Reflection on Class, January 16

Discussion this week focused on methods of teaching and learning and how those practices transfer (or maybe don't transfer) to a digital environment.
One aspect of that discussion that was interesting to me was thinking about the different ways that people organize information as they learn, sort of a cognitive infrastructure. When Kristin drew a "mind-map" on the board, at first I had no idea what she was talking about, but then I had a vague memory of using diagrams like that in grade school. I suppose that I had forgotten all about them because to me, a list broken up into categories is a much more intuitive way of organizing information to make it manageable. Mind-maps and flow charts feel cluttered to me, but I can see how to someone else a list wouldn't be effective in making connections between ideas. All of this carried over into the exercise in which we had to try to explain a database to an eighth-grader. Filing cabinets and notebooks were good analogies, but it was clear to me that a music library like iTunes or Spotify was better suited to the audience in question. A learner-centered approach really does seem to make all the difference in teaching.
It's easy to see, then, that online learning may present a greater challenge than expected. How do you make material learner-centered when you don't know who the learner is? It would be a bigger problem for public libraries than for academic or school libraries simply because they cater to a wider and more diverse population. A solution may be to survey potential participants beforehand or to pay attention to use statistics for different relevant library services. But for a one-shot workshop (or screencast), that may be all the librarian can do, aside from just trying to incorporate as many learning styles or needs as possible into the one lesson.
If the question is, "should online learning replace face-to-face workshops?," I think the answer is no, absolutely not. Screencasts and other online learning models are great, and they should certainly be developed to be even better. But there are still plenty of people, especially if we're talking about public libraries, that are much more comfortable in a face-to-face environment or who don't have access to digital resources. Those people shouldn't be forced to learn in a way that doesn't work for them. It's also worth repeating that there are kinds of workshops that are not well-suited for a digital environment, regardless of who the audience is. Like a lot of issues in librarianship, it seems, the answer is to do our best to keep up with the new without abandoning the old.

K