Our own experiences

As I think about my teaching, I have started to go back to my own undergraduate experiences. Sarah and I had the same kinds of passion about learning: it was most exciting when we were able to make connections between the classes we took and within individual classes. When I wrote papers I often would include information or insights from the instructor. For example, I would write, "According to Professor Instructor, the market value of education...." I brought this up to a student I worked with at the reference desk, and he had not thought of doing something like that. I wonder if students think that their research papers exist in some kind of vacuum. When students do discuss these connections, they sometimes feel like their cheating (i.e., I'm using information from this paper in another paper in a different class but similar topics). I'm wondering what made you passionate about learning. Was it the connections or something else.

Podcast for College 101 web guide

I created audio instructions on how to access UW Restricted databases from home for an online College 101 class. I'm not sure how useful it is. I also have to work with how to embed it correctly. I'll have to ask Libhelp if we have flash-bashed player capabilities. Although it seems clunky now, I like that the audio is about one minute long, but to write it all out - "you need a UW NetID, but first you have to have a CCC user account. Go to the OLC if you don't have one..." would be cumbersome, and I don't know if students would understand. What do you think? Also, any help making it look better would be helpful.

another random reflection

This activity, the CLMC Learning 2.0, has been an interesting and rewarding experience. I'm excited that we have had this opportunity to experiment with the different technologies. It's also been fun to have coworkers lead the learning.

As we investigate and evaluate the tools, I hope we can maintain a critical eye. Although it's all cool, not all the technologies will be appropriate for each of us. As we talk about them, I look forward to robust discussions that include advantages as well as the disadvantages of the technologies without anyone feeling defensive. Maybe that's not a problem for us, but it could be easy to jump on the technology bandwagon.

Will they use it?

Librarians who serve large departments find blogs to be a useful way to communicate with faculty, staff and students (rather than emailing everyone). Would something like this work with our smaller community? For example, with fewer than ten faculty members it’s easier & more effective if I use email to communicate – especially since my faculty isn’t the most technologically savvy. Even the students have their own listservs, and again, it’s easier to email them rather than hope that they check my “education blog.” What do others think?

reflection #1

I find it interesting that creating this blog puts me in a similar position to the students I teach. I often tell students learning to search new databases that it's important to look at the computer screen closely to figure out how to search the database. Often all the information is available, it just takes time to see where all the functions of the database reside on the screen. As I began creating this blog, I realized I became frustrated that I not only couldn't find, but I didn't know, what I needed to complete the process. I also was frustrated that I wasn't able to do it quickly. It took time to search the screen, figure out what the different links were and to get it to do what I wanted it to do. We do live in a world where we want computer applications to be intuitive, but it's not always so.