over some problems that may have occurred on the presenters' end. I think that happened with my own webinar, and I know that it happened with the ones that I viewed. A member of another group told me that her group had done particularly poorly, but I never would have guessed that from what I saw. So that, at least, is reassuring.

On the whole, I found more to dislike about webinars as a format than things to like about them. For one thing, I didn't retain information from the webinars that I viewed. Because I relish the opportunity to whip out a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference, I'll quote Giles: "The knowledge gained from a computer has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible." The webinars, while well-planned and well-executed, were intangible and thereby forgettable.

This isn't to say that webinars can't be a useful format. They overcome barriers such as accessibility (in some cases), distance, time constraints, and cost. But I think that they should be a last resort. If there is a better way to relay the same information to the same people, that is the route to take.

Reflection on Tweeting, 3 April 2014

The "reading" for this week was to join Twitter, build a network of at least 25 professionals in our fields, and tweet or re-tweet at least five times. After having done the minimal amount of work for this assignment, I feel comfortable commenting on the state of librarianship on Twitter.

An interesting thing that I immediately noticed was that, in contrast to the blogs we've been reading, the levels of professionalism on Twitter are highly variable. The most career-focused or academically-focused bloggers that I have been following are the ones tweeting about the season finale of Cougar Town. Even organizations such as the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (@cincylibrary) take on a very informal tone from time to time. This made it difficult to judge whether an account was worth following in a professional context; maybe an account sometimes tweets brilliantly about librarianship, or maybe it's really just all cat videos. Related to that was the observation that it's not always worth it to build a "network" of a bunch of librarians and information professionals if not all of those professionals tweet anything about the field. Although, some of the silly or lighthearted tweets from libraries and librarians go a long way toward reminding me why I wanted to be a librarian in the first place. Always a good thing.

Observing the difference between the content on Twitter and on personal blogs is a great illustration of how the medium influences the message. Twitter is great for short, one-off messages and links, less so for serious conversations.

Twitter is also a great tool for keeping up with the news and other recent developments. People often tweet links to articles, which are then re-tweeted throughout the original poster's network So if someone I follow retweets a link about school librarianship from someone she follows, that link shows up on my feed, and I see the story, which I may never have seen otherwise. You can also follow the Twitter accounts of organizations like NPR, which means that about a million news stories show up in your feed every day. For an information professional, this makes Twitter a great tool.

Finally, on a completely selfish note, Twitter is great for networking. It's the virtual equivalent of casually meeting someone at a cocktail party - you see a conversation, you say something witty, and you hope you make a good impression. I'm currently sidling over to some librarians from the PLCH. Would it be too gauche to tweet a photo of my business card?

Reflection on Class, 27 March

We spent a lot of time last week discussing the controversy over a plan to turn part of the Ann Arbor District Library's parking lot into a public park. Information on the (let's say) disagreement can be found here, though as always, I would advise against reading the comments.

This case sparked a lot of interesting conversations about how to handle inappropriate behavior in the library (and what constitutes inappropriate behavior), drug use as a community problem, and to whom a public library has an obligation.

Some examples of inappropriate behavior are pretty obvious - drug use or dealing, fighting, harassing other patrons, etc. Some are less so. For example, when is it loitering vs. enjoying the space? Are you loitering if you're sitting down? What if you've been there for the last eight hours? When does a patron's irritation over some detail become a behavior problem? Some of these examples strike me as especially problematic when you take into consideration a patron's identity. Maybe a young white middle-class couple is just sitting on the front steps to enjoy a beautiful day, but when it's two young black men, it's loitering. Maybe an older, articulate middle-class man becoming irate at the circulation desk can be solved by some smooth-talking from a staff member, but if the man is less articulate and doesn't appear to have bathed recently, security steps in. Clearly-written policies help with this (as Mari and I explored in our workshop), but there is still a lot of gray area that can result in librarians not serving patrons the way they should.

But even in cases where a patron's behavior is clearly inappropriate, there is some question of how best to handle the situation. I'll use bathing in the bathroom sinks as an example. It isn't illegal, it doesn't cause harm to patrons or staff, but librarians across the board seem to agree that we should not allow patrons to do it. As another student pointed out last week, though, where else can the offending patron go? If there are no shelters available and the patron is homeless or otherwise has no access to running water, what else are they expected to do? Just go without bathing until it's their body odor that gets them kicked out of the only place they have left to go? Another one of my discussion group members brought up the idea that a library's responsibility toward its patrons doesn't end at the library's front doors. Perhaps a case can be made that libraries should take a more active role in assuring that their patrons have access to resources outside the library. This might be too much to ask of smaller libraries with barely enough money to keep their own doors open, but in larger or more affluent communities (cough-Ann Arbor-cough), it might be doable.

This is an odd sort of thing to be thinking about a semester and a half into my MLIS. We spend so much time coming up with ways to get people to go to the library, and now we have to come up with ways to keep them out. Certainly it doesn't do anyone any good to have drug deals going on in the bathrooms, but I wonder if we're falling too much into the mindset that there are unwanted kinds of people rather than unwanted behaviors. I worry that in trying to make the library a better, safer place for everyone, we accidentally exclude the same people who have always been excluded.