Readings: Week 13

Last time to ruminate on readings! Probably, last blog post for SI 643. :(

I really liked all three readings this week, and thought they were a great way to finish out the semester. Semadeni's article was a great explication of a professional development program in education that's gone really well. It was apparent from the article that a lot of the teachers in the Fusion program had really embraced it and taken charge of their own development, which is obviously the goal. As the article notes, finding motivation is always the hardest part of professional development, especially when you're dealing with professionals who are as busy as teachers are and have so many things to worry about. The program really seems to have found a way to get "buy-in" from its audience. I do worry about a couple of things with the Fusion program, though. The first is how to navigate the whole "everyone is a specialist in something" aspect. There are always going to be some people who feel for whatever reason that one of their colleagues is just not a very good teacher at all, and they'll blanch at the thought that they might have something to learn from that person. Obviously sometimes their impressions of their colleagues' abilities will be misguided, but often they aren't. Dealing with this could be tricky. My other concern is the "roaming substitute." In terms of the program, it's obviously a great idea and was essential to making everything work. But I can see this being just the sort of thing that's going to upset taxpayers-- "why are we paying an extra teacher so these teachers can stay at school and not teach? Shouldn't they be in the classroom?" etc. So I think you need to anticipate this criticism and be prepared to make a case for why this professional development time is so vital to good education.

I was also really impressed by the Bowers and Reed piece. I feel like the sort of programs they set up at PLCMC are just the sort of thing libraries and similar institutions should be doing to familiarize staff with technology. In implementing these programs, they really took time to think about why what they were currently doing wasn't working, what the needs of their staff really were, and how they could best meet these needs in a different way. The Learning 2.0 program is a really obvious approach to professional development for its subject matter, but it's certainly non-traditional for professional development in general, which is why it was so innovative. I really think lots of libraries could learn from this approach and implement something similar in their own context. I'm not surprised at all that people responded so positively when there was so much potential for exploration and fun. Overall, just a really cool program to read about. Because I always like to read the short bios of the people who write articles I read, there's another thing I'd like to note: neither of the authors of this article is a librarian; the authors are training and development professionals. This shows just how much we librarians can learn from other professionals we work with in libraries, and also the value of having these other professionals, with diverse backgrounds, in the library in the first place.

Kristin's article, then, really pulled things together by showing how she implemented a Learning 2.0-like program in her own specific professional environment. I really liked how she explained the ways in which she adapted and modified the open access tools provided by PLCMC to build a professional development program geared toward elementary school teachers rather than public library staff. I think it provides a good basis for others to think about how to do the same in their own environments. As usual, I'm already thinking about ways you could adapt something the tools to fit in an archival environment, where tech education is a real need a lot of the time. These articles were a really great way to close a semester of thinking about professional development.

Class in Review: Week 11

So last class we talked about everyone's impressions of Twitter. I have to say I was surprised at how many people shared my skepticism about Twitter. SI students are supposed to be on top of all this new technology to the extreme, right? And for the most part, we are, and I'm sure a lot of people at SI do effectively use Twitter for professional development purposes. But overall people in SI 643 just seem really unsure how to do so, and I can't say I blame them. In particular, I wasn't surprised that people were annoyed at the degree to which people's personal and professional lives intersected on Twitter in ways that were annoying to the person who wants to use the service for professional purposes.

I have to say that though the tools we talked about in class for making Twitter less information overload-ish seemed interesting, I'm still not sure that they'd make Twitter a worthwhile use of my professional time. As we looked at Hootsuite and Google Reader integration and whatever else, I just really couldn't imagine myself ever doing this. I was particular struck by Kristin saying how she could lose so much time just to keeping up with this sort of professional networking without realizing it. I already know I can lose hours of time in my personal life to social networking and blogs (and when you're in grad school, "personal life" means "time to do homework," so that doesn't work out so well), and the thought of the same thing happening when I should be doing work that I'm actually getting paid for-- even when said social networking/blogging/whatever relates to the work I'm doing-- is a little terrifying. And I already know how much time people lose due to email processing alone in work environments. Email is unavoidable, and of course the benefits and convenience of using it generally outweigh the annoyances. But for everything else, is it really worth it? For some people, you can probably manage it just fine. For me personally, probably not.

On the other hand, I see the value of Twitter in professional development and networking in general-- the whole professional learning network thing. But how do you get a balance between that and your "actual" work? Obviously, each enhances the other, but it's tough to justify spending too much time on the former to the detriment of the latter. I suppose figuring this out is part of our obligation as professionals, but Web 2.0 makes these things a little more complicated, doesn't it? Overall, a lot of really interesting reflections on professional development and where to go from here as we close out a very interesting semester.

Readings: Week 11

.... or Twitter: Week 11.

So, per our instructions, I took the plunge into Twitter. And? I just don't know. Like a lot of people, I've long thought Twitter is just kind of silly for most people. (I always say, "It's like Facebook with just status updates. Who needs that?") I can see how it'd be useful for certain types of people-- politicians, celebrities, and the media. And they're the type that are largely known (in the public consciousness) for using it. But the more time I spent around SI, the more I came to think there might be something to Twitter having professional uses too.

And, after spending some time there, I think it probably can. But like every other professional tool, it takes some time to get used to and some figuring out to use well. Personally, just jumping in and following some people, I'm just overwhelmed. Figuring out who to follow and then finding the things they say that are actually useful is just too much; I'm not able to find information I actually want or like.

I'll admit I haven't spent that much time on Twitter, and I know there are tools that can help make the abundance of info less overwhelming. But I still feel like it may not be the most efficient tool for staying professionally connected. Hard to tell, though.

One thing I think is key is having a good strategy for who you follow, and not just following random people who look interesting. For one thing, if I'm going to use Twitter for professional purposes, I really don't want to follow people who fill it up with non-professional updates. I'm  really not that interested in the personal lives of random people I don't know. But some people only feel comfortable if they're able to really merge their personal and professional identities, so that's the only way they'll feel comfortable tweeting. That's just not me, though. What this means is that it's not a good idea to just click "follow" on someone whose tweets you aren't familiar with just because you think their description looks interesting. Finding people to follow is thus more complicated than I anticipated.

Overall, I'm still on the fence about Twitter, but it'll be interesting to hear other people's observations in class tomorrow. There's a lot to be said and a lot of different perspectives out there, I'm sure.

Class in Review: Week 10

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.


So this week in class we covered the apparent library-school necessity of talking about Ranganathan's five laws of library science, as seen above. Though I'd heard of the five laws in passing, I'd never really reflected on them much before. Overall, I agree with people who think the laws have aged pretty well. I think all of them save perhaps #3, if you substitute some broader term for book, still hold up pretty well today. I was surprised it took us so long to talk about #4, because I think it's the most compelling and challenging still today. If we aren't saving users' time in finding resources, what are we really doing in libraries?

As usual, I'm going to ponder a little how these "laws" do or don't apply or can be transferred to an an archival setting. As far as I know from my ARM coursework, there isn't a similar succinct formulation of what archives are or should be. So let's try to substitute "archival materials" (an unwieldy term, but the best we can do) for "books" and think about how the laws hold up circa 2012. Part of the complicated history of archives is the tension between archivists thinking of themselves as historians versus thinking of themselves as librarians. My contention is that we have a lot to learn from doing the latter, so this ought to be a helpful exercise.

I think laws #2 and #4 transfer pretty easily. With the complexity and overwhelming-ness of archival materials, everything we do in archives should definitely be geared toward saving users' time. Since archives (almost always) have closed stacks, this becomes especially important when archivists still have to for the most part mediate access. With digital materials there's pretty much a direct analog to libraries, though archives sometimes have to deal with more complicated digital content. Likewise, "every user his or her archival materials" (as awkward as that sounds) should be broadly accurate, though I think what this actually means is a little complicated, just as it is for libraries. Basically that's my way of saying this is the "law" I think is the vaguest and least helpful.

Beyond this, things get complicated. We noted in class that for non-academic libraries, law #3 really doesn't make sense as a guiding principle. For archives this is true to the extreme. Deciding what archival materials to preserve and keep, and why, and even constitutes "archival materials" is one of the most complicated areas of the field. We have a whole class on Archival Appraisal (SI 632), and I think those of who've taken it would still say we've only touched the basics of this issue.

.... which brings us to law #1. Are archival materials "for use"? What does that mean in the context of archives? You could touch off a lot of controversy among archivists from the questions that leap of off this law. Obviously, we want people to use materials in archives, but what does that mean for our collecting/appraisal decisions? Do we only collect things people want to use or we judge likely to be used? Or is our job as archivists to preserve those documents/artifacts/whatever that best represent whatever we're documenting the history of? What does "best represent" mean? As you can tell, the role of "use" in archival collecting is controversial to say the least. So I'm not so sure this law should be one we try to "transfer" to archives.

This leaves us with law #5. This seems like an easy proposition to agree with, and certainly it should apply to archives in terms of technology and access in many of the same ways it does for libraries. I guess I'm a little wary about the word "grow" because it implies getting bigger. Change, if done well, can be good. Growth for the sake of growth (because we're supposed to be "growing") usually is not. I think pondering whether this applies to archives can lead us into complicated philosophical territory about what our mission is and what we should or shouldn't be doing. Then again, the same thing can probably be said for libraries. And a lot of this is contextual; there are so many different types of archives that do different types of things that it gets very complicated. (Not that this isn't true for libraries as well.)

The other big thing I recall from class is hearing about the webinars people watched. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had a disappointing experience with my webinar, but it was really fun to hear about the cool things some people's webinars did. I hope ours in this class can meet the high expectations!


(Edited to make this look... like it should. I blame Google.)

Readings: Week 10

Our first reading this week was another chapter of How People Learn, this time offering specific examples of effective teaching in the areas of history, math, and science. I found a lot of the conversation fascinating, especially the history part, since I have a history degree and went to school with a lot of people who were planning to be (and today are) history teachers. History is maybe the core subject area in American K-12 education where "theory" and critical thinking are most de-emphasized in favor of memorization of facts, which might have something to do with why it's so unpopular. It was really great to see examples of history teachers who are really engaging their students and teaching historical thinking. I was also really pleased by the emphasis on content knowledge and knowledge of how a discipline works as a vital component of teaching in a discipline. This is something I've believed for a long time is a really big deficit with our educational system. Like with a lot of the book, though, I left this chapter really unsure about how teachers begin to put these techniques into action. The examples presented are really amazing, but they're not always things that teachers, especially beginning ones, can just pick up and go with these strategies. How does a teacher try to get to that point? What are the first things you can do? This is what I'd want to know.

Reading about our webinars made me excited but also nervous. I think it'll be a fun activity but will take a lot of prep time. I think the comments from last year's students will be really helpful.

The Montgomery article was simplistic in some ways, but I think it made a really good case for areas in which webinars can be a really effective tool. Communicating with students who are off-campus is a really big advantage, and I think webinars really could potentially provide some exciting results there. I think one thing that's key is promoting this service. For example, Montgomery mentions an institution where librarians will actually do on-demand webinars with off-campus students. That's really awesome, but I wonder how many students don't take advantage of this and would but don't really know it's an option? And there are going to be students who are just put off by the idea of watching a video to start with, but could really benefit from the help.

The article on traditional v. hybrid embedded librarians was probably the most informative for me. This is because (confessions of a non-LIS student here), I didn't actually know what an embedded librarian was! It's a term I've heard before but not one I was really familiar with as someone who's only taken ARM classes. And it's not something we had at my undergraduate institution, so I don't have experience with it personally. So I learned a lot, needless to say. As to the specific content, I found it really interesting that the hybrid embedded librarian saw distinct advantages and opportunities in his position that wouldn't have likely been there if he were a traditional embedded librarian (like conducting classes using online meeting systems). On the other hand, the traditional embedded librarian saw huge advantages in being actually "on-site" with her department. A lot of this, of course, comes down to the culture of a business school versus a music school, and I think that's key. One of the most important things in librarianship is really having a sense of who your patrons are and being able to serve them in the ways that are most relevant technologically, culturally, whatever-ly. This article made me think of that in ways I never had before.

Also, since I'm always trying to what we talk about to archives, I pondered a bit how the concepts that make embedded librarianship work well could be extended to archives as well. The tricky part, I think, is that for academic libraries and public libraries, your core user base is generally speaking geographically situated in one place. For most archives, the thing that unifies a core user base is intellectual interest in certain topics, which isn't going to line up with geography. Of course there are exceptions both ways; many archives are located within academic libraries or other institutions that have a geographically defined user base (though they also have other outside users), and lots of academic libraries are coming up with new ways to work with distance learners. There's definitely territory to learn from both ways. I think the key takeaway for archivists, though, is that even if you can't be physically close to your users, it's important to as much as possible try to become a part of their professional worlds and communities and share in their culture. This is possible in a lot of ways.

For my webinar, I watched one of the Wyoming State Library ones on social networking. I was pretty disappointed in a lot of ways; it wasn't very interactive and I didn't feel it used the time very well. Some of the information was also a little sketchy, and it couldn't seem to decide if the target audience was people who were familiar with the sites it was discussing or brand new to them. Still, it did give a lot of good information on a lot of things, like ways libraries can use Flickr and the advantages of putting photos there rather than just in local storage online.

Whew, I'd better stop now before this post gets any longer! Lots to think about this week.

Class in Review: Week 9

This week we presented our one-shot workshops in class. I was pretty excited about the other workshops my group was presenting, and there were others in other groups that looked really interesting that I wish I could've gone to as well. Since (as with the book club) there's inconsistent overlap between my group of workshops and my blogging cohort, I'm going to make some more general observations about the workshop experience, both as a presenter and as a participant, instead of focusing on individual content of workshops.

As a presenter, the biggest thing that surprised me was how well we managed the time we had. Because there's no way to really practice group activities, we were pretty worried about things taking longer than we had planned and eating up our 20 minutes. As it happened, the time flowed pretty well and some things didn't take as long as we anticipated, while others took a little longer and used up that time. Generally, I think this aspect of our workshop went well. Another thing I realized was that you can't do group discussion very well when you've given a group hardly any time to learn about and process the new concept you went to discuss. We had two discussion periods in our workshop, and the one that followed a portion where the participants were more engaged in and had more time to learn about the content we were discussing went much better. This should be obvious, but I'm not sure it was something we really anticipated per se while we were planning.

I had a lot of thoughts about the other workshops, and obviously I thought some went better than others. One thing about workshops that run well is that they 1) have an intense focus on each individual topic (or sub-topic) discussed, and 2) keep things moving. A lot of short, different activities that each have a clear goal is going to be more successful than a couple big, broad, fuzzy things, it seems.

Another thing that I noticed is how much the content of your workshop influences the way you conduct it. There were a couple of presentations where I initially thought, "This is really uninteresting." Then I reflected on how I would teach the same content in a more interesting way, and I wasn't really sure. So I decided that was content I probably wouldn't have tried to present at all. But it was useful and interesting information. Finding a way to really engage people in something that's important but not necessarily the easiest to teach or demonstrate takes a lot of work, and obviously some people did a better job of this than others.

Class in Review: Week 8

This week's class was focused on ethics in librarianship and the ALA Code of Ethics. In reflecting on class, I'm not really sure there's much specific I can say beyond what I said in last week's post, but I think the situation we drove home solidified the views about ethics I expressed there.

When we did the "case studies" of ethical issues (about Random House and the ads in Toronto), we were asked to derive guidance from the code of ethics for what we would do in the situation. My group found that pretty difficult to do in any sort of specific way. We talked about different approaches to the situation, how we should respond as librarians, and agreed that the situations raised a lot of interesting issues and things worth talking about. But it was hard to find provisions in the code of ethics that we could really use as justification for whatever decisions we'd make. Obviously, the code notes that this isn't really its purpose; it's supposed to provide a general set of viewpoints and values, not anything that tells you to do a certain thing at a certain time. And it's important as a profession, I think, to have some broad view of what your values and ethics are. So the code serves something of a purpose. In many ways, though, that set of shared values is sort of inherent and intangible-- it's something people share before they go into the profession, and it certainly serves as a reference point for their decision making, but it's hard to articulate in a list of values like the code of ethics gives.

I wish we would've talked a little more about the implications of some of the provisions in the code, and maybe about how "virtue ethics" does or doesn't fit in with the code, because I found that approach really helpful for the reasons I laid out in my previous post. Overall, I think the "case studies" drove home the value of circumstances-based decision-making and an approach to professional ethics overall in line with the virtue ethics approach, though.

I have nothing more to say, except that I'm looking forward to the opportunity to learn something in an interesting way from my peers in our workshops tomorrow.

Readings: Week 8

While reading this week's readings about ethics in librarianship, I thought back a lot to the class we had on ethics in SI 580, the introductory archives class, with David Wallace. I remember that as one of the most interesting lecture and discussion sessions that we had in that class, because it raised some big issues but made them very real. The biggest thing I remember Dr. Wallace emphasizing was that ethical decision-making is very much dependent on context-- on the situation, the people involved, your work setting, and above all your own personal values. And he said that everyone has to make their own decisions-- that what one person decides is ethically proper in a situation or is comfortable doing will not be the same for everyone else, and that should be respected.

This approach seemed a really sensible way to talk about professional ethics to me, and one that was much more sophisticated and realistic than a lot of what you see out there. Essentially, I think this approach is pretty much what the "virtue ethics" Lenker is advocating is. I definitely agree with Lenker that ethical decision-making can never just be a set of rules to follow or something hopelessly reductive-- it takes a lot of thought and a lot of consideration of various factors, and isn't going to be easy. I was especially glad that Lenker emphasized that your own personal values are as much of part of this decision-making as consideration of other people involved or the values of your institution, because often when we talk about "ethics" in professional contexts I think people forget that we're talking about people with their own moral principles, not automatons who can just blindly follow outside "rules." I thought it was good that in presenting his hypothetical scenario, Lenker gave a very human identity to his hypothetical librarian Clark, and gave information about "Clark" that has nothing to do with librarianship but would certainly be relevant to his own ethical decision-making process.

As for the ALA code of ethics, I was also reminded of what Dr. Wallace said when we talked about the SAA code of ethics (which is much longer and more complicated than its ALA equivalent), which at that time included at least one provision he strongly disagreed with. (I believe he mentioned the next semester that one particular provision he strongly objected to had since been removed.) Basically, he said that this may say a lot of nice things, but it's not as though it's some sort of binding rule. Yes, when you join the organization you may agree to uphold it, but you're not going to get kicked out or even penalized in any way for not doing so-- and how do you even measure "not upholding the code of ethics" in a situation like this? With this in mind, I pondered the fact that the ALA code was probably the product of great thought and deliberation by some committee, that it's undoubtedly gone through lots and lots of revisions over the years, and that most librarians still probably don't think about it that much. It's simply a tool in the process of ethical decision-making process Lenker described, but far from the only one or even the most important one.

Class in Review: Week 7

The book clubs were, as promised, definitely a nice break from our regular class session. It was very interesting to see the variety of different ways that different groups implemented the book club, especially given the variety of readings we had.

One thing I realized, both from leading my own book club and participating in the others, is that leading discussion really is tough. Some groups took a lot more proactive approach to really trying to get people to share ideas and helping the conversation along. Some groups really just let things go where they would and didn’t seem to mind. I’m not sure that either format is really “better.” It just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you really want people to have some intellectual discussion about a particular reading, you’re going to guide the conversation more along those lines. On the other hand, if the goal is just to make sure everyone has a good time while talking about what they read, the conversation is going to be more free-wheeling.

A couple of other observations: one is that one of the toughest things in group discussion is getting everyone to really participate. There are always going to be some people who are more comfortable talking in this type of format (I’m usually one of them), and some people who aren’t. Even when the people who enjoy talking have good ideas, and in our group they usually did, it’s hard to say, “No, we don’t want to hear from you. We want somebody else to talk now.” Especially when no one else wants to talk. This didn’t happen per se in our group’s discussions, but some people definitely were more active participants than others. That’s all right, but you still want to have a balance, and getting there can be tough.

Last thought: I kept feeling at first during our book club group like things were getting derailed, or the discussion was going off on wild tangents, and we were “losing control.” At some point, though, I realized that people really were discussing interesting questions related to our reading, and things that we wanted to talk about, even if it wasn’t going the way I’d envisioned. One of the toughest things, I realized, about leading this type of discussion is you have to be willing to “lose control” to some degree and just let things go as they may!

Readings: Week 7

Since only some of the people in my blogging cohort are in my book club group, it's a little confusing to talk about readings that some but not all of the folks reading this have read themselves, so this will be pretty general. My book club partner and I are presenting an article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but everybody else in my group picked selections of fiction, which is less my reading preferences, especially the sort of metaphorical works-- comics and fairy tales, that we're reading. So my thoughts don't come as easily, since I'm so unfamiliar with these sort of reading materials. So these are just going to be some initial thoughts; with some further conversation in the group I'm sure I'll have more to say.

First, the short story by Neil Gaiman. Most of our readings provide a lot of commentary on gender and gender relations. This story plays with the way gender is traditionally represented in fairy tales (like the other one we read), but the implications are sort of interesting in a lot of unexpected ways.

Next, were four web comics, which had a lot of commentary on gender, art, death, fear, and capitalism. (Think there's anything to discuss there?) I'm not sure what I think of them, but my initial thought is that they present a lot of things in pretty simplistic ways. But I'm open to discussion about the implications of the points the artist is trying to make.

The next reading was the black-and-white comic by a French artist. This one's chock full of commentary on gender and gender relations (and inter-gender relations). The first thing I wondered after reading it was whether the artist was male or female, and how that does or doesn't affect the message. I don't know. I'm also interested in seeing what people's impressions will be of what the societal pressures and constructs underlying the topics discussed are.

The last reading we did was the fairy tale of Donkeyskin. This is not a tale with which I had been familiar before, and I was amused by all the thoughts it triggered. As a history person, I was especially interested in the social and cultural circumstances that led to the origins of lots of the stuff it discussed, and this led me to thinking about similar things for other more well-known fairy tales, including those that are and aren't similar to this one. The annotations provided a lot of really interesting commentary on the recurring theme of gender and gender relations, so it'll be interesting to see where the conversation goes from those topics.

Overall takeaway: I don't have a lot of strong viewpoints on my own when it comes to these readings, though I have a lot of hazy thoughts. But I'm sure I'll have more distinct things to say if I'm in a group and I have other  people's opinions to feed off of. So it's a good thing we're doing book clubs for these!

Class in Review: Week 6

So in my reflection on the readings I focused more on the Socratic seminars, but in class the more interesting discussion seemed to center around book clubs. I found our discussions about perceptions (or stereotypes) of book clubs and typical demographics of book clubs really interesting. In thinking about this more over the course of the week, I had some more general reflections on books and the future of books and reading.

I keep wondering about the future of book clubs in a world in which books are increasingly being seen by a lot of people as unnecessary and not useful as sources of information. But as we all know, books themselves aren't going anywhere, even if their physical forms are changing. One thing that I realized is that the nature of books has in a way narrowed-- fifty years ago, books were the best source for many different types of information. Today, a lot of that information is found online, or in databases, or in much more readily available sources. Even a lot of fiction or more literary non-fiction can be read online in forms that aren't like e-books. So what remains for books? Essentially, we've come (back?) to a point where books are in a way more a source of enjoyment and pleasure than they are a source of "information" in the sense of factual knowledge about the world. This is true, generally speaking, whether we're talking about fiction or non-fiction. I would think that really, this would be good for book clubs! People see books and reading as an activity that's reserved mostly for pleasurable parts of our lives and free time, not as something that has to be consulted in the course of serious work-- there are plenty of other sources for that. So book clubs that just focus on reading for the fun of it really have a new opportunity to market themselves, right? Maybe. I feel like a lot of other people have probably said this all before more eloquently than I. But I'm enjoying thinking about this stuff as someone who's primarily been thinking about archives and preservation in my time at SI.

In the comments my last post, my fellow archivist Naomi wondered if book clubs could be an effective outreach tool for archives, and I thought I'd address that here to see if anybody else had any thoughts. I agree   that a lot of regular lecture attendees would attend a book club-like discussion of materials. I also thought about whether featuring discussion of works written using research done at an archives could yield interesting results; it also might be a case of being able to get some input from authors, with whom you already have a relationship thanks to their research. The tricky thing would be finding a work that would really engage people, and not just an academic tome. And even then, it might or might not work. The biggest challenge to something like this is the biggest challenge to any outreach for archives, though; most archives don't have nearly the staffing, funding, or focus on outreach that libraries do, and most archivists are so busy that they don't really have time to think about new outreach activities, especially something as elaborate as a book discussion. But it would be an interesting avenue to explore. Any thoughts?

Readings: Week 6

I have to say book clubs are one of those things I've never thought about much, because they're largely the domain of public libraries, which are outside my area of interest. So it was nice to read a couple articles on where book clubs are at these days and how they've changed. Nothing in Dempsey's or Hoffert's articles really surprised me; I'd fully expect that today's libraries are the source of the latest and greatest innovation in the book club world. It particularly struck me personally that public libraries are using book clubs geared toward young childless adults as an attempt to draw in patrons who don't interact much with them, because that's a demographic that includes me. As someone who doesn't do much recreational reading, especially not of fiction, but would like to do more, a book club geared toward things I'm interested in would probably be quite a good way to draw me into a public library.

What really intrigued me, though, were the Socratic seminar articles. I was really interested to see what exactly these articles said a Socratic seminar was and how to do them, because my standing impression of "Socratic" was just "learning by asking questions," which isn't very helpful in terms of actual implementation. What I kept thinking in reading Tredway's article, though, was, "This is just using fancy language to describe good group discussion!" The classes I have enjoyed the most as undergraduate and a graduate student are those that are based heavily on intentional, focused, well-facilitated group discussion that analyzes a text everyone in the group has read beforehand. As a history major/English minor, I just really loved being in classes like this and felt like I always learned so much more than I did from lectures or other activities. To me, this "Socratic seminar" method wasn't any new or crazy idea, then, it was just an explication of how to do good group discussion, which I thought was a pretty basic educational tool. But the ubiquity of such a teaching method is probably something that's been skewed by my liberal-arts background.

Metzger's article threw me for a bit of a loop. I mean, she does a really job laying out how she implemented this teaching method and made it really successful her context. I appreciated how she showed the ways it could be used to teach the specific learning objectives related to reading comprehension that she wanted to get across. But... I kept thinking it all sounded a little too good to be true. I've never taught high school freshman, so I guess I really can't judge, but I felt like I've been in groups of undergraduates who would not show anything near the results that Metzger describes her class showing after two months of using this approach.

I think the solution here is that Metzger is probably a really, really good teacher, and she (obviously, who would?) doesn't give herself enough credit for how much of a role she played a role in making this a successful teaching practice. At one point, she even makes it sound easy, implying that once you get started, the students will just take over and the learning will happen. But clearly this isn't what she was doing at all. You can see throughout the whole article how Metzger was guiding the process, checking to see what students were learning, making adjustments when things didn't go well, and overall being very aware of how things were going. (She videotaped the first class period and re-watched it so she could see what she was doing well! How many teachers would do that? Clearly she really cared about making this work.) We've all been in classes where group discussion just didn't work and just didn't go well. My contention is that this usually happens because the teacher doesn't really know how to facilitate discussion, which includes doing all the things, on both a micro- and macro-level, that Metzger did here. In general, there probably needs to be more emphasis on the really important role the teacher plays in making Socratic seminars work as a teaching tool.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the high school where Metzger taught as noted at the end of the article. It's in suburban Boston and is consistently ranked as one of the best public high schools in the state of Massachusetts. (It's also the alma mater of Michael Dukakis, Conan O'Brien, and Mike Wallace. Thank you, Wikipedia.) It's obviously the sort of place where students are used to high standards and high-quality critical thinking. In a different school, with different students and different expectations, this teaching method would probably be considerably more complicated to implement. I'd be curious to see how implementing this would go for someone who teaching in a rather different environment.

The other overall observation I have is that Socratic seminars are really conducive to the type of learning that's about building really complex skills that can transfer to lots of other environments. It's really not as helpful when the focus is on covering as much content as possible, because that's what students are going to be tested on. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest hindrance to wider implementation in today's public-school settings.

ETA: Not saying anything here about the Prensky article because I assume the whole point is to have a rather detailed discussion of it in class.

Class in Review: Week 5

Gaming and blogs, oh my oh my!

That's pretty much my reaction to last week's class. I know we talked about transfer in there somewhere, but everything I remember was our discussion of gaming and blogs. And on both issues, I'm really not sure "what I think" at all.

When it comes to gaming, I'm just really skeptical at the whole paradigm that suggests people will be more motivated to do things that encourage learning or solve problems if we turn everything into a game, or cast real-world situations in the form of games. In formal educational settings, attempts at "gamifying" probably still usually come across as "Oh, they're trying to turn this into a 'game' so that it's 'fun' to learn. But this is nothing like [insert favorite video game here]." I suppose the issue of motivation is really what gets to me. We talked about how educators don't understand why students don't display skills in the classroom or in their academic work that they clearly display when gaming. My answer is that it's simply because they're in the classroom/doing academic work and they know it. That alone is a motivation-killer. I don't really know how to deal with this, but to me it's the biggest hurdle to getting "gaming" approaches to work in formal educational settings. I don't know about other gaming that aims to solve "real-world" problems; this is probably a little more complicated.

And oh, the blogs. One of the things I really wanted to learn in this class was how to do a professional blog and not come off as narcissistic or obsessed with your own ideas. I read a lot of blogs, some more regularly than others, and I always find them illuminating. But I'm not the kind of person who feels the need to broadcast my ideas about particular topics to the Internet at large, because I think it gives off the attitude that I'm a super-special snowflake who everyone should listen to. This is the same reason I don't post Facebook statuses or links very much (though I spend hours on Facebook every day); why would so many people be interested in mundane things I have to say?

But at the same time I know that in our profession and many others, blogs have come to play a vital and important role in professional discourse. And I know that when you're blogging as part of your job, the potential for the impression of narcissism is going to go down quite a bit. Nevertheless, given all this the part of our discussion on blogs I found most interesting was the discussion at the end of class on blogging culture and "blogging superstars" and such. That's exactly the kind of behavior that annoys me and turns me off of some blogs.  I have no desire to be involved in petty professional drama that arises from who's "famous" on the Internet, though I guess some of that is inevitable these days.

But the thing that I learned from looking at so many professional blogs (and I looked at several others from the list than the ones I'd been following, though not in as much depth) was that the most significant thing a blog post can do is try to be part of a larger conversation. The best professional blog posts were those that took something personal and tied it in to larger trends, and then asked questions that generated further thought. The best bloggers don't just throw out random ideas and "here's what I'm doing" sort of moments-- they think about how to connect things to the larger context of the profession and really want to get feedback and provide more in return. Whether that actually happens is another question, because not all the blogs I looked at had a lot of comments, though that's not a great measure of how widely they were read. Overall, I guess the point is that blogs should be part of a larger conversation, not voices that dominate a conversation. Given the ubiquity and power of the Internet, though, this can be a tough line to walk sometimes, and it's something I think bloggers should keep in mind.

(Hope I haven't said anything that's offended all the blog-lovers out there! I like blogs too, I promise!)

Readings: Week 5

I feel like a broken record saying this, but this week's readings again left me grasping for more practical details to fill in what sounded like very reasonable, well thought-out theories about how people learn.

I particularly felt this way about Wiggins and McTighe's article.  The idea that teaching for understanding and transfer should be the focus of education is not a radical concept after the other readings and discussion from this class, and it's certainly a noble concept. The first thing that bothered me, though, was that the authors seemed to discuss this as the purpose of high school specifically. I know there are differences at different levels, but I would think that these would be laudable goals for teaching at any level. In particular, if you start implementing these methods in high school and your students don't really have experience with this type of learning for understanding and transfer before that level-- which would surely be the case for most schools in this country-- students are going to be confused and unclear about what's going on, because this type of teaching is so different from everything they've dealt with before.

The thing that really got me about this article, though, was the proposed "meaningful sequence" for teaching about measures of central tendency. It was a lovely plan for how to teach this concept in a way that promotes real understanding, and would probably work quite well in doing so provided the teacher really understood how to implement it. But... it just kept going on and on! The whole sequence had 12 steps, many of which were quite involved and would obviously take quite a bit of time. Now, I've never been a teacher, but the normal class period for high schools is 50 minutes, I believe. I can't ever imagine being able to accomplish everything this plan laid out in that amount of time with a group of 15-25 fifteen-year-olds. The science example discussed following the math one seemed more reasonable, but still like a lot to pack into 50 minutes when you want to get real understanding out of it. Like I said, I've never been a teacher; maybe I'm way off base here. But this really bothered me when it came to the applicability of that article.

This week's chapter of How People Learn was, as usual, a lot to take in. One big thought that crossed my mind as I read about all the ways transfer is important and how to encourage learning for transfer was the issue we talked about last week: assessment. How do you assess transfer of knowledge? Obviously, the article notes various ways that this is done, generally summatively, by asking students to solve some "real-world" problem that requires knowledge they have but have learned in a different context. But this still is a formulaic, plotted situation. The real test of transfer of knowledge is going to be when students have to get into the real world and solve real problems that depend on the knowledge they've gained through education. In those situations, the factors and context involved are almost always going to be more complicated than anything you deal with in school, as are the conditions under which you work. The chapter got at this to some degree, noting that in the "real world" collaboration and using tools are much more common and important. As an educator, you're never going to be able to actually see if the students you teach really effectively transfer those skills to the real world; you can only hope to emulate "real-world" conditions as best as possible.

I was glad that the chapter acknowledged that you have to be able to strike a balance between higher-level, abstract conceptualizations of concepts and actual "real-world" examples and problem solving when teaching; too much of one or the other isn't going to be effective. I think that's probably the hardest part of teaching for transfer, though; how do you strike this balance effectively, especially when your students have wildly different backgrounds and quite possibly wildly different futures?

Class in Review: Week 4

So I had to go look through the slides to remember what content we actually talked about in last week's class, because all I remember is looking at lots of different types of survey questions! Ha.

After pondering everything we discussed about summative and formative assessment, I'm left again with the thought that this stuff is really hard to get right. As librarians, we really want a lot of feedback on how well we're doing what we're doing from our patrons, and we really do want to use that feedback to make things better in the future. But looking at all those different types of survey questions, and debating the pros and cons of each, just sort of overwhelms me. In every situation, it seems like a different approach might work best, and when you have a lot of different stakeholders to please (your boss, the people giving you money, etc.) it makes things even more complicated.

Formative assessment is even trickier, though. As we noted in class, librarians tend to be pretty good at giving formative assessment-- offering advice about what people are doing as they're doing it and observing patrons to find areas they need additional help with. And I was really intrigued by the suggested methods for library-friendly formative assessment strategies. Many of them are strategies that I think would work really well in most educational environments, not just libraries, but are never implemented!

As usual, I kept thinking about how to apply this all to the archival world, since that's where I want to make my career. And as usual, my thoughts boil down "archivists really need to figure this stuff out." When it comes to getting feedback from users, archives are light-years behind libraries. Even getting users to offer summative assessment of their experience in archives and with archival instruction is not something that usually happens. And though archivists are often just as good as librarians at giving formative assessment, getting users to offer formative assessment almost never happens, unfortunately. Part of this has to do with the lack of formal instruction about information literacy in archival settings at all. As the articles I read two weeks ago pointed out, archives still haven't really developed a coherent framework for teaching the sort of skills needed to effectively use archives-- to actually find information and do archival research. Archival instruction focuses almost entirely on how to use primary sources, ignoring how to actually find relevant primary sources that you can use to begin with. If archives actually started teaching, on a large scales, how to utilize the multitude of resources out there for finding materials, I think we could implement these formative assessment strategies, and there would be a lot learned about how people do research, people's knowledge of archival resources, and what we need to be doing as archivists to help the situation. But there's a long way to go to get to that. I can only hope these are the sort of problems I can help fix in my career.

Readings: Week 4

This week's readings were all about learning environments and assessment. I have to say I'm feeling a little overwhelmed and discouraged after taking everything in that I found in these readings. They seem to be a reminder of how much work there is to do in the educational world.
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The chapter of How People Learn laid out structures for learning environments that seem eminently reasonable and offered good, solid advice on the sort of classrooms and other settings that are necessary for real learning. As with the early chapter we read, I was struck sometimes as wanting more information on how to actually make these things happen in the real world. The book promises that further chapters address this, though, so that's not a completely fair criticism. I have to say that the biggest challenge to implementing this sort of learning environment-- one that is learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered-- is simply that it's not what people are used to. I constantly thought back to my own educational experience and the many ways in which it did not mirror the model proscribed by the chapter. Of course, I also realized the many ways it did mirror this model, so that's positive at least! Many of the sorts of structures necessary for learning described here, though, are things that potential learners, and significantly at some levels their parents, just won't know how to deal with. "Learning the landscape" may indeed be the appropriate metaphor for knowledge-centered instruction, but students and parents are used to the "rutted path" that focuses much more on memorization and retaining knowledge as opposed to building skills. Similarly, formative assessment, despite its immense usefulness and success in producing real learners, runs so counter to how our whole educational culture works, at least in this country, that really implementing a strong culture of it seems nothing short of a gargantuan task. I'd really like to read a study on how to implement the techniques discussed in this article in a way that really gets buy-in from learner communities, which would seem to be important when "community-centered"-ness is one of the goals.

Similarly, the article on formative assessment made me realize how little I've received true formative assessment in my own experience with formal education, yet at the same time how useful it was and how much I valued it when I received it. Most of the points in the article are really good, yet again I can't help but realize how counter to our educational culture this idea is. Particularly, I thought about how, as someone who's always been quite a good student, grades have been pretty much the be-all and end-all for my evaluation of my own academic ability. I always say that even though I think my study habits aren't very good, and even though I often am strongly critical of my own work before I turn it in for a grade, as long as I continue to get good grades I don't have any motivation to change. Obviously, the extent to which I care about the quality of my work when I initially do it and the time I spend trying to improve it show that I definitely have some of the self-monitoring skills that formative assessment tries to teach, but it's still the summative assessment that always "really"  matters.

I know none of this mentions libraries and how we apply all this as librarians, but clearly there are connections that I just haven't thought out clearly enough yet to articulate. :)

Readings: Week 3

I figured I would have a problem finding three articles that truly addressed information literacy or related issues from an archival perspective, because in many experience these are issues that archivists don’t really spend a lot of time talking about.

As it happened, I only actually found one article that explicitly discussed information literacy in the context of archival work, which was rather depressing. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, this article came straight from SI—it was written by Beth Yakel! In “Information Literacy for Primary Sources: Creating a New Paradigm for Archival Researcher Education,” (OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20.2, 2004, pp. 61-64) she articulates many of the same questions that I have about what information literacy means for archives. As the title indicates, her primary concern is how archival users are educated. Yakel notes that in the shift to an “information literacy” paradigm in the broader library world, archivists’ main response was to focus on teaching how to evaluate and use primary sources. While this is commendable, and important, her broader point is basically that archivists still haven’t really figured out how to do education that focuses on how to actually use archives themselves—how to use the sorts of bibliographic and access tools that archives generally have, and to do it in a way that, in the language of this class, promotes transferability across different tools. In this way, she essentially argues that the shift to “information literacy” in the archival world is pretty incomplete. She particularly notes the ways that archival access systems are significantly different from tools used to access library materials, and that just because someone knows how to navigate library catalogs and databases doesn’t mean they know how to use finding aids and other more complicated tools that archives use.

I realized after reading this article that anything I read about archivists as educators more generally was going to touch on issues of information literacy, even if it didn’t use that terminology. One of the articles Yakel cited seemed useful in this regard. This was “The Archivist as Educator: Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into Historical Research,” by Marcus C. Robyns (The American Archivist 64.2, 2001, pp. 363-384). This article was an overview of research on efforts of archivists to offer education on how to use primary sources, and then offered a case study of doing just that. It seems to have been a pretty influential article and is one of the oldest that tackled this topic. The article did what it promised and did it well, and I was impressed with the degree to which instructional strategies we’re studying in class (the ADDIE model) were actually implemented by the archivists doing the education. Nevertheless, it never moves beyond “how to use primary sources” to “how to use archives,” which seems like the reverse way to go about things.

The final article I found was a qualitative study of archivists and special collections librarians who have been significantly involved in education efforts, analyzing interviews with them to see what could be learned and what areas were ripe for further study in their experiences. After I found the article, I discovered that it too was SI-generated as well, written by an SI-PhD student, Magia G. Krause. This was “’It Makes History Alive for Them’: the Role of Archivists and Special Collections Librarians in Instructing Undergraduates” (The Journal of Academic Librarianship 36.5, pp. 401–411). This article was really illuminating for a variety of reasons in that it shows how far instruction has come in the archival community and how far it has yet to go. A lot of the analysis comes back to the same issues that Beth Yakel discusses, especially when it comes to “navigating” through archival access tools. The archivists interviewed noted that they didn’t really have any formal training in how to do education, but their strategies for teaching and the experience they’d gained seemed to be working quite well. It was heartening to see that there are at least some archivists who are actively engaged in educational roles and take these roles very seriously.

In general, these articles reiterated what I already thought about how information literacy applies to archives, and made me realize several other important points as well. The big takeaways:

1. Archival research is hard! And it’s very different from regular library research, which many more people are used to doing.

2. The potential for educating users/patrons/researchers whatever on how to use archives is huge, and it’s not really being exploited.

3. Teaching people how to use primary sources is important, and good things are happening in that area. But the educational role of archivists should go beyond that.

4. Archivists really need to focus on education more! Librarians have been focusing on education for ages, and it’s about time we in the archival world caught up.

Class in Review: Week 2

I'm finding that our discussion in class last week triggered a lot of the same thoughts I had after doing the readings the first two weeks, considering issues of information literacy and the difficulty in teaching well. On that front I don't have a lot more to say.

However, I did think a lot about how all this relates to my areas of interest and my work as (hopefully) a future archivist, which is somewhat of a different focus from most of the rest of the class. The archives field has always learned a lot from and had a lot to learn from librarianship, and this area is certainly no exception.

One thing that struck me in our discussion was that archivists don't often think of themselves as educators, and they rarely think of education as an important part of their work. At the same time, we often bemoan lack of public knowledge of or interest in archives. Perhaps the first has something to do with the second? There is clearly a lot of education that archivists could be doing, especially in areas related to how to use and evaluate primary sources (our niche within the world of information literacy, I'd think) and simply when trying to get people to use our resources! It's especially worth noting that most archives are situated within larger institutions that do have a significant focus on instruction, such as academic (and sometimes even public) libraries and museums. But archivists rarely play an educational role, which is surely to the detriment of their institutions and their patrons. There's a lot of work to be done here, and there probably should be more discussion in the archival community about the roles we could play as educators.

As we talked about screencasts, I thought specifically about the ways they would or wouldn't be useful educational tools for archivists specifically. One thing about archives is that most archives have far fewer online resources available than libraries-- the majority of their collections still have to be accessed "on-site." But usually most archives have pretty useful on-line tools for finding out about their collections-- what they are, what's in them, what's useful for different areas of research, etc. Often, though, these tools are pretty complicated; most repositories don't have a single online "place" that tells you everything about their collections. Some things may be in a library catalog, but many may not be. Some collections may have complete and beautiful finding aids online, some may just have briefer listings. These different tools may exist in several different parts of a website, especially if the archive is connected to a larger institution like an academic library. And there are always going to be some things that don't have any online representation, that actually requiring sending an email to an archivist to find out about. The best method of looking for archival content will probably depend on your topic and your end goal. None of this even gets into how to look for and use archival content that has been digitized and is actually available online, which can also be difficult. Some institutions have a lot more content online than their users even realize, because it's not easy to find!

In short, using archives is complicated business, much more complicated than using most libraries. But it's a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to online tools. It's hard to tell, though, if people actually know how to use these tools very well. I would imagine that a lot of the time they don't. I kept pondering whether screencasts might be part of the solution to this problem. I'm still not sure. You could definitely do a screencast that explains the best ways to navigate through a database of finding aids, for example, or how to use the library's catalog to specifically look for archival collections. You could do a screencast that shows how to navigate your institution's portal for access to digitized materials. But getting your users (libraries talk about patrons, archives often say "researchers" instead, so I'm splitting the difference and going with "users" here) to actually utilize these tools seems even harder than it is for libraries. This is all complicated a lot by the types of users that archives have, and the preconceptions about those types of users (PhD-level researchers, undergraduates using the archives just because they have to for a class, genealogists) and what those capabilities are or aren't. I realize these are problems for libraries too, but my perception is that in general libraries have been much better at being open and accommodating to new user bases over time, and archives have struggled with this a lot.

So I don't have any clear answers, but a lot of thoughts (most of which I still can't get into clear enough form to articulate well here) about how archivists can come to play more of an educational role, and in this instance how screencasts could maybe be part of that.

Readings: Week 2

This week's readings formed an interesting set that furthered the interests in information literacy and library instruction that were piqued during class last week. It's interesting to look at different implementations of library instruction and see the ways in which they work toward meeting goals.

This is maybe a little embarrassing to admit, but in my past experience with library instruction, I hadn't realized how much thought needed to go into these sort of instruction sessions. Though I suppose I acknowledged in the abstract that this sort of planning went into teaching in libraries, it wasn't something I'd ever given much thought to; librarians simply plan workshops that they run every now and then-- I don't really think of them primarily as educators. This is a pretty naive assumption for somebody in library school, I guess, but since primarily studying archives and not librarianship per se, it's not something that's come up often in my classes. But it's refreshing to know that this is an important conversation in the library literature.

I thought the ADDIE model laid out in the Veldof reading was very... interesting. When I first encountered it, it seemed like a rather obvious putting into words of the steps that should be taken in any instructional setting. However, as I read more and thought about it, I realized that often these sort of steps don't really go into planning instruction at many levels of formal education, and that education is the worse for it. I also realized that this process was designed to work especially well for the sort of instruction that librarians are likely to do, which is "one-shot" in nature and often focused on teaching specific tasks. (With the goal that knowledge gained from learning those tasks can be transferred to completing other tasks, of course.) I wonder how well this model can be implemented in a variety of settings, especially those in which the monetary and time constraints are as significant as those faced in many libraries. Though the article mentions doing a scaled-down or miniature version of the ADDIE process, I'd need to have some more specific examples of how to do this before I felt comfortable doing so.

My main reaction to the two case study readings (Yelinek et al. and Johnston) was basically that they were definitely just that-- case studies. In both cases, the implementation of the instruction they were designing was over such a small group and the feedback they received representative of an even smaller group that it seems hard to use them to draw any more general conclusions at all. Though both projects discussed seemed to have gone well, I was really looking for more information on the decision-making that went into the content of the instruction and how to present it intellectually, rather than the issues of usability and organization that were primarily discussed. I understand that with web-based instruction these are significant concerns. Content, though, is still what matters. Though the content seems to have been well-communicated in these cases, there really isn't enough information to tell without follow-up or further studies. Still, their conclusions lead to an interesting basis for discussion on the pros and cons of web-based versus in-person instruction.

And that's all for now. Hopefully I won't blog so close to the deadline next week!

Class in Review: Week 1

So I had sort of forgotten that we needed to blog about our class meetings as well, and thus I'm doing this almost two weeks after class! So my memory will probably be a little hazier today than on future class in review posts. Oh well.

I had a bit of trepidation after doing the first week's readings, because I was a little overwhelmed by all the focus on teaching an education and as a future archivist, I don't really think of instruction as something that's likely to play a big role in my career. However, I have to say that what we talked about in class assuaged these concerns pretty well. One thing is that though I think of myself as an archivist (to-be?), I really don't mind being thought of as a librarian, and though I'd like to do archival work, I'd be just fine with having a career that focused on working in library settings (such as in the archives division of an academic library). The other thing is that I was actually pretty interested in the things we talked about in class, and because the class seems to be so well-taught from what I can tell so far (not brown-nosing, Kristin, just being honest!), I think I'm going to have an enjoyable time even if I can't always directly see the connection to my career goals.

I'm actually writing this after spending the day at the UM ALA student chapter's Quasi-Con, where one of the sessions I participated in discussed information literacy, which is a concept that came up a lot in class. I have to say that though I've unfortunately never really studied information literacy, it's quite obvious to me after our discussions today and in class that it's an incredibly important topic. As various people in class discussed their own experiences dealing with individuals who needed help to make sense of information, I thought of all the times I've encountered this in my own experience and how much information literacy is a real need in today's world. I'm also beginning to think of ways that this is an issue that I'll deal with, even as an archivist, and it becomes apparent how much helping folks improve their information literacy when it comes to accessing information.

I have to say, I'm looking forward to thinking about these issues again in class and seeing what else is in store. Now on to the readings!

Readings: Week 1

Typically for me, I'm not getting around to posting til the very last minute! So, I'm a little short on time, but this first week's readings definitely triggered a lot of thoughts for me.

The main thing these chapters made me think was, "Wow, I'm really glad I decided not to be a teacher!" All this sort of research shows just how complicated teaching is. A lot of people seem to think that education is sort of an easy career path or not one that requires a lot of work. If those people become teachers (and some do!), they certainly don't make very good ones.

As I read, I was constantly making connections between what was being said and my own experiences as a learner over the past... 20 years or so, since I've pretty much been in school nonstop since then, if you count preschool. :) My thing is that I've always been the "smart kid"... at the top of the class, with a reputation as the guy who "knew everything." I've been a valedictorian twice and a salutatorian once. But I always say that I'm just good at memorizing things, which is demonstrably true in a lot of circumstances, as most people who know me well can attest. I've always said that really "being smart" involves a lot more than that, even if that's what it takes to get good grades a lot of the time. This reading explicates in pretty extensive detail the ways in which that's true.

A lot of things really clicked for me while reading this and made me think, "yeah, that really is true" when it comes to actually being able to think critically and do real intellectual "work." It made me realize how being "good at memorizing things" (i.e., having "a great deal of content knowledge" in the language of the reading) has helped me along a lot when it comes to developing these higher-level skills. The discussion of organizing information contextually and being able to retrieve it "fluently" because it's been "conditionalized" really struck a chord with me as being a really good verbalization of the skills necessary to be an "expert" in a field. I particularly appreciated that examples from the humanities and social sciences-- particularly history, which is my area-- were used in addition to those from the natural sciences. A lot of times people seem to think that there's nothing more to history than facts, no real conceptual basis at all. I'm pretty sure I've even heard history teachers with this viewpoint, which is distressing.

Overall, I thought this reading was fascinating. It prompted a lot of thoughts about the work it takes to actually put this research into action in a classroom, particularly when classrooms are full of students with widely varying skill levels and sometimes backgrounds, and teachers face nothing short of legions of societal, institutional, political, and personal pressures when it comes to do their jobs well. I'm hoping that the rest of the book provides something a little more concrete with regards to this, though I know there are no easy answers.

One thing I guess I'm still confused about is what this all has to do with libraries. I mean, I understand how it does for an instructional librarian or a school librarian or something, to some degree. And since I'm planning to be an archivist, unlike most of the people in this class, it makes things a little more complicated as well. This just isn't the first things I expected to read in a class focused on "professional practice." But I guess we shall see.

And here goes my first blog post ever. I keep telling people this is a class where I'm going to learn about "blogging and stuff"... so I suppose I'm jumping right in!