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.

Preparing for a One-Shot Workshop

This week we will be working in the same pairs and groups that we worked in for our book clubs to do one-shot workshops. 

I have done group presentations in class before and I have even developed and given a full two hour workshop based on the research I did last summer for my internship.  However I found this experience to be somehow more challenging than any of my past experiences. I think this may in part be due to the time frame that we had to work with. 

We had a bit of an initial block when it came to coming up with topics, but once we got going there were a number of topics that my partner and I were interested in exploring. However, we didn't feel that we would have enough time to properly research and produce a workshop on some of our topic ideas, so we had to work to narrow our choices down to something we felt we would be able to research and develop a workshop on in a week.

When it came to pulling the actual workshop together we chose a topic and then used google docs to develop an outline and estimate how long each section would be.  The biggest challenge was  finding a flow of information that felt like it worked and that still touched on the topics we felt were important to cover.

After we had our outline divided up we developed the visual portion of our presentation using Prezi.com. We chose Prezi over power point because we like the way that it allows an audience to visualize the sequence of a presentation from the start.

Ethics in the Library

So I was excited to do the reading this week when I saw that the topic to be covered was ethics, I think that ethical issues as they related to libraries and archives are very interesting. In many of my archives classes we have discussed the issue of ethical decisions at length and I have always found these discussions very engaging. So I was surprised to see that we only had two readings this week the ALA Code of Ethics from 2008, and an article titled Dangerous Questions the Reference Desk: A Virtue Ethics Approach, by Mark Lenker, also written in 2008. 

What's more I was extremely disappointed and quite frankly deeply annoyed with the Lenker reading.  While Lenker provided what I believe he felt were realistic hypothetical case studies I found them to be ridiculous and utterly unhelpful. Let me say that I am not saying that patrons may not ask the very questions that Lenker's fictional patrons ask, in fact I'm quite sure they do. However, I found the entire premise of the article and the lack of conclusions drawn to be frustratingly simple minded and hyperbolic.

The range of what he lists as "dangerous questions" is problematic in and of itself, to group in reference desk questions about building a bomb with questions about growing pot doesn't even make sense.  If you're going to make ethical judgments about these, and I'm not saying that one should, but if you were, a bomb could physically hurt a lot of people, some teenager asking about growing pot is probably pretty harmless, but right there a LOT of potentially very unfair assumptions are being made. Really the main thing that both of these reference questions have in common is that patrons are asking for information, information which presumably already exists in the library. They are not purchasing C4 and fertilizer, or a hydroponics. Reading about something or even researching it does not imply any form of action on the part of the reader beyond READING, and while it is always important to use ones judgement in any situation, I think that the judgmental assumptions made in this article about the questions themselves are extremely problematic.

So clearly I was upset about this article, but if I didn't find the issues it discussed to be a worthwhile discussion of ethics then what would I have preferred?

What I was expecting from this week and in fact hoping for would be questions about censorship, collection development decisions,  perhaps even funding and financial issues etc.

For example:

Censorship: What does one do when faced with a community or even just a single parent who is upset about a book held in your collection? What if part of you agrees with the patron's concerns, but you feel that it is more important not to censor than to remove a book simply because it makes you uncomfortable? What if you don't agree with the patron's concerns, but still have to deal with them in a professional manner? What if your library makes a decisions to censor part of the collection and you don't agree with this decision?

Collection Development: What if you work in a special collection library and weeding of the collection needs to be done, how do you make choices about what to get rid of (considering that much of your collection is unique)? What if you work in a library that holds archival material and what if some of the information contained in those archives is not viewable to the public for a certain number of years to protect individuals mentioned in those documents? What if (this is a true story) your library holds academic records of a presidential candidate because he went to school there, and what if a request to deliver those records to the government has been made and approved, because there are things in them that they don't want getting out. What if you don't like the candidate and you could easily photocopy the documents and leak them, but you know this would jeopardize  not only your own career, but that of your colleagues, and the reputation of your institution?

Financial: What if your library needs funds and you are offered money by an organization whose beliefs are fundamentally opposed to your own, or might cause some of your patrons to feel alienated if they knew you had taken the money from that organization?  What if you are offered a donation, but only if you use it for certain things? What if selling a part of your collection would bring in much needed funds?

Reflection on overcoming personal challanges

I had anticipated that I would write in this reflection more generally about the book club experience. However, as I started trying to put down some of my thoughts in response to our ADDIE planning sheet I found the one question in particular elicited a very long and personal response, and I thought I would share that here. 

Describe your biggest challenges and how you overcame them:

One thing that I personally found to be a major challenge that I was expected to overcome was not to give my opinions too much. I am really torn about this because I have participated in several book clubs and the organizers were never expected to keep their opinions to themselves and always fully participated in the discussions, which I always liked and felt comfortable with. 

I felt like with this book club there was an expectation that we wouldn’t share too many of our own opinions, which I found to be extremely difficult and uncomfortable.  I think I did a fairly good job, but we did receive some feedback that we could have, as moderators, talked less. And one of them did pick me out in particular “Sarah talks a lot! Her opinions are interesting and I could tell she was trying to hold back. Something to keep practicing.”*  This feedback didn't upset me, except that it shows me that as hard as I try to hold back I have to try even harder.  I am always conscious of the fact that I tend to talk a LOT, in fact I am incredibly self conscious about it and I worry a lot that teachers will get annoyed with me. Believe it or not for every time I talk in class there is a time when I force myself to be quiet because I am very worried about overpowering a conversation, or being perceived as overly pushy.  So I’m kind of torn about this observation, it is something about myself that I am highly aware of.  I think I do an okay job controlling it, but I know I could do better and it is something I have to be constantly conscious of.  On the other hand I don’t know if I agree with the book club model in which the person who organized it is more of a passive observer and simply feeds the group questions. I think that if the book club is for teens or younger readers the impartiality of the organizer is probably more important, but for a general adult group I actually think it is a little awkward.

In retrospect I also think that picking a story that I was really excited about made the process, in some ways, a greater challenge.  It was great because I was excited to hear what others had to say and coming up with questions was fun. On the other hand I desperately wanted to be more a part of the discussion and it was torturous having to moderate, and trying to hold back on commenting.

 I have a few overall take aways from this expereince:

1.  I don't EVER EVER EVER want to run a book club where I can't fully participate in discussions. This probably won't be too difficult since the kind of jobs I want aren't very likely to require me to run book clubs.
2.  Even though I probably won't be running anymore book clubs in the near future, I need to stay ever vigilant about mitigating the extent of my own input when I am supposed to be acting as an impartial moderator. 
3. Overall and in spite of some of the personal frustrations expressed above I really enjoyed this experience, it was fun to get to talk about fiction for a change. 


* As a side note the same person who gave the feedback about me talking a lot also gave one of my very favorite feedback comments in response to the question about what strengths the book club had: "There was no judgement. This was a complex work and I felt safe to say that it took me a few readings to understand it."  This made me feel really good because we knew we were picking a somewhat more complex story, and it was really important to us that we create an atmosphere where people would feel comfortable talking about what the struggled with as well as what they enjoyed.  We didn't want anyone to feel intimidated or uncomfortable and our feedback indicates that we succeeded in this. 

 

Book Club Week

Reading for this week was a lot of fun because this week we are doing book clubs.  Each of us picked a partner and then the class split into 3 groups.  For each group their are 4 to 5 pairs and we're reading short stories or poems picked by the other pairs in our group.

The readings picked by the pairs in my grouping are:

"The Crime," by Victor Hugo: http://books.google.com/books?id=9LvTAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

"The Queen of Hearts": http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/digitalcoll/digitalcoll-children.html

“The Street That Got Mislaid,” by Patrick Waddington: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/mislaid.html

“A Haunted House,” by Virginia Woolf: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1388/a-haunted-house

The final one is the reading that my partner and I picked and I will write about that for my class reflection blog post. 

As a general observation I found it really interesting that two of the readings chosen for this week felt very thematically tied to SI.

"The Crime" is a poem in which an individual has burned down a library and is being admonished for doing so. The voice which speaks for the majority of the poem exclaims "O most unheard-of crime!/ Crime, wretch, which you upon yourself/ commit!"The speaker goes on to explain that the library was the arsonist's own "treasure, fortune, heritage" that he has burned down this precious treasure that belonged to everyone and had the power to set minds and spirits free.  His speech is lengthy and moving and touches upon nearly every argument that those of us at SI would likely come up with to convince someone of the virtues of libraries.  (SPOILERS beyond this point) But there is a twist because at the very end the speaker says "Knowledge, and duty, virtue, progress, right,/ and reason scattering hence delirious dreams./ and you destroy this, you!" and the man who has burnt down the library replies simply "I cannot read."  What I loved about this is the way in which it brings all of our lofty ideas about libraries crashing to the ground. This poem was written in a very different time from our own, but in spite of the years that separate it and us one thing is still true and far too often overlooked. Literacy is a sign of privilege, it is not a given, and assuming that it is makes invisible a vast number of people.

I enjoyed this poem because of the way it managed to upturn some very universal assumptions, and make me consider things from s different perspective.

"The Street That Got Mislaid" is the other reading that I felt was thematically appropriate for SI because it is about a man who works in the filing section (ARM anyone?) of the city hall's engineering department, sometime in mid 20th century.  This man's job is not glamorous or exciting, and he seems to live a fairly quite, rather lonely life. Yet he is clearly passionate about his job, sees the importance of it in keeping order.  He tries to explain why the records he provides diligent stewardship for are important to a neighbor:

 "You live here on Oven Street because it says so in my filing cabinet at city hall. The post office sends you mail because my card index tells it to. If my cards didn't say so, you wouldn't exist and Oven Street wouldn't either. That, my friend, is the triumph of bureaucracy."

The order and care for the documentation are beautiful and yet, also so utterly ridiculous.

The one day quite by accident, he discovers an index card jammed into the top of a filing drawer. He discovers a lost street, a street that has been mislaid.

I think in many ways this story is about letting go of the rigidity and structure we impose on our daily lives and finding peace in the simple joy of living and enjoying the company of others.  Yet the ARM student in me couldn't help but love the thrill of discovering a lost and forgotten record, and the decisions that come along with such a discovery.

"The Queen of Hearts"is a poem or nursery rhyme that pretty much everyone knows, and could probably even recite from memory.

The Queen of Hearts

She made some tarts,

    All on a summer's day;

The Knave of Hearts

He stole those tarts,

    And took them clean away.

The King of Hearts

Called for the tarts,

    And beat the knave full sore;

The Knave of Hearts

Brought back the tarts,

    And vowed he'd steal no more.

So what's so interesting about it? For one I enjoyed the version we were given to read, it is from a classic book of nursery rhymes and the illustrations were really enjoyable. The illustrations were in the same style as the nursery rhyme book I remember having when I was much younger, so it gave me warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings.

However, because it was so simple and because I simply can't let things be I did a little research and discovered some interesting facts.  Everyone is familiar with the above rhyme and the Queen of Hearts from f Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but what I did not realize or even really think about until reading it is that the poem was actually written after Carroll's classic story.  The poem also originally had verses about the king and queen of the 3 other suits as well, but those were never very popular and eventually disappeared from the poem all together.