Librarian Blogs

The Four Bloggers I Chose to Follow for SI 643

My Interest–Public Libraries

• “Swiss Army Librarian”

Brian Herzog

http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/about/

Chelmsford Public Library in Chelmsford, MA

Real-life stories about his experience as a librarian

• David Lee King

http://www.davidleeking.com/about/#.UQRab2coY6w

Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library

Writes about technology in libraries

 Other Specializations

• “Tame the Web”

Michael Stephens

http://tametheweb.com/about-michael-stephens/

Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University

Writes about technology in libraries from an academic point of view

• “K-M The Librarian”

Anonymous

School librarian

http://kmthelibrarian.blogspot.com/

Discusses anecdotes from her experience, focus on informational literacy

Trends

Technology

Two of the librarians focus specifically on technology. In fact, it was harder to find interesting bloggers who don’t specifically talk about technology than those who do. But I wanted more variety, so I specifically chose an SLM blogger whose stated topic is not technology. However, she does like to share what she can do on her iPad. Though I knew it already, this experience has reinforced the idea that librarians are a techy bunch.

 Presentations

I was surprised to find material from the bloggers’ presentations on three of the four blogs. I expected the university professor to have them, but not necessarily the public and school librarians. It’s a good thing we are learning how to create presentations in SI 643!

 User-Centered

Each of the bloggers concentrates on how to best serve library users, rather than the just the collection or the budget. I appreciate the focus on providing the best service, even when it may be tempting to just play with the newest technology.

Instructional Design, Project Planning, and Visuals

The readings for this week concerned the creation of instructional programs, specifically those which are taught either asynchronously (as a self-guided tutorial) or in a single sitting. Both situations present challenging constraints for the instructor. Student feedback may be nonexistent, or it may come too late to improve the instruction. Therefore, thoughtful design is critical.

The reading from the book Creating the One-Shot Workshop by Jerilyn Veldof outlines a process for designing a stand-alone instructional period.1 The process is called ADDIE. Each letter stands for one phase of the process: analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation. What struck me most about this process was how similar it is to any project plan. The only difference would be that development and implementation may not always be distinct. (If you’re knitting a scarf, for example, the “development” and “implementation” are the same step—knitting.) The value in this book, therefore, is that it lays out considerations you must make, not only in analyzing what you want to accomplish, but also in allocating time and resources to its development and deciding who to involve in the development process.

The other readings describe more anecdotal situations and methods of teaching using digital technology. They are disparate in their focus, but one theme that showed up in both the piece by Griffins2 and Yelinek, et. al.3 is that visual demonstrations are often preferable to extensive verbal instruction. This is helpful to keep in mind, particularly for someone like me, because I am a very verbal person. Though visuals often help me understand something, it does not always occur to me to create visual tools.

1. Jerilyn R. Veldof, Creating the One-Shot Workshop, (2006).

2. Griffis, P. (2009). Building pathfinders with free screen capture tools. Information Technology and Libraries, 28(4), 189-190. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/215827770?accountid=14667

3. Yelinek, Kathryn, Lynn Tarnowski, Patricia Hannon, and Susan Oliver. “Captivate MenuBuilder: Creating an Online Tutorial for Teaching Software.” The Clearing House 82, no. 2 (2008): 101-106. http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/196882077?accountid=14667.

Structure

Our brief but intriguing discussion of organizational strategies in our first class reminds me of an assigned reading for SI 500, excerpts from Too Big to Know by David Weinberger. He argues that information, which used to be structured in books that have a “shape” (meaning some kind of organization,) now inhabits a network with “no shape.” The idea, as I understand it, is that we understand knowledge differently because it isn’t categorized in the same hierarchical or linear fashion that it was in older media.

Though I now often rely on outlining when writing anything longer than a few pages, I remember how unnatural it seemed to me when learning it as a child. The structure of the Internet itself may be “shapeless,” but a written document—even a blog post—is linear in nature and therefore requires some sort of logical structure whether its creator maps it out or not. Given that children growing up now are often using the Internet as one of their main sources of information (aside from personal experience and other human beings,) isn’t it all the more important to teach these organizational strategies, since they may seem less intuitive than ever? I was surprised to hear that children are no longer learning how to make an outline (or its successors, like the mind map). We only talked about this for a few minutes, so I’m not sure if the reason young people don’t have this skill is because it is not “covered” or just not “understood,” but either way, it is certainly a problem.

I’m not sure the ‘cut-and-paste’ phenomenon is enough to explain why anyone would think their writing doesn’t need to have some kind of structure. Even a series of quotes juxtaposed for a purpose would need to tell some kind of story. If you don’t have your own line of thought to follow, what are you trying to say? Why not just put up a list of hyperlinks and be done with it? (Then again, I do believe I’ve read comments on news articles that seem to be a jumble of stock phrases.)

Of course, it’s possible that none of the SI 647 students will ever teach a writing course. So why does this lack of structure concern us? As Ms. Fontichiaro pointed out in class, structure is “one of the ways we turn information into knowledge.” This doesn’t mean that, in order to understand something, we must visually make a mind map of every piece of information. But it does help if we have some idea how the little concepts and ideas we know connect to one another, as this seems to be one of the differences between “experts” and “novices” as discussed in the readings last week. Awareness of that structure is a kind of metacognition. And if we need to model metacognition for students, it strikes me that a diagram would be an excellent tool. I suppose the main thing I take away from this idea is that, when planning for more formal instruction, it’s best to have an outline, not just for your sake, but for the students’ as well.

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