5 posts tagged “instruction”

While I do have a healthy respect for some of the elders in the library profession, once in a while I have to wonder if they have been out of the trenches a bit too long. Steven Bell, who is an acknowledged advocate of minimal library instruction for information literacy, has a new piece out on faculty involvement. It all seems pretty good until he gets to this part:

But I can imagine some information literacy and instruction librarians asking themselves “if faculty do ever fully integrate this into their courses and teach it without me - what will I do for a living?” The possibility of librarians being made obsolete by faculty following the examples described above, I think, is highly unlikely. But even if the majority of faculty did, I think that academic librarians would still be needed to support the development and design of instructional activity and digital-learning materials. Our new opportunity would be back-end support - making sure faculty were up-to-date on the e-resources and well equipped with the tools to integrate them into their courses. This could be a whole new growth area for librarian educators. That’s where I’ve advocated the growing importance of instructional design and technology in the work of librarians. I don’t know exactly where academic librarians will be in the future, but if it wasn’t at the front of the classroom that would be fine with me - as long as we play a role in what happens there.

Just some librarians may ask themselves? You just pretty much said that our new role will be in the back-end support. You know, with the IT people and the others in the backrooms who never see real people? Is that really an area of growth, or are we looking at yet another way to de-professionalize and get rid of a few more librarians in the process? I do ask because, for example, here we have what is called an instructional designer who does, well, instructional technology and design. The person is not a librarian by degree or trade, but she would certainly be the sort of person that Professor Bell seems to have in mind. And why is it that being in the front of a classroom seems to be such a bad thing? Some of the best work we do is working with students and in front of their classes. And while educating faculty on things like e-resources is important, we do have a role as well in helping educate students and in the larger educational mission of the university. And statements like the one above can certainly be used to eliminate, or at the very least, keep librarians from the educational roles we should be engaging. Maybe the back-end is good enough for some people. It is not good enough for me, and I am sure it is not good enough for a few of my colleagues. Our instruction librarian would be a good example. Spent the last two years or so building an information literacy program from the ground up with extensive involvement with faculty in what was then known as the Freshman Seminar program. University decides to scrap the program, for some fairly dubious reasons, and we are back to zero pretty much. And while we could document our successes in reaching students, the university pretty much saw us as "the back-end" support anyhow. I am sure she would have a thing or two to say about taking librarians out of the front of the classroom to let the faculty do it, so to speak. I have seen the faculty do it, and it is not always as ideal as the selected examples Professor Bell cites in his post. At the end of the day, that is much of the problem with the library literature: you only see the positives, which at times are exceptions rather than representations of the rule. But hey, we can all just go work in the back-end.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum has an interesting little piece on library instruction here. By his own admission, he is in a fairly idealized setting, but the idea of the kairos (the writing moment to put it simply) is an interesting one. He is basically saying a lot of what many of us in instruction already know. And unlike him, I don't see myself as a trainer. I am a teacher. I may not have my own classroom, but I certainly do develop some very good relationships with students. Still, worth a look. 

I have been thinking for a while about using wikis here in the library for a few things. Pathfinders are actually one of the materials I would love to move over to wikis. However, our choices in terms of wiki tools are severely restricted. Since we lack servers in the library, the option of downloading any wiki software is out of the question. It would probably have to be some hosted option, and even then I am not so sure. It is something I need to investigate. Would something like PBWiki work for us? At this point,  I am thinking about opening an account myself with PBWiki (or any other free solution) and taking it for a spin with one of the library guides I have made. I could see how the system works out, ease of use, so on, then show the others. It's an idea I have been bouncing around for a while.

Seeing Joyce Valenza's post on "Ten Reasons Why Your Next Pathfinder Should Be a Wiki" has definitely added some fuel to my inspiration. Some of the reasons she presents are things I have been saying here for a while: the organic nature, the ability to collaborate with the editing amongst the librarians (and possibly faculty for pathfinders in their areas), and ease of use (no need to know things like HTML). We'll see how it goes.

A good article on the use of blogs in college. It pays attention to reflective writing and assessment. By the way, the website was useful in providing a suggested way to cite the article. I wish more periodical sites would do that.

• Ruth Reynard, "Instructional Strategies for Blogging," Campus Technology, 5/9/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=47775. See also the related article Reynard wrote back in 2005, which is linked in this one.
  

I am rethinking how to make better use of del.icio.us, the social bookmarker. A while back, while I was fiddling with it, I accidentally erased my large list of bookmarks. While I do have the sites in a couple other places, I have decided instead to start anew. I am going to try to make more use of it as storage for things I would like to keep. One of the issues for me is the tagging. I am really going to try to be a little more selective and careful with that. Last time, the tags just got out of control because I often used whatever was suggested. This time, I am trying to limit the tags I use in terms of quantity, to see if I can keep better control of things. The other thing I am doing gradually is seeing which clips I have saved on my aggregator can be moved to the social bookmarker.

Often I save clippings in the hope I may blog about them or not. However, that is something that has gotten out of hand, and it is time to reign it in a bit. I am hoping by extracting from those clips what I really want and putting it on del.icio.us that it may tidy up things and still keep them accessible. We'll see how this works. Maybe this will be a good solution for me, or maybe I will simply try something else.

One thing that is intriguing me is that I could make use of the social bookmarker in connection to my student resource blog. Very often, the entries over there are just aggregations of items I find. While I would still do blog posts on various topics, I think it might be easier to put a lot more things in a social bookmarker and give students the url to it. Del.icio.us allows one to make brief notes on an item, and that is often enough for my purposes. I wonder if it might make some things a bit more efficient. Not sure how it would work. The one thing I know is that I would probably want a separate account for that. While I don't mind people seeing my bookmarks, I think that for students, something more specialized or particular might work better if I use some narrow tagging and make it a list of resources. I still need to think over that a bit more.