LibraryTechtonics

Things have been a bit crazy busy, what with all the stuff going on at RPL (gearing up for Netguides, the launch of NetLibrary eAudiobooks and MP3 players for borrowing, our LSTA grant for promoting databases, and the regular everyday stuff of my job, all of which warrant their own posts), taking on the PLA Blog in-full, and dab of public speaking, not to mention just general life stuff. So crazy busy, it’s been hard to find the time or the energy to *write* about it all, even though I very much want to.

The NAHSL presentations I did back in October (posting forthcoming) led to a gig doing continuing education classes for the Southern Connecticut State University Information and Library Science program this coming Friday, December 1. I’ll be teaching two 3.5-hour classes, one on Social Bookmarking for Librarians and another on The Art of the Wiki. I’ll be posting both presentations after Friday sometime for your general perusal. If you’re in the New Haven area, and you’d like to attend either class, you can contact the SCSU ILS folks and find out how (the information isn’t on their site for some reason).

I’m finding it interesting trying to create classes for librarians who don’t live online when I have no real sense of what they know and what they don’t know. With patrons it’s different, because I can somehow gauge the average skill on my interactions with everyday patrons as well as the regulars in my classes, and put together something that’s balanced enough to fly with everyone, but flexible enough to change on the fly to better meet the class needs.

With librarians, since we have no real, solid, standardized, across-the-board technology competencies for our profession, it’s a bit hit or miss. It could be that I’m preaching to the choir for three hours, or it could be that I need to do way more backpedaling than I originally anticipated, never getting to the hands-on component of the class.

The up side is that I made presenting the class in a technology lab a requirement. I can’t express enough the need for anyone learning technology to have hands-on time with the technology, where the student is the driver of the mouse, must take the time and brainpower to logic it out, and has the opportunity to commit some of the information to even the vaguest of muscle memory, even if they don’t remember everything exactly later.

Don’t get me wrong, I do offer classes at my library that are presentation-only (my Getting Started with eBay and Getting Started with Craig’s List classes are my first foray into the presentation-only realm) for broad overviews to get patrons started and encourage them to explore on their own, which they often do as a result of the class. But when it comes to the HOWTO stuff, as most people know, reading the instructions is one thing, understanding them well enough to do it is another. If you have someone in the room to help you logic it out and correct your mistakes, with a trusty handout by your side and other people to commiserate with ;D, you’re more likely to really *learn* something. My Geek Out classes are a prime example of this.

In any case, I should be getting ready for work. Stealing snippets of time to post has been difficult lately, but I wanted to make an effort to populate my sorry-looking empty home page with something interesting and substantial to renew the faith of my readers, and for a greater part *myself*, in my blog, even as my blog has been rebelling against me (problems with the software, no stats, upgrading to MT 3.33 because I haven’t had time to finish the WordPress shift, bleh). More positive things are head, I’m sure!

Tags: work
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