Readings: Week 14? 15?

For this week our readings focused on professional development. How can teachers (and librarians!) become better at what they do? Of course not every person can be strong in every skill area, and teachers are no exception. This week we looked at some really interesting ways that teachers can work together to learn from one another on improving areas of weakness. In the Semadeni reading, the example is a program run by the district that allows teachers to take time out of their day, maybe just an hour, to sit in on another teacher's class to study that teacher's strong suit. It's a great way for teachers to collaborate, and to promote respect and collegiality within the school as well. It's nice to be singled out as someone who does X very well, and who another teacher can learn from. And it's a great way for teachers to be able to ask their colleagues, "Why did you do that?" and get a real answer. I'm not sure if every school district would be able to implement this strategy, but it sounds pretty reasonable!

We also got to read Kristin's short piece on a PD tool that she enacted in her school as a librarian, which was a self-paced technology "exploration." I think this idea is pretty neat, because the teachers could do it on their own time, with minimal instruction or oversight, and just play around with a bunch of new educational websites and resources. They then had to write up a short blog post about it (something seems familiar here...) and submit it for their PD credit. I thought it seemed like a good way for teachers, who are so busy, to take their time going as slowly or as quickly as they like through new tools and resources. I think they're more likely to gain the benefit from this style of PD than they would if they sat in a computer lab for a half day and had someone "teaching" them to use all these new resources. So much of that information goes in one ear and out the other in sessions like that.

Well friends, this is my last "official" blog post! I must say, I really love blogging, and I think it's been really helpful to think through my learning and reflect on my classes. I am going to try to keep this blog up and running, hopefully with weekly blog posts related to my adventures in library school, or soon here, my internship. I think I get a lot out of it, even if it's just a cathartic release. And it's really been very surprising how many people are interested in what I have to say. I started posting this blog on my Facebook from the very first blog post, thinking, "Well, I wrote it, and probably no one will be interested in it, but I guess if someone really has nothing to do, they could read it." And I must say, I post the link to this blog every time, and almost every time, someone outside of SI even has something really great and interesting to say about what I've written. From teachers who have their own classrooms and have taught me more about what the readings said (for better or worse), to computer programmers discussing privacy concerns or ethical issues, to friends just agreeing with a few lines that resonated with them. So, thanks, everyone, for reading my ramblings on a class you may not even be in!

Week 13: Class Reflection -- Webinars

This week for class we prepared webinars in groups to present to the class. Having never seen a webinar before last week (last week? two weeks ago? ten years ago? I have no idea how time functions at this point in the semester), it seemed like a really daunting task. First there is the fact that you have to talk about something for a half hour at a time. Then you have to come up with a powerpoint to go with your talk that will engage people on the other side of a screen, because it's really easy to tune out people who are not physically in front of you. Then there is figuring out how to use the software needed to broadcast a webinar, which is no small feat and plenty of us had "technical difficulties" today. Finally, it's important to rehearse and maybe even write down what you're going to say, because it's really easy to get messed up. Oh, and did I mention that while you're giving your presentation, there is an active chat happening on the side?

tl;dr: Webinars are hard.

But that didn't stop us! No, we forged on ahead, and although no one's webinar went off without a hitch, I'll say that they went pretty well, despite whatever difficulties.

Actually, I really liked my group's webinar topic and had a lot of fun exploring the topic. We chose to present on how to attract pre-baby, post-college Millennials (a group that is kind of "forgotten" usually by library services) to the library. We titled it "Millennials: Get in my library!" which I feel was apt. Anyway, we decided to have fun with the topic and I think it really showed in our presentation. The focus of our presentation was really on the kinds of fun events and services which really cater to the wants and needs of the millennial crowd. These included the Smarty-Pants Trivia Smack Down hosted at the Chelsea Alehouse by the Chelsea District Library, or the 21+ themed Halloween party that my own hometown library throws as a fundraiser, which features drinks, dancing, costume contests, fortune tellers, palm readers, silent auction, a raffle, and a tour of the library's (allegedly) haunted spots. That last bit is actually really cool because a few years ago we had "ghost hunters" come in and they verified the hauntings and whatnot, so it's pretty cool, but it's up to you whether you think it's haunted or not. So the tours go through the areas which the ghost hunters said were haunted in the dark and it's all kinds of creepy. The library shuts down early that day for service and they clear off the circ desk to make room for the bar, and they decorate the whole inside. It's a great party. It mostly works, though, because the building looks like a castle. Not that it couldn't be done in a building that does not look like a castle (re: most libraries), but it's just particularly suitable for this library. See the picture below! 

Hoyt Library - Wikipedia.org

Some other ideas we had for programming we book-themed speed dating events, where singles would be paired up based on their tastes in books. This could just be done as a way to meet new friends, too, especially in an area that sees a lot of new people moving in. We also thought of hosting open mic nights, either at the library or a local coffee shop or brewery/bar, where people with talent want to get up and share their songs, poetry, comedy act, you name it. The last example we had was based on an event that the Ann Arbor District Library is hosting with the A2 Nerd Nite organization, which is a Sega gaming night. That easily translates into just any library offering a throwback gaming night, either with old school video games or board games. 

So the intended message of our presentation was: "Hey, look at all these great things you can do to attract millennials into your library!" But according to our evaluations, what people actually came away with was our final slide on marketing! Admittedly, we put a lot of thought into that marketing slide, because honestly, you can create all the great programs you want and still only have four people show up if no one knows about them. As I was working on that slide, I actually had a lot of fun thinking of ways that we could market the library, and the biggest thing I could think of was that you need to be advertising where your users are. And where are millennials? What do they like? We came up with what I thought were some pretty great ideas, like advertising events on Pandora or the sidebar on Facebook, or in the bathroom stalls of a popular bar. 

I think we were all really surprised, though, that in our evaluations, everyone said they loved the marketing tips! Well, I'm glad that they came away with something useful! Actually, what I get out of that, though, was that I had a lot of fun coming up with those ideas, and I had been toying with the idea of finding a Marketing for Non-Profits course to take as a cognate. Now I think I definitely will! 

Our webinar was not flawless, though, this is true. It's a weird medium to get used to, that's for sure. At one point we had turned off the chat feature because the icon looks like a little whiteboard, and we didn't want people drawing all over our slides in a repeat of Kristin's in-class demonstration. And something weird happened with the polling feature; I think I clicked the show responses option too soon, thinking it would update as people filled it out, and that was not the case. And at one point I got lost in my own notes as I was going along, and couldn't find my place again, so I had an awkward pause and a bit of fumbling. But overall, I would still say that despite these hiccups, it went pretty well. 

We may have been a little heavy-handed with the alcoholic beverage theme, but I don't think that makes it any less true. Go where the users are!

Week 12: Class Reflection

Alright, I will admit that I am lagging behind on this reflection post. It is now Monday evening, and class was Thursday, and I can barely remember what happened. Lots of talk about Twitter and Webinars.

Twitter. As I said in my last post, Twitter was quite the experience. But from our discussion in class on Thursday and reading through some of my classmates' blog posts on the subject, it seems like I was not the only one struggling with the platform, and I hated it less than others. I intend to keep my Twitter account and check on it from time to time, but I have to admit that I'm already failing at that, too. I haven't touched it since Thursday at least, I'm sure. I actually had a bit of a moment with another classmate while I was complaining about how it seems like everyone just posts links to articles, and how can I possibly read through even the ones that interest me when they are flying in at light speed? She admitted that she sometimes just retweets a link based on the title or headline without actually reading it. I have to really wonder how often that happens all over the web, but especially on Twitter. It just doesn't seem conducive to actual absorption of information. Speaking of that, NPR played a great April Fool's Day prank which illustrates that point exactly.

Webinars. Yes, this is coming back to me, now. Kristin walked us all through what the webinar platform we will be using looks like (Blackboard) and how to use it. It took quite a while for everyone to get on board, and the class was apparently quite slap happy (I guess being so near to the end of the semester turns stressed out grad students into children) because we spent an awful lot of time drawing on the slides with the interactive tools, and sending silly "private messages" which the moderator can see. Joking aside, though, it was a good to see a full-scale tutorial of the technology we'll be using to conduct our own webinars. Now I just have to practice it with my group a few hundred times before I can feel comfortable actually doing it.

Week 12: Twitter Activity

This week in Adventures of SI643, instead of readings, we were assigned the task to create a Twitter handle if we didn't already have one (I'm what one might call a "laggard," and therefore did not have one. You can follow me @EmilyKrueger89 if you really want.), and to follow professionals in the library field, and tweet at least 5 times to #si643.

Sounds simple enough. I've heard about Twitter enough to have a pretty good working knowledge of the platform. You tweet messages in 140 characters, you employ the use of hashtags (Let me tell you about my theory of the beauty of hashtags. No really.) to categorize postings. It's kind of neat because celebrities and CEOs and politicians are on Twitter and they will respond to you personally, and you can retweet things you want to share. Ok, good, I got it.

ERRR!! WRONG! I have no idea how to use Twitter!

Joining Twitter has been an extremely confusing activity. I don't know what's appropriate to post on Twitter and what's not, I don't know if I should be posting personal thoughts or if I should only be posting links to content. I don't like that people post photos but they're links you have to click on to see the photo. I wanted to retweet tweets(?) from people I'm following to #si643, but I can't alter the text of a retweet to put the hashtag there. The fact that I'm following almost exclusively professionals in my field makes me extremely wary of posting anything for fear of being unprofessional, and then the idea of gaining more personal contacts on Twitter doubles that fear. How come when I use the hashtag, sometimes my tweet shows up when I click on the hashtag link, and other times it doesn't? I'm not sure how to attribute other people in a tweet, so I have resorted to saying "From @______:" because the retweet option isn't what I want, and I don't know the proper way to do it! I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Also, Barack Obama has been spamming my feed(?) all day about the success of ACA. I mean, every two minutes. Literally. Is this normal? I just completely don't understand the norms of Twitter and it's freaking me out! I think I need someone to sit with me like I'm 75 and talk me through it. Man, life is going to be hard when I'm actually old and have a hard time learning new things!

What I do like is that it's apparently totally normal to follow people you have never met, and so growing a professional network is much easier on Twitter than Facebook. In fact, it was kind of exciting when I posted something by someone I follow (using my make-shift "From:" attribution tag), and they retweeted it! That was neat. And then since I saw that person later give a shout out wishing all the #nightlibrarian 's a good night, I had to respond to that, since I'm on the desk currently. That was fun. I might be slowly getting the hang of some small aspect of this Twitter thing, after all.

Side-note on the pervasiveness of the hashtag, when I was in Alaska visiting my friend, one of her students had hashtagged the title of his/her essay, as well as the MLA heading. Handwritten. On paper. Example:

#English10
#MsWaldrup
#3rdhour

#The Conch in The Lord of the Flies

Just saying. 

Class Reflection: Week 11

In class on Thursday, we had a lot to talk about. We spent a long time discussing a recent local controversy surrounding the proposal of a park next to the public library. It sounds nice; it would be great to be able to take your kids out on some playground equipment after leaving the library, or to see small musical acts or stage performances put on by local artists in the community in a proposed staging area. How nice! How idyllic! What's the problem?

The article is here, and it brings up some excellent points. The reason the proposed park is controversial is actually because the director of the public library as well as the the board came out against the construction of this park. They already see a large amount of substance abuse within the walls of the library on such a regular basis that they feel making a park next door would further exacerbate the problem.

As you can see in the article, some of the city council did not feel that the claims made by the library director were true. I think a big part of the problem is that in this kind of community, people either aren't aware or turn a blind eye to problems. This is a wealthy community. This is a clean city. The public library is well-funded, it's a beautiful space with enormous collections and excellent, innovative programming. We do not have drug users in our community, and they certainly wouldn't be found in the library. But it is true. A public library in any community attracts the homeless, and the drug users (who are not always the same people, by the way). Even on the island of Kodiak, Alaska, I heard rumors that the city's homeless gathered there. I was more surprised that the island had homeless people than that they chose the library as their preferred haunt.

But in her interview, the director of the library explained that the drug abuse is such a problem in the space of the library walls that they have had to remove ceiling tiles in the bathrooms to prevent people from stashing their drugs there. The library has quietly been dealing with this major community problem on its own for many years. They are only now being vocal about it because they can see that adding outdoor space just outside the walls of the library would invite more miscreant behavior. They have concerns about the safety of the space both next door and inside their walls. The director paints a vivid picture of someone having to clean up the syringes every morning in the proposed space. Who takes care of that? Since the library is next door, will they be in charge of monitoring activity in this public space? A shocking figure reported is that the library spends $250,000 annually on security personnel. That is a very large amount of money to be spending, and I am sure that the library would not spend nearly so much if they did not have the need for it.

I guess what our conversation boiled down to was that so many in this community, and other similar communities, see this as a library problem, when it is really a community problem. There are no homeless shelters in the area (so I'm told). Heroin is cheap and popular. What I really thought was admirable was that in her interview, the director doesn't place blame, but she doesn't shy away from talking about the problem either. Hopefully this controversy sparks more than just angry words about whether or not a park should be built. Maybe someone will start to consider what else could be done.

Week 11: Class Readings

How People Learn: Chapter 7

This chapter presents a more detailed look at some teachers in classrooms who are succeeding in teaching their subjects incredibly well. The main point is that it is not enough to say that once a teacher has learned teaching strategies, they can teach any subject. Now, I'm not sure who says that to begin with, because I don't think anyone wants someone whose area of knowledge is in the social sciences teaching the hard sciences, or vice versa. Do people really think that teachers can successfully teach any subject just because they are trained teachers? Anyway, the chapter suggests that teachers should not only understand teaching pedagogy, but have a very thorough understanding of their subject and the ways their subject is best taught. The chapter presents a history teacher who instead of outlining what their curriculum will be at the beginning of the year asks the students what they most want to know about themselves and about the world. They then come up with a list of questions which they attempt to answer throughout the year using various subject disciplines. The example was a student's question of "Will I live to be 100?" and they attempted to answer it by studying genetics, population statistics, family trees, environmental concerns, etc.

So this approach sounds really awesome and like a great teaching/learning methodology, but I think it would be almost impossible for most teachers to teach that way, and for a number of reasons. The first reason is that very, very few school curricula would allow such a free-form outline of the school year. The second reason is that only very experienced teachers could develop their lesson plans in such a spur-of-the-moment manner. Teachers spend all summer developing their lesson plans for the upcoming school year, and then continue to develop them throughout the year. It would be very difficult for anyone to do this. The third reason this is almost impossible is because this teacher seems to have a very broad knowledge base to teach from. Not too many social studies teachers, I imagine, could confidently teach genetics, for example. I think the text's example is an example of a great teacher, and her students are fortunate to have her, but I don't think it is a realistic model to draw from.

Overall, though, I do believe that the text's premise is correct: the best teachers are the ones who a. know how to teach well, and b. are masters of their subject areas. This must be why in many European countries, school teachers are required to have their subject area master's degree before they can become a teacher at all. But, in this country, that gets into issues of the cultural status of teachers, and rates of pay vs. student debt. The payoff just isn't there.

Week 10: One-Shot Workshops

Hah! Do you see that there? That photo of a young, hip looking librarian leaning against some shelves? That's me! Ok, it's not me. But it's a stock photo that represents me, and I got it from Getty Images which as of just recently gave up the good fight against internet plagiarism and now allows anyone to embed photos their website and it attaches that fancy photo cred tag at the bottom, too!

That photo above is brought to this blog by this week's One-Shot Workshops that we held in class. The first group that went did a presentation on copyright and Creative Commons, and showed us some great resources where we can access legally free-to-use images and music! As librarians, copyright plays an important role in our lives, as according to the ALA Code of Ethics (were you paying attention last week?) it is our responsibility to balance the rights of the creator with the rights of users. That can be a fine line! But not so fine that I had trouble walking it earlier last week when someone in China asked me during an online reference chat if they could have their friend in the States come and scan the whole book they wanted from our collection and send it to them. The answer is no. That's copyright infringement, and is definitely not acceptable.

The second group that went presented on Diversity in the Library, an always important topic in any field. The problem we have currently is that librarians are overwhelmingly white females. But the group presenting on diversity opened up the discussion to include more diversity than "How can we get men/people from other ethnic backgrounds to be librarians?" which is so often the only question addressed. They simply asked what having diversity in a library means to us, and we found that we came up with a wide variety of answers. To me, it means having the people staffing the library reflect the community they are in. I worked in a public library in an urban area, and most of our patrons were African-American, but almost all of our staff were white ladies, and that really stood out to me. To other people, having diversity in the library meant a diverse collection reflecting many different subjects, viewpoints, and formats. To others, it meant respecting that not everyone who works in a library has the same background or experience. To others, it meant having employees who have a disability, or resources for those who have disabilities. Our classmate who is blind is a constant reminder of how we can easily help those who have disabilities just by taking a few extra thoughtful steps. She explained that if she had had even a small browsing collection of books in Braille as a kid, it would have meant the world to her to be able to go to the library and pick out a book to read like any other kid. I really hope that by having her in my classes, I carry the idea of accessibility with me throughout my career.

We went next, and our workshop was on avoiding controversy when weeding library collections. It's kind of weird to think about, but weeding (removing books from) a collection is a necessary part of librarianship, and interestingly enough, it's the task that is most likely to stir up controversy in a community. People start saying things like "The library is throwing away all those good books that my tax dollars paid for!" and things get out of hand quickly. So based on the information I'm learning in my Collection Development course, we outlined a few strategic tips to make doing our professional duties less likely to cause problems. I think it went pretty well! I was actually nervous to do the workshop, oddly enough. I wasn't nervous to do the book club a few weeks ago, which was the same length of time and with the same people. It must have been because giving a workshop is considerably more structured than leading a book club. I think it went really well, though, and I shouldn't have been nervous in the first place.

The next group to present was talking about banned books, and we got to pretend like we were high schoolers, which was a riot. It was definitely a lot of fun, but I think the group may have gotten a little out of hand with the antics. Their presentation was good, we talked about why we thought someone might ban books and why we (as high schoolers) disagreed with people making those kinds of decisions for us.

Our final group's workshop was on learning to use the Apple Voice Over technology, which was a really great learning session. Unfortunately, only three people in the room (of about 10) had Macs, so we had to share, which wasn't bad but it would have been a better learning experience if we could have all easily tried to follow along. Anyway, it was immediately clear how complicated using adaptive technology can be! It really gave us a good idea of the kinds of challenges people who need to use screen readers face when using computers.

Overall, everyone did a great job, in my opinion, and I had a lot of fun learning from my peers! I really love when we have the class structured in these small groups and get to learn from each other. I've really enjoyed getting to know some of my classmates I haven't had the opportunity to really interact with yet.