Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

CIL2010: Virtual Learning & Training

Meredith Farkas started this session and talked about Web 2.0 ideas in the classroom.  It is the age of participation.  We can learn so much not just from professors but from the students and back and forth sharing.  The teacher is more of a facilitator (social constructivism).  It’s about reflections & teaching each other.

The core of Farkas’s classroom for her SLIS class at San Jose State University is a blog.  Blogs are a familiar medium.  42% of bloggers are aged 18-34.  It’s a great way for faculty to communicate with students.  It is also fantastic for community-building.  The students get involved more than she’s seen in any other online class.  Building an online learning community helps to get students used to writing in public — when her students write their blog posts, it’s publicly-visible and the world can see it.

Joan Petit talked about blogging at the American University of Cairo in Egypt.  She did her presentation using Prezi instead of PowerPoint and it was an interesting experience, though I can’t say it was easy to read…. English is not the first language for most students.  They had some bad experiences with students not being able to complete the basic skills required for searching and finding information.  They had been using WebCT but switched over to using a wiki.  They switched their information literacy class from being focused on the grade to being pass/fail and all it took to pass was to show up to class & participate in each in-class weekly activity.  They had the students set up blogs with the theory that if their writing was visible to each other, the students would work harder.  There was an additional challenge that the culture in Egypt was quite repressive, bloggers were regularly jailed, and people did not have the same blogging culture as they do here.  Instructors would comply if students requested that their blogs be private and visible to the instructor only.  Students had a variety of involvement and effort put into their various sites.  The technology was a challenge too.  Students didn’t understand how the technology worked (some of them created a whole new blog each week instead of just creating a new entry in the existing blog).  Some of the teachers didn’t understand how RSS worked and were thereby unable to take full advantage of monitoring their students new posts.  Lessons learned: Looking good on paper isn’t good enough.  Take advantage of key moments.  Own your disasters.  Define success before starting.  The most exciting technology isn’t always the best for the users.  Hasty ideas can sometimes work well — if this project had gone through a committee it never would have gone through.

cil2010, computers in libraries