Where do we go from here?

I don't know if anyone beyond my class cohort has been following this blog, but if anyone was/still is following me I would like to provide a brief update.

I graduated in early May and am currently in the midst of job hunting, for a position as an academic librarian.  I had considered blogging about my job search experience, but I'm not sure I would be able to do that in such a way that readers would not be able to tell where I am applying/interviewing, and I felt that could violate some professional boundaries.  Thus, I have placed blogging on hold for the time being.

That said I hope to return to blogging at some point in the near future, hopefully once I have been offered a job.  At which point I would like to return to blogging by discussing the job search tactics I employed and then re-frame this blog as a place to share my insights and experiences as a new professional (to the extent that I feel it is appropriate).

Final Readings / Final thoughts

The semester is drawing to a close and so too my blogging for SI643 Professional Practices.  We closed out our readings for the semester with three readings about fostering a professional development community within one's organization.  I thought this was a really nice way to end the semester because we had discussed education and professional development all semester long, that is after all what the class is about.  But these final readings capped off the semester nicely, but turning the lens inward to what individual organizations can do to build positive incentivised learning environments for their staff.

The first article we read was about how one school district in Wyoming implemented an incentivised, voluntary, peer led professional development program.  Although this particular program was built for K-12 educators I can easily see how their approach could be applied to libraries of all kinds.  The main keys to their program's success seem to be first allowing teachers to choose whether or not they want to participate, and providing support for teachers who choose to get their professional development in other ways.  This is really important because it eliminates any resistance you might get from people who feel resentful of being forced to participate in a program.  It also ensures that those who choose not to participate have the support that they need to continue their professional development and aren't singled out or made to feel bad for choosing to go another way.

Another important element that the school district implemented was that this program would take place during school hours and on the clock. This meant that teachers didn't have to sacrifice more of their scarce free time to participate in professional development.  The program is also peer led and there are incentives for leading learning sessions and participating.

Overall I think is a really great approach to ensuring that one's staff can stay up to day on their professional development without asking them to output tons of time and money that they don't have to continue learning elsewhere.  I also liked the way in which it clearly fostered a strong learning community among the teachers at the school.

Our other two readings looked at a similar kind of program being implemented in public libraries. These programs involved more independent learning options, but still resulted in staff members teaming up to help each other out.  Again a big component of this program I liked was the flexibility it gave participants, particularly for how and when to work on their assignments. 


I think that finding ways to provide professional development in libraries, that provide flexibility, choice, and freedom to library staff members is so important.  We all need to keep our current skills sharp and continue to add to our toolkit as we move forward professionally, but this can be difficult to do when working a full time job and trying to juggle a personal life at the same time.  Providing time for professional development during the normal work day is a great solution to this, and it would likely make staff feel more appreciated and supported as the strive to develop new skills, which will ultimately benefit their institution.

I don't know a lot of the details about the program, but I know that MLibrary does have some professional development type programs in place for their staff.  I know they have professional development days where staff attend talks and workshops during normal working hours, and they also have a shadowing program where staff members can spend a week shadowing other staff members to learn about the kind of work they do. After doing the readings for this week I think I need to find out more information about this program so I can be better educated about how professional development can work in academic library settings.

 

Webinar Reflections

I've participated as an audience member in a few webinars in the past, but being a moderator was a rather surreal and at times unsettling experience.  I recognize the usefulness of webinars as a medium though which people who are far apart geographically can come together for a shared learning experience, but I have to say that I personally don't enjoy the experience very much as an audience member or a presenter.

Ultimately presenting the webinar with my group wasn't so bad, it went fairly smoothly and people seemed to be fairly engaged with our content, but I didn't like how disconnected I was from my audience.  I have a background in theatre and I love teaching, sure I get nervous for presentations just like everyone else, but once I get going I love creating a connection with my audience or class.  As a performer and an educator I see one of my greatest strengths as being able to read my audience or class and respond to the cues they are giving me.  Being able to connect with my audience mean I can adjust my style and approach based on how my audience/class is reacting and in this way hopefully keep them engaged and alert. 

With a webinar where not only can you not see your audience, but they could be anywhere being distracted by anything, this same kind of connection isn't possible. I can however see how this could be a huge advantage for individuals who get anxious and nervous about presenting in front of groups.

As an audience member I find it hard to participate effectively in webinars.  If I am paying attention to the presenter and the slides, I can't pay attention to the discussion going on in chat, and if I participate in chat I miss much of what the presenter is saying.  I actually prefer to watch pre-recorded webinars for this very reason, which lets face it isn't the point of webinars.


As far as the technology goes, it isn't exactly the most user friendly experience, but it isn't prohibitive either.  Once my group worked with it a little bit, it really wasn't that bad and we got through our webinar without any issues.


My overall verdict?  I don't really care for webinars, but I'm glad that I now have the skills to create and moderate one should I ever be called upon to do so.

Tweeting in Library-Land

So in case people hadn't already noticed I'm sure this weeks twitter related assignment made it very clear that librarians love them some twitter.  I've been on twitter for some years now and have always had mixed feelings about it. This is partly due to the fact that I do not have a smart phone, and don't really see myself getting one anytime soon due to very prohibitive pricing on data plans. 

 What I don't like about twitter:
If you don't have a smart phone you have to access twitter on your computer and that's not really how twitter was made to be used.  I've noticed that a lot of library and archives related conferences are big on using hash tags for communication throughout conference events, and this is totally a great idea, if you have a smart phone.  If you don't have a smart phone and you're at a conference where you know there is going to be a lot of tweeting going on you're basically doomed to lug your laptop around the whole time, which is a total bummer.  So in a why twitter pretty effectively excludes anyone who has chosen not to get a smart phone, or (as is the case for me) can't afford one.  I find this very frustrating, but I realize that there isn't anything I can do about it.

What I do like about twitter:
As I said before I've been on twitter for a few years now, I started it quite a while ago simply out of curiosity, and then pretty much ignored my account until coming to SI.  When I arrived at SI I started thinking about how I might effectively use twitter even without a smartphone, or tablet device. I decided to use it as a kind of news aggregator for my two areas of professional interest, libraries (specifically academic special collection libraries), and early modern scholarship (specifically Shakespeare). 

Using twitter in this way has been useful to me.  I can't check up to the minute news, but I can scan through my feed in the morning over coffee or in the evening when I'm sitting at home watching TV.  I have found it to be a useful way to stay up to date on what is going on in the professional areas that I am interested in, find new articles, and even to interact with / ask questions of professionals who's work I'm interested in.  I even contacted one of the professional librarians I follow on twitter to ask her for suggestions for blogs to follow for this class. 

Finally I have also been using twitter a lot lately to follow a few library job posting sites, to get up to dates info on the latest jobs being posted in the field.

Conclusions:
Overall I guess I would have to conclude that I have found a useful way to use twitter, and it is the best way to get professional news on a variety of topics all in one place.   However, I still think that when libraries and other professional organizations place a big focus on it for conferences or other events they should think long and hard about who they are excluding and what this means.

To embed or not to embed?

Today in class we talked about the concept of embedded librarians in relation to our readings for this week.  I was glad for the opportunity to go over this concept more in class because I felt that the readings had some clarity issues, which I don't think are necessarily their fault, but rather that the subject has some foggy areas. 

One of my classmates shared that she had found it difficult to distinguish between what exactly defined someone as an embedded librarian versus just having a well organized and integrated library system. I have to say that I identified a lot with this feeling because it seems that in many instances the differences are not clear.  I think that overall I am okay with a certain amount of uncertainty around this subject because I suspect that part of it is that whether embedded or not a librarian's job description is going to vary by institution and therefore what may be defined as an embedded librarian at one institution may be defined differently as another.  While this may make it somewhat hard to talk about, I think that so long as each given library is clear as to what is expected of their librarians, it is okay.

Another thing we talked about was the fact that most of us have never utilized our own librarian at SI.  I can't speak for the rest of my class, but for me it is part a matter of accessibility and part a matter necessity.  My days are very full (as I'm sure are those of my peers), and I don't really have time to specifically go by someone's office hours, not to mention the fact that I work during hers. The other is that while I have written research papers, all be it fairly minor ones, while at SI I haven't felt that I needed help finding resources.

In my previous grad program in English I had a very different experience, and regularly sought out our librarians for assistance.  There were however a few very big differences. For one we had a small subject specific reference library where we as grad students were each given a shelf for our books, but we were not allowed to remove the books from the library.  The library was literally connected to the building we had classes in. Finally there were two main librarians whom we got to know very well through simply being in the library and through the research skills class, which they taught, and which we were all required to take in our first term.  All of these elements combined to give us as students a very strong connection to our library, its staff, and the resources it contained.  Out side of the physical properties of the library and our familiarity with the staff we were also writing much more in depth and lengthy research papers.

Although I have worked in and around Hatcher since I arrived as SI, my relationship with the building is no where near as intimate as it was at my former graduate program. This is partly just due to the size of the library and its staff.  I do however wonder if having SI's librarian somehow participate in our 501 or 500 class, preferably 501 since it is our first big class at SI that everyone is required to take, might have fostered a stronger relationship between her and the students simply by raising our awareness of her.

Approaches to Teaching & Webinars

This week to delved further into approaches to teaching through our textbook and an article that addressed some of these issues in relation to librarianship.  We also start to learn about webinars and picked a webinar to watch in preparation for creating our own in a couple of weeks.

I really enjoyed the readings for this week about teaching in our text "How People Learn."  I think that people far too often take teaching for granted and don't realize that it is actually incredibly hard to do it and do it well.  Our book focuses more on K-12 teaching, while I tend to think more in terms of post-secondary education. However, I think that all of the issues discussed in the book can easily be applied to college and university settings as well as K-12.  

Although our reading in "How People Learn" is focused more on on-going course instruction, rather than the one-off or one-shot instruction style that most of us will be using as librarians I think that the principles and ideas are still very useful.  This reading continued to focus on the idea that strong subject knowledge and the ability to engage with students ideas and interests is a huge asset to teaching.  It also continued with the idea that we have seen repeatedly this semester that if students can learn to connect ideas and concepts and think about the bigger pictures questions of "why?" and "how?" rather than memorizing, the "where?" "when?" and "who?" they will be far better equipped to understand and use that information in meaningful ways in their course work and in the future.

I think that librarians can make use of these teaching tactics by being as well educated about their collections as possible and by creating educational materials that seek to engage their audiences with those collections.   One way to do this that we have discussed before is to tailor teaching sessions to specific classes where the information being taught can be applied directly to that class that the students are in. 

If as a librarian you find yourself teaching to a general grouping of students who are not in the same class, it could be useful to instead try to identify what they do have in common beyond being students at the same university.  Are they all incoming freshmen or outgoing seniors? Or did they elect to take the session based on its topic.  The answers may provide a broader scope than a specific course would, but they are a starting point for what you can start to think about as you plan the session and try to think of meaningful ways to engage your audience.

I'd like to wrap up this post with some of my thoughts on webinars. I have attended a few webinars in the past as well as watched a couple recordings of them.  I find them interesting because they always feel far less polished to me, as compared to prerecorded presentations.  This isn’t surprising really, but it does always feel a little weird.  I have also NEVER seen a webinar that didn’t deal with some technical difficulty during the webinar, this always results in a couple of minutes of stalled time to figure out the problem.

Keeping this in mind as I begin to think in terms of having to create a webinar with a team, I think that the main things I am going to want to remember are that a webinar isn't going to be as polished as a presentation might be, or even flow as smoothly as an in person workshop might because the technology will likely cause some minor disruptions along the way.


Another thing that I think will be important to keep in mind is to make sure that and images used whether slides, screen captures, etc. are very clear and easy to read/see.  Something about webinars can make them a little more difficult to follow than in person presentations. I think it is simply the inability to see the speaker.  When you watch an online tutorial you often don't see the presenter, but you're also not expected to be interacting with them, it is a one way instruction. With webinars though, you are expected to interact and it is a little strange to do this when a) you can't see the instructor and thus are unable to use visual cues to know when it is a good time to ask a question or even to get the instructors attention and b) you know that there are a number of other people also attending the webinar and participating, whom again you cannot visualize.

From a presenters point of view I have a feeling the webinar format is going to feel strange.   I have a background in theatre, and I have given workshops and presentations on numerous occasions.  However, in all of these situations you are standing in front of your audience and can see how they are reacting to what you are saying.  I know that I rely heavily on visual cues from my audience in all of these situations.  When giving a presentation or a workshop I rely on visual cues to tell me when the audience is bored, engaged, or confused. I then may choose to go faster or slower through a section based on how my audience appears to be reacting, or I may provide further detail that I had not initially planned on discussing if my audience seems confused.  Furthermore I use lots of visual cues myself to interact with my audience. These range from smiling and other facial expressions to hand gestures, and other body language to emphasize a point, or make it clear when I am making a joke.  Due to all of this I expect doing a webinar to present a unique challenge from any presenting experiences I have had before, and I am very interested to see how it turns out.

Workshop Reflections

Now that the workshop is over I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  I still wish we had had more time to prepare them, but over all I think it went well.  Areas that I felt our probably could have been stronger were pacing and perhaps some of the content.  I would have liked to boil things down a bit more so that we wouldn't have had to move through our content so quickly to fit it all in. 

I really enjoyed getting to see what everyone else chose to do as well.  Some things I noticed we that while a visual presentation to go along with your workshop does help, it isn't necessary.  One other group aside from us used a visual presentation aid (Powerpoint), they did a really great job using the visuals as an aid, but not as a crutch and I felt that their presentation was very well done.  The other two workshops didn't make use of any visuals, but they were still well organized and were able to make their points clearly.

The biggest issue I noticed with the workshops in our group was that you have to be really careful to manage time and expectations when asking your audience for feedback.  The two groups not using presentation software both had a section of their workshop where they asked the audience to read over some materials and respond to them.  Both groups did a very nice job and I think that having this exercise was a good idea however, I noticed that with one of the groups we were asked to review a much longer piece of material and the framing for the response we were asked to give was much less focused. This isn't necessarily a bad thing I think by it's nature that workshop needed the broader scope, but I found it a little difficult to focus in on anything.  Having had this experience I think that if I am in that kind of situation in the future I might ask each group to look at a section of the materials and respond to that.  Smaller pieces are easier to digest and form opinions on when given a limited amount of time, and acting as a participant helped me to see that in a way I hadn't before.