Back from ALISE last week, where I presented “Remodeling ‘Relevance Work for the LIS Curriculum’” with my wonderful colleague Connie Van Fleet. Got a few useful comments (most of the audience seemed a little bemused by why we would be putting all of these seemingly unrelated activities together in the first place), so it was useful from that perspective. (And now for the paper to explain more about why we did this!)
Hmm, just got the aggregate course survey results from the College of Arts and Sciences for last semester’s KM/LIS 5433. One really startling statistic is that the course apparently was perceived by the students as having the lowest workload of all courses in the department “at a similar level.”
Don’t have the student comments yet, but I’m rather curious as to why this is so. There were actually more assignments than I usually give, and the final projects were actually more complex than I usually see. (See the 5433 “Virtual Project Fair” tab above.) And the “amount learned in this class” percentile was very high indeed.
Maybe because a lot of it didn’t seem like “work” to people?
Or maybe I just need to impose more rigid requirements?
*sighs*
Laws of Level -3
1. MATH CREATES ANARCHY
2. MATHEMATICS IS FORBIDDEN
3. NO ONE SHALL KNOW MATH
4. YOU ARE POWERLESS
5. WE CONTROL THE MATH
6. WE CONTROL YOU
7. QUESTION NOTHING
8. KEEP A CLOSED MIND
9. WORK DON’T THINK
10. NOT THINKING IS THE NORM
11. BE IN THE NORM
12. MINDLESS DOING BRINGS PEACE
Perhaps my whole life would have been different if I’d been exposed to “Absurd Math” rather than “New Math.” Or not.
Interesting article in this month’s First Monday by Lisa Lane about the constraints imposed by course management systems such as Blackboard, WebCT, and Desire2Learn. The article is called “Insidious Pedagogy”, and it focuses largely on the defaults on the course dashboards, which Lane says contribute to the faults of novice online instructors, who don’t realize that they can be customized. Well, yes, true, but I think that some deeper issues lie in the fact that the “defaults” are constructed to provide a very linear framework for efficient delivery of course material, that students expect to see a certain structure to all online courses after their first exposure to one, and that many of the customized features available are either not available due to cost or removed at institutional request (I’m thinking particularly of the “pager” on Desire2Learn, which I absolutely loved, but which was removed by the IT administrator at faculty request because students expected the instructor to respond more quickly than usual to these messages, and many faculty didn’t want to be constrained into this kind of “emergency response.”) Some customized features are abhorrent to me: I can’t conceive of using Turnitin, and yet that is being touted as a wonderful new addition to our instructional repertoire, because student papers can be sent directly from the dropbox to the Turnitin servers.
Bottom line is that, although I love the tremendous amount of information that can be conveyed in all directions 24/7 in a good online course, I suspect that I wouldn’t especially enjoy them as a student either, compared to the face-to-face experience, which is becoming increasingly uncommon. I’m fortunate that all my education was face-to-face, though it was not nearly as interesting as it could have been (since it was largely constrained by 3 hour lecture-style evening classes, accompanied by black and white overhead transparencies if the instructor was especially technologically adept!)
And yet I managed to learn quite a bit along the way, I suspect. Hopefully my students will do the same, irregardless of the CMS and instructor constraints.
And if I ever teach KM/LIS 5433 again, we’re definitely going to have a week on “font personality,” now that I’ve found this study from Usability News in Wichita. I had some intuitive sense of this from having worked with the fine graphics designers at Cornell University Press, but it’s even better to have empirical data!
Well, time to revamp my syllabus for KM/LIS 5433… more metadata (or, as Joe Colannino would no doubt justifiably point out), more supradata.
Recommendations:
5.2.1 Communicate with LIS Educators
5.2.1.1 LC and ALA: Convene a biennial meeting with LIS educators and trainers, perhaps in coordination with ALA and ALISE, to discuss changing policies, procedures, processes and practices, the levels of demand for qualified professionals in the area of bibliographic control, and base levels of knowledge required, in the first instance, of those who will work in bibliographic control and, in the second instance, of all professionals. Read more…
I have two tracks in mind for the fall course I’ll be teaching, given the variety of folks I’m hoping to attract to the class: one Library 2.0-oriented and the other information entrepreneurship-oriented. So I was trawling the web for some ideas to spark discussions in the second track (“Intellectual Venture Capital”) and came across the concept of “dark tourism,” which is currently being studied (and marketed) by certain academic-related institutions such as the Dark Tourism Forum in Lancashire. “Dark Satanic Mills”, indeed!
Well, the whole Library 2.0 thing has finally made its way onto the JESSE library education listserv in the form of a question posed thus:
“There has been considerable under-the-table discussion about Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 tools, capabilities, philosophies, and approaches to information organization and retrieval. Read more…
I had the pleasure of giving the pre-dinner speech at our spring SLISebration last night, and it went reasonably well. (Note to self: when white tablecloth is on speaker table, mouse does NOT work well– adapt quickly!) Due to having prepared much more material than necessary (typical junior faculty error in making public presentation to outside audience!), I rushed through some introductory material about normative theories, and didn’t clearly state the relationship of theories to models. Read more…
This is such a great reading, but is it something that my future students in LIS 5433 would “get”?
On the other hand, do I really “get” it all either? Does it stop me from wanting to get the entire book from which this been excerpted? Not at all! You go, Bonnie Nardi!
