Note from Michael: I posted about Megan’s work here: http://tametheweb.com/2013/09/26/if-you-like-it-put-a-badge-on-it/I remember my exact reaction the first time I heard about Digital Badges. “Hey, these could replace performance reviews!” I exclaimed. Maybe it was due to upcoming performance reviews I didn’t want to complete, maybe it was my deep love for quest based learning, or maybe it was just one of the many things I exclaim in excitement during any given day, but for some reason it stuck. I couldn’t get badges out of my head. This was several years ago and my excitement over badges has only continued to grow. I’ve […]
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Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois 60062. Although we only saw it for that one day, one of the greatest collaborations took place in a library.A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal each assigned to write an essay of no less than a thousand words describing who they thought they were. One of the things that always struck me when watching the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club, even long before I started the MLIS program, was how advanced the Shermer High School library was. Hopefully adding to what Jenkins (2006) calls the “Collective Intelligence” of media […]
Everyone gets naked every once in awhile. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you’d have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you’d be buck naked? Even if you’ve got nothing wrong or weird with your body and how many of us can say that? You’d have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most […]
Note from Michael: Carlie will be a Participatory Learning Guide for the #hyperlibMOOC this fall. She was a WISE student in my classes at SJSU SLIS. Her ideas below resonate with my teaching and views. Enjoy… As a recent LIS graduate I really don’t feel different, but looking back I think I had an exponential increase in library and life knowledge throughout the second half of my graduate degree. It’s been almost a year since I shared the promises of a then future librarian, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to share those of a new one. As a […]
Every ILS and database vendor at ALA Annual seemed to be touting their new flashy, single-search discovery tool that groups together all kinds of information sources in a list of search results. Discovery is the hot topic, and your library surely doesn’t want to be left out in the cold. The sales folks have been putting on the full-court press within higher education, and I assume also in public libraries. After leaving ALA, I just don’t get it. The hype doesn’t seem to match the impact. I struggle to see who these tools benefit. Who’s the Audience? Over the years, […]
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t” – Robert Benchley When I walk in to a library I can usually tell what type it is fairly quickly. I don’t mean public, special, academic, school, etc. but a library for stuff or a library for experiences. When I walk in to the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, IL it is obviously centered on experiences. When I go in to a museum library it is obviously about stuff. This isn’t to say that AHML doesn’t also have an […]
Yesterday morning (Tues 17th June 2013) I found myself at the Urbana Free Library, which is the focus of a lot of attention in library land at the moment. I count it as a professional privilege to have spent two hours with some of the most inspirational public library staff I have ever met. Here I offer a few observations and opinions based on my visit to the library. I’m travelling through the USA for the next two weeks on a VALA Travel Scholarship, investigating existing and planned projects where fibre-broadband rollouts affect libraries. The twin cities of Champaign and Urbana in Illinois […]
Johnson County Library contracted the services of Mindmixer for their strategic plan in March of 2013 and by April 9, 2013; the www.jocolibraryconversation.com site was live and active with input from members of the community. The goal was to expand the number of Johnson County citizens the library would be able to engage with during the strategic planning process. By May 15, just a little over a month from the launch date, 1,213 people visited the library site and in addition to responding to the topic questions, they submitted 117 ideas for the library staff and the strategic planning committee […]
In the last three months, I’ve been interviewed about information literacy by two students. One was working on her MLIS and taking her first instruction course. The other was working on a dissertation, and I was a participant in her study on information literacy programs. These interviews started me thinking about what I’d tell new librarians interested in information literacy instruction. Here’s my advice for new instruction librarians entering the profession: At least 50% of being a librarian is building connections with people. Instruction librarians thrive by connecting with faculty members and recognizing how they can help faculty members reach […]
Note from Michael: Elaine takes us through her work on the #transtech group project for Huntington Beach Public Library and connects to our course texts. i am happy to share this insightful reflection! This report outlines the unique experiences, challenges, and opportunities in developing a Learning 2.0 program for the diverse community served by the Huntington Beach Public Library. This project – called Links to Literacy – was accomplished virtually as a group assignment in Dr. Michael Stephens’s Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies course in Spring 2013. It involved seven learning technology modules aimed to introduce communication, job searching, […]