Week 10 - Embedded Librarians and Webinars

With just a few weeks left in the semester we are entering the homestretch!

How People Learn Ch7 -
The chapter begins by reminding us that effective teachers tend to have both subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.  The chapter then goes on to give examples of teachers in math, history, and science who demonstrate these qualities in their classroom.  I have heard before (both from some here at SI, as well as other educators in my life) that good teachers can teach anything.  Since HPL argues otherwise, I would be interested to hear from those who disagree and have a bit of experience in the classroom. 

My main takeaway point is the importance of not just understanding what students need to learn and how they can best learn it, but also the importance of identifying the types of barriers they are most likely to face. What struck me about the examples provided in HPL is the importance of knowing your learners.  This is something that I think takes time to develop, requires a few iterations of teaching the same topic to similar learners, and emphasizes the need to assess what works well and what does not. 

Embedded Librarianship -

• "The Embedded Librarian Online or Fact-to-Face: American University's Experience" - Matos, Matsuoka-Motley, & Mayer (2010)
• "Online Webinars! Interactive Learning Where Our Users Are: The Future of Embedded Librarianship" - Montgomery (2010)

These articles both discuss models of embedded librarianship, as well as the value of webinars as a tool of the embedded librarian in an academic library.  Last semester I also did research on the importance of embedded librarians in serving distance education students, and during my reading I found webinars were mentioned quite frequently.  It seems one of the major benefits to embedded librarianship, in any form, is the opportunity for the librarian to become a member of the community which they serve.  In connection with ideas in HPL, from an instructional stand point this is very beneficial because the librarian would become more aware of who their learning population is and what students need to learn.

One of the major barriers I see to implementing an embedded librarian programs is whether or not a library has the necessary resources.  If an institution is sending librarians to "live" in the departments they serve (either physically or virtually), this means they must have the resources to staff both the "embedded" posts as well as positions in the main library.  When considering institutions that do not have this capability, I wonder if webinars can be particularly helpful for them.  For instance, this summer I will be interning part-time at a community college which has only two full-time professional library staff members to serve nearly 8,000 students.  They clearly cannot have "embedded librarians" in the traditional sense and have mentioned that they cannot provide instructional sessions to many courses as it is now.  I am not sure of the scale on which webinars can be given, but perhaps if many classes can attend at once or if a session can be taped and replayed for other classes, they could be a valuable alternative to institutions low on resources (time, money, staff, etc).


Preparing for Webinars - 
In preparation for our own webinars, I viewed an archived session from "Education Week" titled "Using New Media to Enhance Student Learning."  The webinar featured two speakers - an education researcher and a high school teacher - who presented ideas for using "new media" mediums (videos, websites, blogs, etc) in primarily K-12 language arts and English classrooms.  The topic was particularly interesting considering our previous discussions about information literacy and "transliteracy."  I also thought the format of the webinar itself was well done - a host introduced the webinar and gave participants "housekeeping information," then each speaker presented for about 15-20 minutes with slides shown in the webinar window, and the remaining few minutes were used to answer questions.  

The webinar also did not use a "chat" feature, per se, but did have a feature where participants could submit their questions privately and these questions were then shown in the main webinar window as they were answered.  I think I'm going to be in the minority on this, but I really preferred this model to a more traditional "free-for-all" chat.  I think it is important for participants to have the opportunity to ask questions and interact with the presenters (through polling, etc.), but during our in-class webinar I was really distracted by the participant chat and as a presenter I would be even more distracted.  This is one of the biggest decisions to make when planning our upcoming webinars - how do we best use the available tools to best our audience? 


[Edit -I subscribe to the ACRL ili-listserv (the Information Literacy Instruction discussion list) and in the last three days there have been two conversations which have specifically mentioned uses of Elluminate in libraries.  Looks like we're on the right track!]