Head Tale

Sherri Vokey: Digital Services Librarian – Faculty of Information Studies – University of Toronto
contact | sherri.vokey@utoronto.ca – 416-978-5768 | aim/iChat – sherrivokey [at] mac.com

This is a sort of timely e-mail to receive (thanks Gord!) as I just stumbled across the blog for 757 – Social Software & Libraries.  One of that classes' first assignments was to create a blog and the instructor has linked to all of the blogs from the course page to encourage the students to realise that they're part of the blogosphere (which is cool.) 

But clicking through and reading some of them, I think she may have made the same mistake that many people teaching these types of courses do – namely, defining what the students must post rather than encouraging them to post whatever they want. 

If all that students post are assigned responses to readings and other coursework, blogging is going to feel like homework and nobody is going to continue doing it after the class is done (which should be at least part of the goal of a course like this.) 

Not to mention that instead of having original, readable blogs, you have this homogenous mass of blogs that are all talking about the same thing which sort of defeats the purpose as far as I'm concerned. 

I look at the list of people in the class and see people with interests in esoteric philosophy, medieval history, Russian culture not to mention those with knowledge of specialized areas of librarianship (one whose mother is a medical librarian and would likely have lots of insight into the profession, many who've been on co-op and could share their experiences on that, etc.) 

I'm sure the instruction didn't restrict them to only writing about their coursework but if that's what is assigned, that's likely all a person will have the time to do.  I think a much better solution would be to tell the students to come up with an original theme for their blog (it could be specific, it could be as general as “what's happening in my life”) and make that the subject of their weekly post (along with the occasional response to the readings/posting of coursework to achieve the learning goal of making them think about the role of/problems with social software.)

How's that for a mini-rant?

Classmate of the Day: Barb very generously offered me a ride to Word on the Street in Kitchener-Waterloo tomorrow.  I'd been planning to attend in Toronto all year since I used to be a board member of WotS Calgary and wanted to see what the “big guys” did.  (In fact, my ambitious plan was to organize a rental van or even a bus trip to take intereste students.  If it was first semester, I might've pulled it off but as I mentioned, third-semester Jason is stretched too thin as it is!)  But pending assignments, the expense to go to TO for a single day and a few other things all factored into making me decide not to go. 

Still, I was glad to have the offer of a ride to the much closer festival with a local and am looking forward to seeing the KW version. Kathy Stinson is reading, there's a celebrity spelling bee and a handwriting analysis tent plus there's even a panel on blogging that I should probably go take in so I know what I'm talking about when I go on my mini-rants!