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.