Our friends across the river have come up with a nifty video about their library. Fun!
Learning in Libraries and Loving It
Our friends across the river have come up with a nifty video about their library. Fun!
School starts on Monday, and with it comes a brand new set of graduation requirements for all first year students. The new requirement that most affects me is the required Argument and Inquiry seminars that all first year students take in their first term at college, and this seminar includes the first cross-curricular mandatory information literacy requirement we’ve ever had.
Obviously I’d think this is a good thing. But what I hadn’t realized was what I’d find most good about this good thing: the major pay-off of this new requirement may be the conversations I’ve had with several faculty in the last couple of months as they develop their A&I seminars for this fall. Just the fact that the seminars are new and that they’re a little intimidating to teach means that we’ve felt at liberty to completely mess with “normal.”
“What if we do away with the ‘library class,'” I ask, and they don’t look at me like I’m growing horns. They say, “What would that look like?”
Another professor came to see if I thought she was completely bonkers for wanting me to come in 4 or 5 times for 15-20 minutes each rather than just once, and I could say “Not at all! Here are the kinds of ways we’re doing that with these other classes.”
And these are professors I’ve never worked with before and professors I’ve worked with consistently over the years — creative and thoughtful professors, all — but it feels totally different because we’re both pretty uncertain about how we’ll make these seminars work. We’re brainstorming and upending the status quo with wild abandon, and nothing feels taboo. And sometimes we settle back on a format similar to the more normal class: assignment-specific instruction for 50 minutes. But when we do, we do so with more confidence that this format suites the course’s learning goals rather than just being What We’ve Done Before.
4 CommentsI haven’t written as much here in the last two years as I did in the years before that. Part of that is because most of the conversation happens on FriendFeed these days, part of that is because I’ve been sick the whole time. I have all kinds of post stubs in my drafts that I just didn’t have the energy to flesh out into real posts with, you know, full sentences and maybe a paragraph break.
In that time many of my favorite blogs have petered out, a few have blown up, and a couple people whose opinions I respect a lot have told me that blogging just isn’t worth it any more, that they kind of wish people wouldn’t keep throwing posts into the void. And for a while I was inclined to agree and acknowledge that it’s perfectly likely that people see Pegasus Librarian pop up in their aggregators or on FriendFeed and think “Aw man, her again? Doesn’t she know she’s boring? *mark as read*”
But lately I’ve felt more and more like posting mundane little things here again, and maybe soon I’ll start working through a few of the more promising post stubs from the dark period of the last two years. For me, worrying about the death of blogging and worrying about whether anyone cared that I post here seems to have been more tied to my feelings about other things in my personal life than it was to the actual act of posting here. For me, realizing that I care again that I own and archive my thoughts, that I’m ok with this not being a conversation space if conversation doesn’t happen, and that it matters more that I have a thinky space for me than that I have one for anyone else — these things are all making me feel less like I’m clinging to nostalgia or that I’m in denial whenever I post. When FriendFeed dies, I still want to have access to some of my thoughts.
Of course, I say this just as Fall Term is about to start, so there’s no telling when I’ll have time to write much. But you never know.
8 CommentsStanding in the coffee line this morning, a cheerful first year student turned to me and asked, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Thinking it highly unlikely I told her I’m Iris, one of the librarians here. Her already animated face did backflips over itself in her excitement: “You were teaching with the professor when I visited a linguistics class as a prospy last year!!”
I’m facing a busy, busy day, and I’m kind of nervous about it, and my socks chose this day to be the one where they sink further down into my shoes with every step and clump painful under my instep, and my whole body aches from all the running around that’s involved in new student week and preparations for classes. But this one first year student was interested enough in what I had to say nearly a year ago that she remembered my face today. I love that.
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