Zoë WS in SI 643

(I wasn’t in class last week, so instead here are longer-form thoughts on rad library folks on social media!) Jessamyn West @jessamyn I know I won’t be unique in putting Jessamyn Weset on my list. Jessamyn was one of the people who drew me into librarianship in the first place. In 2011, just after graduating undergrad, I started serving in an AmeriCorps program called the Community Technology Empowerment Project in Saint Paul, Minnesota targeting the digital divide in the city. I was placed in the busy Rondo Community Outreach Library in Saint Paul and started to design and teach basic computer classes – everything from how to double-click to making functions in Excel. I was thrilled, inexperienced, enthusiastic, freaked out… I had to go in every day and just try stuff (in the way that AmeriCorps often involves lots of reinventing the wheel, unfortunately) and I definitely needed guidance. I found Jessamyn’s work via a popular old-school web community that I frequented, and tha...

Previous class (Note these notes are from the ethics workshop week) It was fascinating to create a space with classmates/fellow future library folk where we could engage ethics in libraries from so many angles. Our sessions touched on ethics in the self-presentation of libraries (online and in job listings), in the conduct of librarians dealing with difficult patrons behaviors and situations that imply conflict between values (e.g. the conflict between free access to information and creative a safe public space with pornographic viewing, librarians administering Narcan, etc.), and meta-conversations about how we can find support going through these ethical decision-making processes and appreciate the complexity of these arguments (by for example forcing ourselves to take opposing sides). On the whole, I definitely walked away feeling like I just had a really thorough check-in with my own ethical processes. Over the last few years, I have gone through a kind of stereotypical 20-so...

Class Notes  Book club class! I really enjoyed taking part in our book club sessions as both a participant and facilitator. The rotating structure to the bookclub was a function of necessity for the class, but I actually think having this kind of rotating facilitator group could work really well within a library workshop context! I’m imagining a kind of skill-share collective where folks take turn leading a discussion -- perhaps among librarian staff members, or a mixture of librarians and students. (And perhaps this is idealistic, but I love the democratic/participatory feel of it.)  I absolutely loved Grimm’s Cinderella. I was pretty unfamiliar with Cinderella and entirely unfamiliar with Grimm’s version, which I imagined would be gory and sweetly dark in the Grimm Brothers’ style (which it certainly was!) We came up with a headcannon ( https://fanlore.org/wiki/Headcanon ) of Cinderella as a punky witch subverting the patriarchy, which was lovely (and maybe, like, 70% ...

Socratic Seminar  In last week's class, we focused more on the Socratic seminar model and demoed a discussion on Prensky's 2011 article "In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books" (which I discussed in the previous blog post). I wasn't entirely surprised by the negative reaction from my peers, but I did enjoy the depth and variety of critiques: Ignorance of copyright (something I don't think about often),  Prensky positioning himself as a disruptive "change-maker" within the field, Rhetorical failures (all of the logical fallacies etc.), Lack of engagement with related/complementary/more thoughtful trends in librarianship, etc.  It's helpful to realize that even though many share a lot of common experiences and vocabulary, each of us also has a particular vantage point within the information science fields that comes from the professional identities we have held and aspire to -- but also our focus points of intellectu...

Class Reflection  At the end of last class, we took turns facilitating conversation based around a list of prompts. I found that brief activity to be an incredibly powerful experience -- the experience of sharing that space with my classmates brought to the forefront a bunch of questions that have been in my head this semester (and things I’ve been trying to get better at as a human). I’ve always had a kind of ambivalent relationship to listening and speaking. I very sincerely love listening to others, and specifically creating space for people to work through ideas and express themselves in a way that makes sense. I appreciate opportunities to facilitate where I have a formalized role that involves stepping back and making space, and to that end, I very much enjoyed trying to lead the discussion and create a supportive little bubble of conversation, if only for a moment. At the same time, I often want to share my own ideas and speak up. I sometimes do this too much -- the ur...

Class Reflections I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. (McGonigal, 2010)  Jane McGonigal closed her 2010 Ted talk “Gaming can make a better world” with a mixture of specific arguments about gaming (the typology of four “amazing superpowers”) and a wide-open argument about saving the world. As we discussed in class, the world-saving piece has aged much more poorly than the exploration of gaming. Our discourse on tech and its role in social change continues to become more critical, and r...