Class reflection: Week 3

So since I am late doing this ("late" by my own standards, I usually like to do this reflection immediately after class so I am sure I remember what I need to talk about), I would like to preface this by saying that the things I have learned and discussed both in other classes and private conversations may leak into this post. My apologies, I'll try not to go too far into professional dreamland. The good news is that by waiting a few days, I realize how MUCH I learn every day in my program! And that feels good.

In class on Thursday we did a few surprising things. The first was that Kristin gave us 45 minutes to find a way to visually (and digitally) express our "biggest questions" about the readings that we did for class. Each of us was allowed to choose our own readings, so I can see that this was a way for the class to quickly and effectively share with each other what our readings were about and the questions we had. She gave us a variety of options to choose from, from making a meme, to an infographic, to a comic strip, to whatever we wanted to do. During the exercise, I confirmed my suspicions that I am, in fact, a curmudgeon who does not like experimenting with new technology (shocking, I know). So I stuck with the meme route, since that's what I have experience with. I made a meme, which I liked, but memes only take 30 seconds to make, which meant that I had 44.5 minutes left in which I should be doing something. I actually ended up using the rest of my time investigating the infographics sites she had suggested, http://visual.ly/ and http://www.easel.ly/. I have always found infographics to be interesting, and I guess I always assumed that people who knew their way around Adobe CSS made them, not your average bears on the internet via an easy drag-and-drop system. I didn't end up making anything for class, but I think it is interesting to know that these sites exist and maybe I can play with them in the future. A thought on 45 minutes of play time in grad school: this was a very unusual concept, and many of us were uncomfortable with the idea. "What should I do? Where do I go? What kind of work is she expecting?" It turned out fine, but it was a little unsettling at first. And as a final thought on Kristin's teaching style (and the best practices in teaching these days. I know enough about teaching theory that having students teach each other and setting students to tasks in class instead of just the teacher talking at them is much more effective than traditional methods), I made a meme:

(Just being silly, please don't take offense!)

Additionally, Kristin set us up with an information literacy task (that's library-talk for "can you identify what is true and false in information?") that tricked us all for a little bit. She brought up a news story about the man who got harassed by Homeland Security for wearing his Google Glass into a movie theater. Mari immediately verified the story, saying she saw a report from the AP about it. I had seen something on Reddit about it as well, and didn't really question the validity of the article just because of all this. It took us a while to eventually realize, "Where is this story coming from?" The article she had brought up was pretty suspicious, and if someone had posted that on my Facebook feed I would have definitely investigated it a little more. It didn't have an author, the person wasn't named, it was from some random website. These are all marks of an unreliable source, and in our program, I am sure that we all know that. But it really took us a long time to realize that, simply because we had been "primed" to believe it. We did some more digging, found that the links on the dubious website went to some tech journal writer who reported that "a man emailed him" this story, first person. Still unnamed, the tech writer didn't verify with the movie theater or anything. By now we were ready to call it fake. Pretty unbelievable in my opinion, because I had seen it on Reddit, which is pretty good at calling out fake news, and Mari said she saw it in the AP. But we continued to dig more, and actually were able to find a news source from the local paper there that confirmed the story with the theaters and local authorities. So it was true, after all. But it was just so crazy that because we had been primed to believe it, none of us really questioned the reliability of the information, and that is basically supposed to be our number one goal as librarians. Ack! It was an example of how difficult it is to teach good information literacy.

The top disclaimer was unnecessary, after all.