Blog Post 2: Reflection on Week 1 Class & Readings for Week 2

As SI 643 get settled into its wintry night class routine, we started getting to know one another and framing some of the big questions of the course together. I loved hearing the many ways that my peers found “teaching”, “learning”, “libraries”, “data”, and “students/learners/patrons” meaningful. Some of these definitions certainly swirl around academic and public libraries, but not all! We all want to help folks learn and grow and connect with resources, but the spirit of librarianship doesn’t need to map literally onto a library, and I think that’s a big strength in a class like this one.

I’m interested in what it will look like to become skillful in the craft of instruction. What moves a workshop or webinar from being merely informative to being transformative? As we discussed in class, to what extent can we approach our diverse work tasks with the spirit of an educator, or maybe an educator-librarian, and how does that change how we design, implement, and evaluate learning interventions?

Our readings this week started providing some practical tools for an effective instruction toolkit. Specifically:

• The ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model of continuous curriculum development. Veldof (2006) describes the shortcomings of workshops that lack a cohesive structure or sense of purpose in favor of last-minute improvisation. Instead, Veldof suggests library-based instructors integrate the ADDIE model into workshop design and approach their preparation processes as instructional designers.
• I’m curious to learn how instructional teams can most effectively initiate an ongoing, long-term process, and what gets in the way of ongoing efforts. Veldof emphasizes the importance of paying attention to team dynamics: “If instructional design is going to catch on in your library and become a positive and integral part of your work, it’s important to carefully attend to team dynamics prior to the performing stage.” (13). What philosophies of decision-making (e.g. consensus-based models?), project management, etc. tend to succeed in a library context?
• In my own experience, there’s a big difference between projects that “belong” to one or two individuals in the library versus projects that span many stakeholders, including faculty and staff outside of the library. Sometimes the seemingly logical step of scaling a successful workshop to a workshop series runs into a complex web of problems stemming from poorly planned project management, or ambiguity about what role each individual is supposed to play in the project. I am eager to learn how to prevent this from happening!
• Both Bowles-Terry et al. (2010) and Flynn (2013) identify many of the strengths of screencasting and video production in a library context. When these videos are composed effectively - when they are brief, focused, captivating, and address students/patrons’ pressing needs – they provide excellent asynchronous instruction support.
• I’m curious to what degree these trends in viewership have changed recently. The brief viral video (~30 seconds to 2 minutes) seems to have taken off across social media platforms, which bodes well for videos like “How to submit your I.S. to the College of Wooster Libraries” ( http://youtu.be/hwNKa4elLmE ) (which I loved!) I wonder how to best balance compelling production with being a little too cute, and in doing so potentially dating the video for future users. I think this particular video strikes a great balance, but it’s something to keep in mind to avoid alienating students. I think, for example, about how the trend of brands being vocal on Twitter via young social media managers backfiring recently/seeming artificial and cloying rather than witty and relatable… however, I do think brisk editing and relatable narration is likely to continue being positive for the immediate future!

Excited to try out these ideas via making a screencast or two soon!