shinylib

Meme: Passion Quilt

I had been ignoring the passion quilt meme for the most part, but Ellie <3 libraries prompted me to think about how to use this meme to sum up some of my thoughts on my IL instruction process. Maybe this will get me off my rump and moving forward on that article I should be writing…

When I taught my first “library instruction” (BI, IL, whatever you want to call them) classes I really struggled with how to connect with the students. They arrive in the classroom certain that they’re going to hear what they’ve already heard, which they didn’t find especially useful the first time. Many of them are pretty sure they rank amongst the best Googlin’ experts and, while they may not know what one is, many are certain they don’t need an article database. Some students groan, “Dude! I’ve had this EBSCO class 4 times this year,” and I don’t doubt it. I don’t blame them and I’m not offended—after all, Google and the like haven’t let them down when it comes to finding playoff scores, movie times, and sometimes their next date.

Despite all of that, community college students coming to a 50 minute one-shot in the library are surrounded by things they don’t know—unfortunately many haven’t been exposed to that concept in a way that doesn’t insult, bore, or intimidate. Even more baffling is the idea that there are things they don’t know about Google!

In library school we learn about sensemaking and “the gap”. The principle issues here are that there are things we don’t know, gaps in our knowledge. In order to acquire the knowledge we need we have to somehow figure out what it is that we don’t know, acquire the language to search for information on what we don’t know, and then absorb and interpret information to help us fill in those gaps in our knowledge. Like a great many theoretical pieces of library school, I don’t always think about these ideas while I am teaching.

With that and an assignment brought to me by a writing instructor I started developing a research exercise I think of as Mind the Gap (although the handout just says Research Exercise, heh), where I shove the students into various resources and then discuss the tips n’ tricks after. It seems to work fairly well, the students are more interested in my schpiel about Google advanced search, page rank, or other facets of the popular search engine once they realize they can’t readily identify three scholarly sources from the first page of a Google results list.

Interested in seeing what the other two people who read this have to share.

The rules are simple:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Instruction Load

I was talking with a colleague (an on-call librarian) last night about the reality of being a librarian here in Portlandia. Usually you have to cobble together umpteen part-time and on-call jobs in hopes of coming away with a semi-decent resume. {Before I was offered my current temporary FT position I was looking at three jobs which would total about 35 hours a week–with wildly varying salaries and commutes.} An unfortunate downside to this cobbling tends to be a marked lack of teaching experience.

I just took a look at last quarter’s instruction stats and realized that over the course of about 10 weeks I taught 15 courses in 7 distinct program areas. That’s 300 students, 995 minutes of teaching, 465 minutes of prep work,  and about 100 cough drops. Srsly, I always sound like a 14-year old boy about ten minutes into my teaching. I have no idea why.

The reason I am taking note of these stats is that I get the idea they are fairly abnormal. I just read a blog entry at ACRLog in which a first-year faculty librarian relays that he taught 8 courses over a semester. I am certainly not dissing his 8 courses…that’s awesome.  We have a lot more students than his institution does, certainly an important factor.  Nevertheless, I’m realizing that I am really blessed with my work scenario.

Sure I wake up every night drenched in sweat, doing the late-night freakout over my total lack of job security, but at least I can eventually go back to sleep certain that I am at least getting really killer experience.

Falling asleep in my shoes…

I am exhausted today. Staying up until 1am packing was neither good nor smart. Bleh…and I’m not at all sure I managed to pack anything logical.

Today’s Bio class went fine although there were some frustrations with the timing. If I see I am scheduled to teach a class from 11-12, I don’t expect that the instructor will tell me at 11:50 that I’m out of time… it makes me look ill-prepared and you, dear readers, must know that the shiny adores preparation and planning!

On the upside, I have never had a class find me as entertaining as these guys did. It was awesome. Usually I make jokes knowing that they groan at me and think I am a total n3rd. These guys just kept laughing, one cat in the front row was actually havin’ a belly-buster laugh. This is kind of funny…because I’m really not, at least not intentionally.

Well, lunch is over and I’m out of caffeine. I better go walk around before I slump over at my desk…

Wesch does it again.

Mike Wesch, professor at K State and paragon of digital anthropology has done it again.
His video “The Machine is Us/ing Us” provided brilliant oversight on what this whole cult of 2.0 is really about; separating content from format and coming away empowered by the process. The 4-and-a-half minute film really makes you think about how humans think, create, collaborate, and organize. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend checking it out.

What I really want to talk about is a video that came out last month, “A Vision of Students Today” created by Wesch and 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. You can see it (and the rest of his videos) here: http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch

What really strikes me about the video, which is another of the brilliance in under 5 minutes variety, is not the overwhelming number of statistics presented that tell me our students are totally not listening but rather the hope it gives me that if we can only pry ourselves out of our boxes we can still reach them.

[Stop reading here, watch the video, and move on with your day unless you really want to read my thoughts on so-called Millennial student learning styles.]

The video begins with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.” Although McLuhan said this forty years ago it could easily have been said just the other day. To acknowledge the existence of varied learning styles only to then insist that our students do it the way we like best is a shame and a disservice to our students and our profession.

Whoa, okay, backing off of my soapbox… but really, doing this is like going to a really expensive hair stylist. You tell the stylist what you want, because after all it is your head and one hopes you know it best. Sure you expect them to tell you that cutting bangs will make your head look like a potato and not be especially flattering. But you also expect them to understand the difference between “take a little off the ends” and “scalp me.” When your stylist veers off the beaten path without checking with your first you have a right to feel both uncomfortable and underserved. This is no different in our profession. Sure I will tell my students that checking their MySpace during my lecture is likely to result in them missing some key elements of the lesson because it’s just common sense and part of my job is to impart those little gems. I also point out that I will only see them this one time, for 50 minutes, which creates a “blink and you missed it” aspect to library instruction.

I also have to acknowledge to myself that I earned a masters degree by sitting in class with my laptop open to no fewer than 5 websites at a time, two word processing panes, a One Note file going for my lecture notes, and crocheting afghans and various Xmas goodies. And really? I didn’t miss much. I took the time and courtesy to notify my professors that I am a fidgeter and apt to disrupt class with bouts of talkative if not allowed to let my fingers roam around. I asked for feedback and made it clear that I would discontinue any of my sporadic learning-related (to me) activities if asked to do so. No one asked.

Certainly there is merit to some claims that students are lazy and suffer from an extreme lack of work ethic, prompting them to sit in class watching the world go by on their laptops. I believe it is just as likely that their instructors just do not “get” them and that by stubbornly refusing to move away from the chalkboard (chalk! egads!) they are going to do nothing but lose those students who have embraced alternate modes of learning. For instance, I recently taught a WR 115 class in which a number of students were clearly exploring other things besides research on the Internet. I was concerned about this but when the writing faculty and I debriefed after the class we found that some of the best interaction came from a kid who was hunkered down in the back row watching skateboarding videos on YouTube for at least half of my lesson…

Now having said all of this, how do we deal with the fact that our community college students are as diverse as they come? That some students are as likely to have never used a web browser as others are to have their own laptops is a complication to say the least.

The end of all of this for me is a circle– understanding that education is complicated. Teaching is complicated. Learning is complicated. That we repeatedly confuse these terms. Showing up is not the same as coming prepared to learn. Simply showing up and talking a lot at the front of the room does not really constitute teaching; although it certainly does pass for education in many places. Challenging ourselves to out-perform MySpace is daunting, but not too different than trying to keep students from staring out of windows… I can’t outshine the sun, no matter how hard I try…but I can certainly challenge myself to be engaging on a daily basis. Is that enough? I don’t know…