Some things that stand out:

• The Library 2.0 project was my first experience on a major project that not only required me to work with a team long distance but also implement an online learning experience for a group of people I had never met before.
• Char Booth text will likely sit on my desk like a bible.  I was always so intimidated by learning theory but her book breaks things down into bite sized pieces more manageable for consumption.
• Since reading Hanging out, Messing Around and Geeking Out for my context book assignment, I have found myself looking at the students walking into my library in a very different light.  I feel I can understand better how they interact with the technology I put in front of them and how to connect with them in a better way.
• I really appreciate having the opportunity to build a personal learning network.  Even though I technically had one before, it really needed to be updated.  But unlike past efforts when I would revise my personal learning network at random with no real thought process behind it, this time I had Thomas and Brown’s New Culture of Learning text to guide me.

It’s been a blast and I have learned so much!  Thank you everyone and best wishes on your future endeavors!

GOALS:

I need my personal learning network to:

• Challenges me to think outside of the “echo chamber”.
• Informs me about innovation and trends in academic libraries.
• Informs me about innovation and trends in higher education.
• Inspires me to join the conversation.

Rather than start from scratch, I inventoried the personal learning network I currently have in place and started “shaving off” some of the resources I didn’t feel fit any of my particular goals.  I used to work in a public library where I focused mainly on young adult services, so many of my feeds focused on that part of the profession.  Now that I work in a community college library, I figured it was time to eliminate those so I could make room for other resources.  This also brought me to my next step which was to define my scope and specify what settings I wanted to work within.

SCOPE:

In addition, I also have some special interests, most which have to do with my current position as instructional librarian but also others that are just a part of my broader interests. These include:

1) Communicating directly with vendors when their services break down.

2) Suggestions for resources.

3) Sharing, conversing on professional topics.

Maintaining my PLN

If there’s anything this particular activity has shown me it’s how important it is to periodically evaluate my network.  It’s easy enough to go through the day and find more blogs and people to follow in your network, but harder to take the time to edit your network so your not bogging things down again.  Scheduling about thirty minutes on a Friday, once a month would be enough to keep up with this.  I anticipate that my goals will remain relatively the same as I stay in my current position but if my position changes or if I get a new job somewhere then I would probably re-evaluate that also.

As for technology, there are three main tools that I use regularly:

1) Tweetdeck

2) Feedly

3) Readability

I also recently started using Scoop.it and find it useful as a kind of “discovery tool”, picking up articles that I may not come across regularly through my personal learning network.  I also use Zite for this purpose also.

It can be overwhelming at times trying to keep up with all the collective knowledge out there, in addition to all the tools being developed to do it with.  You simply can’t keep up with everything, so developing your own goals and your own philosophy about a personal learning network can ease that struggle.

My son playing Donkey Kong at Wal-mart…shortly before he received it for his sixth birthday.

As a mom to a six year old I often witness first hand how youth learns through play.  However, I admit that I’ve always been a bit aprehensive about incorporating video game play into my sons daily activities.  I try to limit most media activities or at least monitor it so he learns to engage in other things. He has maybe two or three video games (Wii) but it hasn’t been until recently that he’s shown much interest in playing them.  I’ve never really been much of a gamer so I can’t really help him when he gets stuck on a level or needs help with some challenge.  As a result, he usually gets frustrated and gives-up.   But last weekend he had a playmate over and they spent almost the whole time playing Donkey-Kong together.  His playmate is the same age as him, but had clearly played Donkey-Kong a lot, and through him my son was finally able to learn some of the gaming skills he’s been lacking.  He leveled up for the first time and I’ll never forget the excitement in his eyes when he came up to tell me.  After an hour went by I started to head in to ask them to switch activities, since an hour of Donkey-Kong was surely enough.  But as I watched them play together I realized how many different learning opportunities they were engaging in.  The one that came as a surprise to me was how they both were working together to achieve a goal (teamwork is something Jenkins mentions in this weeks readings about Core Media Literacy Skills).  My son would often hand the controls over to his friend during parts he had trouble getting through, then once his friend got him past the hard part, he passed it back.  It was also heart warming to here two six year old kids constantly praising each other, “Yes! Awesome job! Keep going, you’re almost there!”.   Then there were parts that they both got stuck on which meant having to work together to figure out the solution.   Then there was the issue of taking turns.  They tried this multiple different ways, first counting the amount of tries they each got.  But because my son was less experienced than his playmate, he wouldn’t get very long to play because he would usually die quicker. So, they decided to do a level then switch.  They played for four hours.  That’s the first time I’ve ever let him play a video game for that long.  When I think of my six year old playing a video game for four hours, I feel slightly guilty, as though some child psychologist somewhere is going to strike me down from above, claiming that I’m exposing my son to too much media and not enough outdoor time or something.  But after what I observed, I know he finished those four hours having learned and practices some critical real life learning skills.

Hanging out, Messing Around and Geeking Out is the result of a three year research effort by members of the Digital Youth Project.  It was quite heavy on the research making it a little rough to trudge through, however, it provides much needed research that helps fill a gap in the study of new media and youth culture.  Using qualitative methods of research, the contributing writers conducted an ethnographic investigation into how kids and teens use new media in their everyday lives.

Specifically, they ask the question: “How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas?  And how do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning and authoritative knowledge?”

There are various genres of participation identified by the writers.  To begin with, they make a distinction between friendship driven networks and interest driven networks and how new media are used in each.

•  Friendship driven networks – considers the encounters kids and teens have during school through other local activity.  In these networks, the online activity tends to mirror offline interactions and are inevitably used to extend or maintain relationships already made in the offline world.
• Interest driven networks – specialized interest groups and activities.  This is where gaming and creative content production will often occur.  These networks also tend to provide more of an opportunity for youth to broaden their circle of interactions to include peer communities that may not be as available to them locally or offline.

3 different kinds of participation

1. Hanging out – this is where the friendship driven networks tend to thrive.  Using social network sites like Facebook, Myspace and Youtube, youth will organize and maintain their offline friendships in an environment that is less structured and less supervised than that of their offline interactions.  More traditional forms of interaction familiar to youth culture, such as gossiping and bullying, also occur in these environments but take on entirely different shape given the anonymity and viral opportunities provided by such online mediums.
2. Messing around – used to describe the more solitary activity that youth engage in when they are simply surfing the web, often accessing information driven by their own interests via video tutorials on youtube, blogs, forums, etc.  This is where a lot of self-directed learning and discovery can happen for kids and teens, and likely where much of their own personal research skills are developed.
3. Geeking out – is used to describe a more specialized group of users who participate in gaming culture and content creation online, including mashups and the remixing of media.

I really liked how the authors chose to keep with this more authentic way of describing youth interaction instead of coming up with more formal terminology which is kind of what I would expect from a research project this expansive.  Once I had a handle on the various genres of participation and how they related to each other, I was able to identify a few key points that reflect our course topic of transformative learning and technology literacies.

• Not all youth come from media-rich households, making it harder for the youth living in those households to engage in participatory learning.  Libraries can encourage this kind of learning by making it a priority to provide new media tools, or media labs where youth can hangout, mess around and geek out.
• The writers note on several occasions that a large part of learning and literacy happens outside of school in more informal peer-driven environments where participatory media tools are widely used. In addition, youth also engage in more self-directed learning in special interest environments.   Librarians need to consider how this kind of youth engagement is affecting the various benchmarks for standards of learning already in place in more formal learning environments and how they can be refined so peer-based learning and participatory culture are encouraged more.
• New media is empowering youth in a way that often challenges adult authority at home and in education. This challenge can be met by librarians who can function as a bridge between teacher and student, parent and child, by providing access to a place, the tools and the expertise needed for utilizing new media to enhance social interaction, learning and literacy.

There was so much to this book.  It included many case studies clearly demonstrating how new media has infiltrated the daily lives of our children and young adults, providing ways to develop and express their identities, organize their social lives, and broaden their peer communities.  Contrary to the concerns often shared by adults, learning takes place on many levels within the context of these interactions.  Our youth are not engaging in new media passively, but are participating, driving , if not bull dozing a path for new media to transform our society.

____

Ito, M., & Horst, H. A. (2010). Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media [E-reader]. MIT Press.

This is what the Ubiquitous Librarian has to say:

I see MOOCs as a way to expand and redefine what a librarian is/does. We don’t break away from the stereotype of “book people” by talking about it on panels or writing books/articles about how our profession has transformed. We change the way people think through out actions, or more specifically, our interactions.

I imagine librarians joining MOOCs and not just serving a traditional role (let me guide you to some info) but genuinely becoming a part of the course (let’s build and learn together.) This is a chance for us to present ourselves as public thinkers, public learners, public instructors, and public knowledge makers. This is an opportunity to fully participate in the total learning process—or at least a greater share of it. I want students, faculty, and others seeing librarians as partners, collaborators, experts, and fellow learners. Not just the keepers of the proxy.

I signed up for three different MOOC’s this fall, through Coursera in an effort to get the full learner experience of what it is like to participate in a college course MOOC.  Unfortunately, I haven’t really participated much.  It was obviously still summertime when I signed up and I was obviously over-energized with anticipation of the coming Fall semester activity to actually think I would have that much time on my hands.  Regardless, I have participated enough to know that MOOC’s are a perfect example of what our textbook refers to on page 53 when it mentions the “collective”  and the lack of a core center where people will move in and out of a group at their own desire, depending on their own level of interest and need.

Of course, each time I signed into Coursera I would start thinking about how a librarian can infiltrate that environment and break the boundaries of our more traditional role.  There always seems to be a never ending necessity for librarians to hack into these new learning environments after they’ve been created, trying to find ways to get people to notice we’re here and we have expertise to share.  We did it with MySpace, with Facebook, with Twitter, with Blackboard and now we find the need to do it with MOOC’s.

This is definitely a thinking outloud kind of ramble.  I guess I’m not sure myself and I’m posing the question: What is our role? Is it necessary to have one? Will there be a point in time where libraries are involved in the earlier stages of things like MOOC’s so we’re not always trying to break-in after they’re creation?

So, imagine how shifting this paradigm could ultimately create a whole new culture of learning, providing both faculty and students with permission to play, to be the new learner not just in the fall, but every day of the year.  To come to campus and say “I’m not sure how this is going to work, it could be messy, but let’s try it anyway”, without worrying about how they will be evaluated for their performance. Perhaps then, that divide between tenured/non-tenured/professional/student may begin to recede, leaving behind an environment that would breed excitement for learning and a passion for innovation.

But after the first few times, I realized it really wasn’t adding much to my instruction.  In fact, the first class I used it in, many of the students didn’t even have cell phones on them and since we also didn’t have any computers for them to use, those students weren’t even able to participate in the poll.  I had jumped the gun and simply assumed that everyone has cell phones these days.  I ended up aborting the whole idea after a few weeks.

I think if I had used something like the Toolkit Evaluation Table I would of determined that Polleverywhere had many more drawbacks then I had initially expected which would of made me think twice about implementing it in regular library instruction. If I had given myself a better method for considering the caveats then perhaps I would of chosen to only use it in the classes I instruct every so often in computer labs across campus.  It is definitely a tool with a lot of potential for instructional literacy.  It has several affordances such as communication, assessment, sharing and visualization but it doesn’t do much good if the students in the class don’t have access to tool that allows them to participate in the poll.

But I will admit, I found it difficult to actually practice some of these methods in a library instruction class.  It all went back to the same problem of having to teach a forty-minute one-shot.  There was also this sense that the professor I was collaborating with didn’t really see me as a teacher, but relied on me more as a tour guide.  I often find that one of my biggest challenges has had less to do with getting through to students, and more to do with getting through to faculty.

My knowledge of educational theory is weak, and I admit that I often feel intimidated when I’m assigned to read something that is theory based.  But Booth’s chapter’s 4 and 5 have been truly enlightening.  I can finally recognize and identify the instructional methods I use and have been taught for the passed few years.   I’ve spent the last four years trying to perfect my one-shot approach to library instruction and in doing so I find I’m relying heavily on the cognitive-direct approach.  I have one hour, sometimes only 40 minutes to feed a group of learners the information I have been requested to teach them.  My more successful experiences have been when I have managed to foster a relationship with a professor, one where I or even just the concept of information literacy has had just the slightest bit of influence over the assignment they have created for their students that will ultimately be used to reinforce the skills learned from me in the classroom.  This “trainer to trainer” relationship seems to create more meaning for students and when I have them captivated within that meaningful environment, they are subsequently more engaged.

Every so often I get a chance to teach faculty and staff short workshops, usually on social media topics and usually during what we refer to as our “start-up week”, or the week leading up to the first day of classes for the semester.  After signing-up for the Power searching with Google MOOC  this past summer, I decided to take what I learned and pass it on by doing a one hour workshop for faculty and staff.  I think this may of been my first true experience with constructivist instruction.  It was pretty much on accident and I identify now only after reading Booth’s chapters.

Perhaps it was the laid back environment and one of the few times I felt like I wasn’t teaching to the request of someone else that allowed me to take a new approach.  Not everything I demonstrated worked properly.  I tried to demo how Google Goggles worked by using a picture of my cat…and the search failed miserably.  But to my delight, the people in my workshop took over, taking out their smart phones, downloading the app and trying it out for themselves.  Normally this is where I would panic because it’s a digression away from my agenda and “oh know, I’ll never fit everything in after this” would send me into speed talk mode.  But I let it go.  Soon the whole workshop opened up into something directed more by their interests.  They all wanted to know more about images, where could they find them, where could they tell their students to find them and how do they prevent plagiarism.  So I spent a whole segment of the class explaining Creative Commons, which none of them seemed to have heard of before.

Then we went back to talking about Google.  I demo’d how to translate web pages and asked any of them if they had an example they would like me to try.  My example had worked very smoothly, but then again, of course it did because I had spent thirty minutes in my office coming up with the perfect example to show how well the feature could work.  But how often does that happen in the real world. So I asked them for an example to try.  Of course, it wasn’t smooth at all yet the effort itself launched us into a completely new conversation about Google Docs and how can be used to peer edit.  By the end of the workshop, we were pretty much all over the place in terms of content. Something like that would usually leave me feeling flustered and concerned that I had done a good job.  But instead, everyone seemed really grateful and remarked about how relevant the workshop had been for them.

_____

Booth, C.  (2012).  Reflective teaching, effective learning: Information literacy for library educators.  Chicago, IL: ALA Publications.

This is me today. We just got done with my son’s birthday party. I’m pretty exhausted. My lips are still blue from the frosting on the Batman cake. Good cake.

Hi. My name is Carleen and I’m a librarian in a community college located in Watertown, New York (way up north…forty minutes away from the Canadian border).  I coordinate the Library Instruction program and oversea the reference desk.

This is my second semester with SLIS.  I’m enrolled in the Post Masters Certificate program, having already received my MLIS in 2006 from the University of Oklahoma.  I’ve really been enjoying it so far.  I’m really looking forward to this class in particular.  I love teaching, and I certainly love teaching technology, but besides a course in Information Literacy while doing my masters, I never had any formal training.  So, I’m definitely interested in diving into some cutting edge learning theory.

When I’m not working, I usually spend my time with my son, dog and two cats.  I also enjoy running and biking when I can actually find the time.  I love traveling.  I also love knitting and crocheting but I’m very bad about finishing projects.  I have many half made socks laying around.  I’m also into altered art and art journaling.  One day I would like to learn to paint for real.