Week 7 - Virtual Guest Speaker

The pic is from Flickr. It's aptly titled *I Love to Read"
Guest Speaker
In addition to developing this class for it's online debut in Spring 2009, I'm also teaching it f2f for the first time this semester. This week's assignment is certainly timely, as our class is meeting at Tempe Public library on Monday, when one of the librarians will talk to us about Reader's Advisory Service. This is a process which supports recreational reading needs, where the patron states a reading interest (genre, author, setting, plot, protagonist type, etc,) and the librarian locates additional material that matches the stated interests, using a variety of print and online resources, as well as personal experience. Needless to say, this is a service we don't provide in the academic library.

So now I need to come up with a way to record this session!!

I just had another "missed the boat" moment related to our class visit to Tempe Public Library. I have asked the students to each jot down a couple of questions to ask the librarian during this session. If I had thought about this in time, I would have asked them to add their questions to a shared GoogleDoc.

Oprah's doing it too!
Yesterday I got home a little earlier than usual, flipped on the TV, and sat down at the computer. My ears pricked up when I heard her say Skype. There were interviews as part of the book club activities, with viewers and celebrities Skyping from all over the world! Imagine the possibilities for education.

Finding Content (err.....Make that "Finding Lack of Content)

With all the time I have spent searching for content for this course, I could have developed my own. That's what I'll have to do. MLX doesn't list Library Science as a discipline, and there's not much I can use on Merlot for this course. I did find a ton of stuff I can use for other courses and for library instruction, so it was all duly bookmarked on my Diigo site, or fed to my iGoogle page. So now I'm scouring the sites of colleges around the country that offer AA degrees in Library Technology, and there are not too many.

Week 5 - YouTube

Librarians are a prime target for satire and spoof. What I found on YouTube was Marian the Librarian, Conan the Librarian, and many bun-sporting, shushing, stereotypical characters. But it was all hilarious. This was one of the funniest(apologies to all the blondes out there) Dumb Blonde in Library.
Here's my needle in the haystack. This Reference Interview in an academic library is someone's grad school assignment, but it's a good example of how the ask open-ended and clarifying questions to ascertain the library patron's real information need.

I'm doing most of my work for this class at my Tucson house, out in the boonies, with only dialup access. This week I slowed down to crawl speed. My laptop wants to automatically download updates, and it's working on one for a few days. So far it's 66% completed, and it's hogging what little bandwidth is available. At best, watching audio or video podcasts is disjointed, as you hear half a sentence at a time.

Week 4 - Podcasts for libraries and other stuff

I've been attending the Podcasting workshops that Alisa Cooper and Veronica Diaz have put together. I highly recommend signing up if you have the time...or at least go and explore the wonders of Coop's Word.

From the Finding Podcasts link, I checked out the Education Podcast Network and was surprised to see quite a bit of content for Library and Information Studies. Towards the end of LBT130 we discuss issues and trends in library reference work, and I found a podcast that I will use on the roving trend that public libraries have embraced. It's Guide to Roving: An Essential Service for Library 2.0. The roving librarian gets out from behind the desk to reach the large percentage of patrons that have information needs, but are reluctant to ask at the desk.
Photo from Flickr

Week 3 - catching up

I've become the sidetracked sister! I start out looking through all this stuff that Shelley sends us, and end up nowhere close to where I'm supposed to be. I guess it's the online version of daydreaming in class. I was looking for a scholarly blog to discuss, without much luck, but I did come across the Public Library Association's web site. Their annual conference was last week in Minneapolis, and all the conference handouts are on their web site. There's some great course content for me, as long as I get the permission of the owners of these handouts.
I set up my social bookmarking account, as instructed, not thinking that I'd use it much. At first I kept forgetting to bookmark, but now I'm Diigoing like crazy. That's going to be very useful. Another tool I can't live without is my iGoogle account. When I first began this class, I was concerned about the looseness of the "loosely connected technologies", but feel better now that I have corralled them into what I call my CIS237 Catchall in my iGoogle. And how did I ever live without GoogleDocs? It's been a huge relief to retire my thumbdrive, at least 'til all this virus mess is cleaned up at MCC.

A Rainbow of Books: there's order in this chaos!

I found this pic on Flickr. Apparently it was taken in a bookstore that organizes the books by color. Well it's not the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress system of classification, but is there some sense of order? Absolutely!

This represents what I feel about communicating in this class. Not quite what I'm used to, but has it's own organization system, with which I'm gradually developing a comfort level.

My worst experience so far was not being able to see how to use the tools, as I didn't have access to the audio. The best part is knowing that I am creeping up the learning curve. It's not second nature yet, though.

Another realization is that so far it's all been about me, me, me! By that I mean I've been so focused on getting the communications via blog, wiki, etc. to Shelley, that I've not thought about seeing how my classmates are doing. It's time to visit their blogs.

Got my ears on!!

Until today I did not have the opportunity to hear any of the course audio or video components. What a difference it made in my ability to see the big picture, and to understand what I have to do to get through the first week's assignments. I think I'm done with all the assignments, and now I can devote some time to playing with the gadgets. The only thing I'm not real sure about is the scope and function of the iGoogle tool compared to the Google reader. I'll get that sorted out tonight.

I did see something that I liked a lot. The ability in iGoogle to add multiple page and have the page titles visible in the tabs. I need to find out if there's a maximum number of tabs allowed. I can see myself using this feature.