"Book Club" Readings, Week 8

This week for class, we are doing a kind of "book club." We paired up and picked brief readings we wanted to share with the class, and will be discussing them in a book club format during the class period.


"For Comfort and Posterity, Digital Archives Gather Crowds." Jennifer Howard. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nov. 18, 2013. 

This article was so interesting! It was about a digital archive called Our Marathon which was set up in the days following the Boston Marathon bombing. Being such a recent traumatic event, it's still very fresh in my mind. The article talks about how the Our Marathon archive was set up, and that it became apparent to the founder, a professor at Northeastern University, that everyone in the city had a story to tell, whether they had seen anything or not, knew someone who was hurt or not. The archive is open to the community at large to contribute to, and consists entirely of digital-born content. The author stressed the importance of collecting this material as immediately as possible, because with digital content so much can be lost very quickly. 

The archive receives much of its funding and technical support from Northeastern University and from their campus library, which is great. I'm so glad that the university and the library have undertaken this archive and see the value in its existence and support. They also get a lot of volunteers from the nearby Simmons College's Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, which makes me glad to know that LIS students are being involved in the digital curation of this collection. 

Finally, they mention that other similar projects which were created in "the early days" such as the 9/11 archive are really struggling to stay afloat because of infrastructure issues. They claim to have learned from such projects and are making efforts to make a better site. 


"Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood.

I first want to say that I have been told a million times to read Margaret Atwood and to my embarrassment I never have. So when I saw this short story listed for the book club readings, I was very excited to read some Margaret Atwood at last! I'm not really sure what I was expecting, since the people who tell me to read Margaret Atwood are people who enjoy thought-provoking and feminist literature, generally, but the title was "Happy Endings" and so I was expecting this to be a happy little short story about something or other.

I was mistaken.

It's set up in a neat format, kind of like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, which is always fun to see. But basically it outlines a married couple's life in the vaguest of terms in section A until they die. Then sections B-F are all variations on what happens before the part where they die. Ultimately, this is not a short story at all, but rather an essay on writing fiction. She says:

"The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die. 

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known
to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what
and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why."

which is of course very poetic and a lovely instructional piece on how to write good and meaningful stories. But I must say, I was expecting a Happy Ending and I had my bubble burst.

"The Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams. 

This is the story we picked as our piece for the book club assignment. I'll confess that my previous experience with William Carlos Williams is exclusively in poetry (so much depends upon a red wheel barrow...), and I had not read this short story previously. However, I am very glad that we picked it! It's a first-person narrative of a country doctor making a house call to check on a little girl who has been running a fever for three days. Diphtheria has been going around the school she attends, and apparently one of the signs of diphtheria is a sore throat because it is covered in a membrane. The story is actually the struggle between the doctor and the little girl who refuses to open her mouth to show the doctor, and his use of force to open her mouth to see. I won't say much more about it, just because I'm excited to see what my classmates have to say in our discussion.

 The Syrian Opposition is Disappearing from Facebook. Michael Pizzi. The Atlantic. Feb. 4, 2014. 

Wow. That's all I can say about his piece right now. It was considerably longer than the other pieces we read for the book club, but it was also the most important. It brought up so many fascinating points. The most interesting, I thought, was that it is incredible how people have started to use Facebook as a means of reporting civil conflict to refugees and the world at large. How incredible. But second, that there is a kind of guerrilla warfare happening between the factions for control over what gets posted on Facebook. Information is powerful. 

I usually have a hard time reading pieces like this simply because I feel so extremely helpless. I listen to NPR, I hear about these kinds of problems in different parts of the world, I read articles online or in the newspaper. And my heart goes out to these people whose lives are so oppressed and they live in constant fear for their lives. But what can I do? It's incredibly frustrating to know there are people like you and me around the world, just trying to live their lives, and they don't have the same luxury of knowing that they are safe in their home or at work that I do. I always feel so powerless to help anyone in any way once I read these articles. I wish I could help, somehow. 

Bluebeard 

Alright, so people have heard of Bluebeard, and most people probably equate him with Blackbeard of piratey fame, but according to this story, anyway, he is not a pirate but a vicious monster who slaughters his wives. The text of the story does not support this, but the illustrations lead the reader to believe that Bluebeard is from the Middle East. There is some serious "Othering" happening here. Especially in the end where Bluebeard is about to cut off the head of his bride and her brothers come in and kill him, give all his slaughtered wives "Christian burials" and the bride remarries someone good and handsome and forgets all about it. Talk about happy endings. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that this story was used to malign Muslims as monsters during the Crusades, and they therefore had to be saved and converted into Godly Christians. 

However, after a skilled Wikipedia search (everything on the internet is true, folks), Bluebeard is apparently a French folktale thought to be based on a serial killer. Fascinating. Those illustrations were very misleading. Something to bring up in class!  

Class Reflection: Week 7

Yesterday in class we spent half of the time doing a kind of "book club"/Socratic Seminar based on one of our readings for the week, the Marc Prensky piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled In the 21st Century, Let's Ban (Paper) Books. I'm not sure if the article linked to is provided by MLibraries or not, so my apologies if you can't read the article. Anyway, just based on the title, this is a pretty incendiary piece, and we had a really interesting discussion of it in class.

We turned our tables into a square to facilitate discussion better, and Kristin practiced what she preached by sitting down with us. She has us each reread the article, and then discuss it for a few minutes with a partner, and write down a question we each came up with on an index card. Then someone started the conversation with their card, and it pretty much just took off from there. It was interesting to see this activity become a serious discussion between peers in a classroom setting, in which Kristin chimed in occasionally but was mostly silent. Obviously we were all extremely against the premise of "banning" all paper books on a college campus, since we are all aspiring librarians or archivists in the library and it is in our professional interest to believe that paper books are still useful. It would have been interesting to have some of the other specializations at SI's take on the article. Anyway, I'd just like to list a few of the concerns we had with the article here:

• What are the actual benefits of "banning" paper books on a campus? 
• Imagine how wildly, insanely expensive it would be to digitize a whole library's collection (and faculty collections, too!) and house all that digital material.
• There is a little thing called "copyright law" which prevents libraries from digitizing their own collections. 
• What library could ever dream of affording a fully digital collection, when licensing fees are through the roof? At least in today's digital publishing climate. 
• What about the special and rare collections of items that for one reason or another cannot be digitized?
• What happens if the system crashes? 
• What do you do with all those millions of paper books? 
• He says that pretty much everything students read for classes are already in the public domain and are already digitized. What world does this man live in that students use materials at the college level from 1923 or earlier, particularly outside of the narrow world of English literature? 

The list of concerns goes on and on. We had hoped that perhaps Marc Prensky was making a parody, or commenting on the current user demand for all materials online, accessible now. Kristin sort of deflated that balloon of hope by saying that in her experience, Marc Prensky is not the kind of person who would say something like this in irony. 

I would be interested to hear what people outside of the profession would say about this. Are paper books irrelevant and outdated? Assuming we could provide access to all of a library's holdings electronically, would this be a legitimate plan? And frankly, comments like "I just like how a physical book feels/smells" or "I like using my large collection of bookmarks" are not useful in this discussion. 

Readings: Week 7

The Evolving Book Group, Beth Dempsey. Library Journal Sept. 2011

"The joy and mystery of reading is that each of us reads a different book from everyone else…even when it's the same book," says Nancy Pearl, author of the Book Lust readers' advisory (RA) titles and LJ's 2011 Librarian of the Year. "We bring all of our life experiences to the reading of a book, any book, and each person's history is different from everyone else's." 

I thought that this article was really great. As a recovering English literature student, I find it really easy to buy into the concept of a book club being a kind of transformative experience for people. Beth Dempsey cited a few library programs which bridge the generation gap, or exclusively target the young professionals crowd. I think that the graphic novel group would be really fascinating, and hosting such book clubs at outside venues, whether it is a local coffee shop or a local brewery, gives a program a more casual and relaxed feel. The online/in-person book club was great, too. People can participate on their own time however much or little they want when the session is online, as well as providing a traditional communal feel for those who prefer that, too. Great ideas!

I think I was the most interested in the prison outreach book club she cites in her article. I loved the idea of having a "book club" with a young offender, the parole officer, the judge, and a librarian, and that it works as a way to model young people who have battled tough situations but made it through alright. It could really help a young person in a positive way. I loved that she said many of these rehabilitated young people still keep in regular contact with "their" librarian!

"Socratic Seminars: Engaging Students in Intellectual Discourse." Lynda Tredway. 1995

Generally I agreed with this article. It said that teachers should be using the "Socratic method," a term I had heard before but never really knew what it meant. Essentially, it is a teaching method in which the teacher leads a discussion but doesn't tell students what to think or how to solve a problem. This method encourages critical thinking skills and as well as respect for one's peers. I liked how the article approached using the Socratic method in school classrooms, but I was reminded of my college experience more than anything else. In reading the article, I realized that this style of teaching was essentially the way that college level English courses are taught, which needless to say, I enjoyed. 

I can very easily see how this method of instruction translates into a library-lead book club, which would be essentially the same as a guided discussion in a literature course. For me, leading a book club discussion would be second nature, I think, which is why I am really excited to do our brief book club exercise in class as well as develop my own book clubs later in a professional setting. How fun is this job? 

The Book Club Exploded Barbara Hoffert. 2006

This article brought up some interesting variations on book clubs, for instance, bringing in authors to speak with the book clubs via phone or videoconference. One idea I really liked was the idea of doing a book club on a thematic basis instead of picking the same book for everyone to read, or picking an author for the book club to focus on and everyone selecting one of their works. I think that in this way people could get more out of a book club from their peers. It would be a greater learning experience and probably even more interesting! 

Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching reading: beyond the plot." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.

I really enjoyed this particular article. It was on a teacher's method of helping her high school freshman English students learn to comprehend texts using a variation on the Socratic method. It's very detailed, and I think that her unit on close reading is probably very successful. I can imagine that some students initially feel that it is a dumb activity, but I think by the end of the unit (2 months) the majority of the students, from all reading levels, would feel like they had learned something or done some valuable thinking about these texts. I think doing this with high school freshmen is the perfect age group, too. They have never been allowed, or told, to mark up books, so that is a new and exciting experience, as well as the opportunity to sit and talk freely with their peers. I liked that at one point the author says her students threw her out of the inner circle, saying that she was not being helpful to their discussions. I think that is a really telling moment for her instruction, and knowing that it was working. Anyway, a really interesting article on helping all students to become better readers. I think that the premise of this article is really foreign to me: reading has always been fun and easy, so I never understood how people could dislike reading or find it difficult. There was a great quote on it, though, that really put it into perspective for me: 

"Often teachers feel so desperate for some class participation that they accept any verbal statement, fearing that they will suppress conversation if they make judgments about the quality of student responses. Therefore, students don't know which answers are right and wrong, particularly since it is out of fashion to say that any answer is wrong. As soon as teachers hear a reasonable answer, they move on to the next question. It's as though in a math class, after several solutions were given, the teacher just moved on to the next math problem without saying which solutions were right and to what degree.

Most students do not understand how their more articulate, insightful classmates reach conclusions about literature. Unless teachers explain why some interpretations are more valid, class discussions confirm students' belief that some of their classmates "just get it" and that literature is inaccessible to them. Again, imagine a math class in which no one explains how a problem was solved."


In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books By Mark Prensky 2011

This article I thought was pretty ludicrous, let's say. By reading the comments at the end of it, I can tell that I am not the only person who feels this way.

I can appreciate some of his argument: at SI, the vast majority of our readings are all free and online, which has been great because textbooks are outrageously expensive and I pay a lot of money already for tuition, so not having to buy books has been great. But to ban print books altogether? To literally confiscate a print book if found on the campus at all, in anyone's private possession? That is insane. Let's take a moment to think about how insane that is.

Even if an institution had the kinds of funds available to 1.digitize their entire collection, 2. give every student and faculty member an e-reader, and 3. pay the licensing fees for all the materials necessary, year in and year out, this plan would take an enormous amount of time and manpower. Not to mention that even in those cases, people still just like paper books. Fact.

New Adult as a Category

In doing some research for a separate class, I stumbled upon an article published in Booklist which caught me off guard. It's the concept of "New Adult" as a category of people, and publishers are catering to them. A surprising statistic cited in the article is that 84% of YA books are being purchased by people over 18 (not sure if this statistic includes parents buying for their teen, because that would make a huge difference, I'm sure). Anyway, I thought it was a great article, and it included a list of Top 10 books for New Adults which I found really interesting. I think I would add the new Hyperbole and a Half book to this list, as well.

Top Books for New Adults

Reflection: Week 6

Our last class period was, in my opinion, very interesting! We started with one topic, which was basically what did we think about the TED talk we watched last week by Jane McGonigal on How Videos Games Can Change the World, and it felt like we really were able to dig deeper and connect the conversation to a wider picture. Class was also made more interesting by Kristin's lovely multi-colored notes on the whiteboard, complete with illustrations. Thanks for that, Kristin.

I'm not sure if our class is just a bunch of cynics or what, but a lot of what we had to say about McGonigal's talk was fairly negative. We weren't sure if 1. the kinds of games she creates are either enjoyable or able to transfer into reality as a real change, and 2. if gamers actually care at all about transferring their in-game skills into the real world, or as a force for change. We did spend some time discussing other people's work that seems more successful in this arena, such as Henry Jenkins' games, or a few other games around solving plague outbreaks or running a McDonald's, which teach transferable skills. What we ultimately ended up deciding was that McGonigal speaks as a brand, rather than necessarily a successful individual. She has a great presence; she's an attractive woman with a mass of blonde tangles like a lion's mane (apparently all the best-known ladies in LibraryLand have great hair. Note to self: invest in excellent hairstylist.), she's a great speaker, and most importantly, she's a gamer herself. She's not exactly the typical stereotype of "gamer," or even "female gamer." So, she's a great representative to the world of the gaming community and the kinds of work that could, in theory, be done. I think we had a real negative spin on this in class, and we called her out for kind of selling half-truths, but I think maybe it is smart of either her or whoever is putting her in the spotlight to call attention to an area which people think could be expanded upon.

We ended up taking the conversation in a separate but related direction by discussing the UMSI t-shirts which we all received at orientation which say "i will change the world." Lowercase i meaning information, not just poor grammar. There were some significantly mixed reviews on this message. Some people liked the idea that it was promoting that just one person can make a big difference in the world, which is great. Some people felt that it was a slogan that had good intentions but was also a little bit arrogant. I can definitely see that, sometimes it feels like people at the university have this mentality that they are going to "save the world," and it can come off as really arrogant and egotistical. We talked about the idea of a kind of us vs. them mentality to this--that we know what is best for other people. I mean, I know that I have insane amounts of student loans for this program, so it doesn't feel like I am one of the wealthy privileged, but simply by virtue of being at UMSI I have to accept that I am one of a very, very privileged few. So when I leave here, I may end up working in a community or at an institution which does not have the same kinds of resources or opportunities that are available in the Ann Arbor area or at UofM. In fact, it's more than likely that that is what will happen. And how can I go to this community and say "Look at all these fancy technological things I learned in library school!" when what they really need is just help figuring out what the heck a browser is and how do you double-click with a mouse. Which sort of brings me around to how I feel about the slogan, which is that I think it applies more to the tech-side of UMSI, anyway. So many of the amazing, world-changing things that happen here happen because someone had a brilliant idea for a tech start-up and implemented it while they were in school, or they designed an app which monitors their glucose trends for diabetes, or they are re-designing the way citizens interact with their local government. What world-changing thing do I do? So this lead the discussion in two ways, the first way being that the iSchool grew out of the library/service tradition, and really the mission of the school is to help people use their powers skills for good instead of evil. Helping better society = good, hacking personal data = bad. Instilling morals and all that, which is great and something I hadn't thought of. The second way the conversation went was that we help to change the world on a much smaller, more individual scale. We promote intellectual freedom, literacy, community support. On an individual level, we help people out when they need it. That changes that one person's world. Most poignantly, Meagan, our own moral compass, concluded the discussion on a positive note about how she really does feel like she changes someone's world, when she can help another blind or disabled person use assistive technology which will help them tremendously. And that really is changing the world for someone.

tl;dr: warm fuzzy feelings on how we really do change the world at UMSI, in big and small ways.

Readings: Week 6

The readings for this week take us back to where I stood on day one of this blog. I firmly believe that in order for learning to happen, real learning, we need to teach students to understand and transfer information, not just regurgitate facts.

I was forever angry in high school because the grades in high school were not about how well you understood the material, or how intelligent you were, they were based on whether or not you filled out the endless worksheets going over the same material again and again. This is the reason why I was not a 4.0 student in high school. I could pass every test with flying colors, I could write a great essay and apply my knowledge to a few different areas or topics we had learned in class. But to me, filling in mindless worksheets was a waste of time, and frankly a lazy way out for the teachers. I will be the first to admit that I'm sure I was a bit of a challenging student to have in class, because although I was always polite, I simply refused to be insulted in that way. Teachers always used to say, "Emily is so bright. She would do so much better if she would just apply herself," to my mom during teacher conferences. Sorry I'm not sorry, but I knew as a fifteen year old that filling in answers was not an acceptable way to learn.

Maybe that idea stemmed from my stellar elementary education, where every unit had a purpose and an activity that tied it all together. I still remember dressing  up as a runaway slave in a wax museum exhibit in the fourth grade when we learned about slavery, or sewing together our Freedom Quilt squares (I am not any better at sewing today than I was in the fourth grade). I recall going outside to splash water on the pavement, measuring the diameter of the spill, and then returning in a half hour to measure it again, and again in another half hour, so that we could see and experience evaporation for ourselves. We turned out whole classroom into a "city." We had a mayor, and we each had businesses where we sold our wares to the other grades for pretend money. I'm sure we had days where we sat and did normal kids-in-school things, but it always culminated in a big activity that lasted for several days and we learned an incredible amount.

What do I remember about high school? I remember I played around with paint in art classes. I remember watching a lot of movies. I remember not doing an awful lot of worksheets. I remember tests which I could have taken the day after the lecture, but we spent weeks on. I remember a few essays. The best courses were my AP European History and AP U.S. Government class, but even those were just an accelerated version of the usual, with one or two larger transfer activities tied in. We did try to do a Middle East peace talks negotiation at one point in AP U.S. Gov, which must have been somewhat successful because I kind of remember it. Mostly I remember a whole lot of nothing. What does it say that I remember my elementary education better than my high school education? I read something recently that was essentially a letter to a young teacher, and it was along the lines of "Don't stress, young teacher, because your students won't remember the lessons you taught them, or the way you set up your classroom. They will remember how you made them feel." Which is sweet in sentiment, but in reality I think that is a disservice to students and teachers alike. Clearly, I recall the well-designed lessons of my teachers from the past. And I thank them for what must have taken extreme amounts of time and effort to develop, because they have succeeded with their students. I don't just mean me, I mean all of my former classmates from that school. We had a little class reunion at the end of our senior years of high school, and so many, so many, were valedictorians in their own schools. So many were going off to attend prestigious universities and do amazing things like become astrophysicists or surgeons or whatever. And so many, too, were inspired by our own teachers to be the best teachers they could be. I was in the middle, I didn't know what to do. I hadn't thought of librarianship, yet, I guess. But I think that for all of us, the lessons we learned as young children stayed with us. Lessons on how to learn, and how to be challenged. That learning is fun, and that the things we learned in school applied in the larger world.

How can we give all students that same kind of experience I had a child? How can we prove to educators and administrators and government agencies that the standard model of education in place today has long outlived its usefulness? This is the real question. Because good educators know that teaching students to understand, not just repeat facts, is the key to success in education, and in life.

Without further ado, a brief recap of the readings.  

Put Understanding First, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

"If we don't give students sufficient ongoing opportunities to puzzle over genuine problems, make meaning of their learning, and apply content in various contexts, then long-term retention and effective performance are unlikely, and high schools will have failed to achieve their purpose."

I think the quote above pretty much sums up the whole argument they make in this article, and what I was trying to get at in my angry educational rant above. They propose that, gosh darnit, education should be meaningful and relevant to students because they would probably learn it better. I don't think I can say much more than I already have other than that I agree. Whole-heartedly. Clearly. 

How People Learn Chapter 3

This chapter is on educational transfer and again how meaningful it is that we teach for understanding and not just facts. It's much lengthier than the above article, and goes in more depth about things which are intrinsically connected to learning materials such as motivation and context. If a student has no motivation to learn something, "How will this ever apply to me?" how could we expect them to learn something from it? I think this can be connected to our previous discussion in class (last week?) when we discussed at what stage it would be most helpful for a librarian to step into the picture. The beginning of the semester is not a super great time to teach students how to use certain databases. They really don't care. Once they have been assigned a paper topic, and need help using the databases to find relevant information? Bingo. 

Fortunately for me, I have the extreme pleasure of manning the reference desk, and from time to time I get the odd intrepid student who realizes that they are lost and need help finding information, or forming a topic, or narrowing the field. I like that part of my job. I get to help shape the direction of their research, I get to talk with them about options they may not have considered. If nothing else, I get to help them out of a corner. But for every student who comes to the desk for help, I can imagine that there must be 10 (or more!) students who muddle through it on their own, relying on what techniques they learned for research in their introductory composition class in the second week. How can we convince faculty that if we are to be of the best use to their students, the faculty need to bring their class to the library once they have been assigned a task?

Bonus Entry on Other Professional Bloggers (Or, Professionals Who Blog, Rather)

As part of our blog assignment for this particular course, we were supposed to pick a few bloggers who update from the field to follow and then report back on who they are, what they talk about, etc. This has been a particularly interesting task, and for me I think it has been a nice introduction to something that is really stressed in library school (follow professional bloggers! Read professional publications!) but without being assigned is just another "thing I should really do." So without further ado, I give to you the librarian bloggers I have chosen to follow along with for this semester.

Academic Bloggers

Librarian Meg has been a blogger that I have been personally interested in following. A little while ago I went into Kristin's office hours and had a lengthy chat about which kind of library I might be best suited for, or would enjoy working in best. The final outcome was possibly a rather innovative public library, or a fairly small academic library such as my own alma mater. In any case, she suggested then that Librarian Meg, a UMSI alumna, might be a good person to follow and/or get in touch with. She works at a small university in upstate New York, and it has been nice to follow along with the daily challenges she faces at work, which seem like things that a typical librarian at a small university would deal with. She talks about things like one-shot workshops where professors want her to teach citation. I liked that her thoughts on this were something along the lines of "Where did everyone get the idea that librarians are citation experts? And furthermore, the professor is the one grading it, shouldn't they be the ones teaching citations to their specifications?" But she chooses to buck up and teach citation, along with some other things she thinks are useful, because face-time with students is invaluable, and a librarian should leap at every opportunity they have to interact with students. She also discusses the challenges that I think many librarians face which have to do with marketing. Librarians are not naturally good marketers (imagine that) and therefore she saw that their ebook system, Overdrive, was being severely underused. She had to figure out a marketing strategy and implement it so that the system would see more use and thus justify the cost of such an expense. This struck a chord with me, too, especially as I think about what courses I should be taking next year. I had already heard about a cognate course in the School of Social Work, I believe, and it was was Marketing for Non-Profits. I was already thinking that would be a great course to take, especially if I am interested in public libraries, but I think it would be beneficial to take even for people going into academic libraries, as Meg is. Of course, I can't expect to learn everything I need to know about marketing in a semester, but it should give me a little more solid footing than I would otherwise have.

Letters to a Young Librarian is a blog run by Jessica Olin, the director of a small liberal arts college in Delaware. I think that her blog title says it all. Her posts aren't actually in letter format (it makes a little sad that they don't start with "Dear Young Librarian,"), but she writes about topics as a season library veteran honestly and in an easily accessible way. My favorite post of hers was a recent recap of her first year as director, and it really struck me because everything she said about feeling like she was totally in over her head every day, and then ultimately realizing that she was going to be okay, really resonated with me as a student. That's how I feel everyday. So it was nice to know that even the tried-and-true librarians feel the same as us beginners. I even commented and thanked her for being so honest. She also spoke at one point about being persuaded by her readers to go to ALA Midwinter, and how she was glad she went after all. I liked that because I am 100% that person who doesn't really want to go to social events because it just seems so exhausting and people end up having to drag me out. I always have a good time when I'm there, but it's a struggle to go. I expect I will need friends and colleagues in my career to drag me to conferences. She also discusses her family history--her mother and grandmother were librarians, too! How sweet! I think there is a kind of wonderful passion and familiarity that so many children grow up with when they have librarians for parents or grandparents. I think it is not all that unusual for children to follow in those footsteps, which is really sweet and encouraging.

Miscellaneous Bloggers

These bloggers don't really fall into a specific category of professionals. They are librarians, or librarian-types, and discuss things relevant to the field.

Annoyed Librarian is a blogger I found to be really funny and interesting. It's written by "anonymous," and hosted by Library Journal, so it's kind of an "official" library blog. I really liked AL's sardonic voice and her perspective on certain issues such as the whole demise of libraries due to e-books. She talks about e-books and how if we get rid of paper books then the gap will only widen between the poor and the more wealthy, and education will suffer, which I think is absolutely true. I am from a poor area, and I know that many of the patrons we served at the public library couldn't use a computer, let alone own one. And an e-reader or tablet? Nobody even knows what those are. What I find to be actually more interesting than the AL blog posts, though, are the comments she inspires, which often turn into a kind of librarian flame war. This is odd because librarians are notoriously the nicest people around. I've learned that when "enthusiastic" is used in job descriptions (and it is very often used in job descriptions), they really mean "young and fresh out of library school," which is a bonus for me right now. The flame wars are fascinating to read through, while at the same time horribly discouraging. When commentors routinely make comments such as this one: 

"Yes, there is a glut of MLIS degrees, a dearth of jobs, and a trend toward downsizing professional library staff through attrition. So under what delusions do people continue to pursue a master’s degree program in a low-paying field with bleak to non-existent prospects for either full-time employment or a liveable wage? I have little sympathy for anyone who accrues 40K in student loan debt on an MLIS and then cries foul because they cannot find a job in the field. As the old saying goes, a failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. I hear Wal-Mart is hiring." Follow the comment thread here

I get pretty upset. 40k in student loans? That's cute. My only hope is in the Career Development Office's figures of 98% post-graduation employment. I see a lot of success stories coming from last year's alum and this year's soon-to-be alum already. I guess I have to have faith in the strength and quality of my program, the school's alumni network and prestigious name, and myself.

InfoDocket has been really interesting to follow for the semester. It's another blog hosted by Library Journal, and it's written by Gary Price. I like it because it is a hodge-podge of library news from all over. If it is noteworthy and a library somewhere is doing it, or it applies directly to libraries, InfoDocket covers it. This blog is updated several times daily, which makes it really challenging to keep up with, so often I only read the full post if the headline grabs my attention. It has been so much fun following it though! I have pulled links from a few different posts and sent them to friends on Facebook. Namely, when InfoDocket announced that the Library of Congress had created an online exhibit to the cosmos in honor of Carl Sagan and the newly updated Cosmos series that Fox will be airing hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was able to share that on my fiance's wall, and he thought it was great!  And one of my current roommates is a huge music buff, and I was able to share on his Facebook wall that the Library of Congress had announced the digitization and release of over 80,000 songs and other materials on American Folk Music, and he was really excited about it, too! I very nearly shared a recent post about Marvel's public release of their API on another friend's wall who is trying to break into the comic book industry, but I decided that he probably wouldn't really know what to do with a public API, and neither do I, if we're being honest here. My point is that following InfoDocket has been really exciting to me both as a librarian who is interested in what libraries around the country and around the world are doing, and as a person who just likes to share interesting information because it's neat and I think someone close to me would benefit from it (or is that just the secret definition of being a librarian?).

I'm going to conclude by saying that I'm glad I was prompted to set up an RSS feed for this class so I can actually follow professionals who blog, and that I believe I will keep up this practice going forward in my studies and my schooling.

And finally, because I really liked this and want to share it here but don't want to create a separate post, photographs of today's librarians at ALA Midwinter. Such great photos of how we are not all old ladies shushing people!

Reflection: Week 5

In class on Thursday we randomly selected three of the screencasts we did a few weeks ago to watch.

The first one was by a classmate and it was on using the Beeline Reader Plug-in for your browser. This was something I have looked at before but for whatever reason I don't think I installed it. Anyway, it's a really neat bit of software which softly shifts colors on pages with a lot of text so that your eye can read faster and with less strain. I actually find it really helpful, and must remember to install it on my Chrome browser on my laptop once I get home. Anyway, the actual screencast was very nice. It was easy to follow along with, her pacing was really good, and she showed just where everything should go in a browser in case you had never used plug-ins (extensions?) before. Overall, a really excellent example.

The second screencast we watched actually was a podcast, because we have the wonderful opportunity to have a student who is blind in our class. So she did a podcast on how to use a particular piece of software put out by the National Library Service called BARD: Braille and Audio Reading Download which is basically like downloading a book to your Kindle or Nook but for the visually or physically impaired. Her podcast was great because she explained both how the service worked as well as the actions a blind person would need to do to access it, such as explaining where specific buttons were and the motions a person would need to do to get there. She also allowed her screen reading technology to play in the background of her podcast so that the person listening would be able to hear what the screen reader would say. I think that having this student in our class is really eye-opening, and in a program where accessibility is highly-stressed (hopefully it is highly-stressed in all library science programs), her presence alone reminds us to always keep accessibility in mind. I know that in my own screencast, I tried to keep her in mind and say out loud the area of the screen a person would find a specific button. I'm not sure if I always succeeded, but it was a great reminder to make things as accessible as I can.

The third screenshot we watched was on the software/website Canva.com. I thought that this was an incredibly awesome bit of technology. It's free and is pretty much a drag-and-drop graphic design tool for anything from posters to presentations to invitations and more. I swear I learn about cool things every day lately. Anyway, the screencast was very good, easy to follow along, and her voice was very confident!

Based on the random sampling of my classmate's work, I imagine that they were all pretty great!

Based off of the above tutorial on Canva, I felt like I was in a safe enough space to ask what in the world a "poster session" is. I get a call to submit my work to a poster session probably daily in my email, and long have I wondered what that means. I imagined it involved a poster (wow) and perhaps some kind of small presentation, but beyond that, I had no idea. Thanks to Kristin and my peers, the mystery has been solved! A poster presentation is where you make a poster for a conference and stand by it and talk to whoever approaches you about your work. Kristin likened it to a science fair, which really helped. So now, once I have done something I think someone might be interested in, I can apply to do a poster session at a conference and know what that actually is. I think I will actually do one on my "Alternative" Alternative Spring Break mini-project I am planning on doing for the expoSItion.

Finally, we watched a great TED talk by Jane McGonigal (spoilers: she does not turn into a cat, sadly) on How Gaming Can Make a Better World, which was really interesting. She used World of Warcraft as her perpetual example, and my deep hatred of the game tainted her presentation for me, but overall it was really interesting. She basically talks about how gamers spend so much time working at gaming that they become "experts" in that area, and we should be channeling that expertise into a game that will actually make a difference for today's world problems. I found it to be a little far-flung, but I thought it was interesting and innovative. We used the TED talk as a starting point for creating evaluative surveys for post-workshops and the do's and don't's of that.

Formative Assessment

This week's readings were all about the teaching principle of using "formative assessment." What this means is that teachers evaluate students' learning during the lessons, and modify their teaching to better fit students' learning styles or focus on areas the students are not understanding. This method of teaching is in conflict with the traditional method of teaching, where teachers teach, students are expected to learn, and then they are assessed on what they have learned. The result is either that students learned what they needed to and do well on the assessment, or they did not learn what they were supposed to and do poorly on the assessment. The modern school of thought is more in favor of the former method of teaching. It emphasizes students' actual learning; it's more important that the students are understanding the material than that they score well at the end.

I come from a small state school here in Michigan, a university, I mean, and one of our most popular and most widely touted programs is our teaching program. We produce notably excellent teachers, who are generally praised all around for their readiness to teach in a real classroom post-graduation. I was never in the teaching program because I don't have the courage and fortitude to face a classroom full of young people day in and day out. But I did take Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) courses, and I know that my professor in all of those courses, who was also a professor in the normal teaching program, I believe, very highly stressed the value of formative assessment. In every class I had with him, he drilled into us that formative assessment is the only way to teach effectively. I am pretty certain that this was the case throughout the whole School of Education, and that our teaching graduates leave the college with a firm understanding of today's best practices in teaching. I would hope that, even though my school produces great teachers, this is the normal way that new teachers are taught, and that new teachers entering the workforce are putting these practices into use. The "problem" seems to be with getting veteran teachers on board with these new practices.

This is all well and good, but the question remains: what does this have to do with libraries? I think that part of it is the need to elicit feedback from users when we are doing instructional courses, or even during a simple reference question. Making sure that users are understanding what we are trying to show them is crucial in the service aspect of the profession. We are in the business of helping people help themselves, and if we show them time and time again without teaching them, we are doing them a disservice.