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.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
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.
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.
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