3 thoughts on “Learning Philosophy 2.0 Video”

  1. Karen Yarbrough Post author

    Phil-Thanks for the suggestions! I’ve used surveys in the past, and they’ve been fairly helpful for giving me a basic idea of the population. I still try to treat everyone as an individual, but having even a vague idea can make a difference of where to begin, especially with workshop sessions. Good point that people won’t sign up for things that they already know. That does weed out a bit of confusion for planning.

    Eunsung-Don’t worry so much! You’ll do great! We all have to reflect on our teaching and keep evolving, especially with technology always changing. We just have to try to do the best we can and come up with new ideas and challenges. Like my video, for example, I’d never vlogged before now, so a seemingly simple thing was a pretty big deal for me. I’d never even posted a video on YouTube, so that’s another new skill. All we can do is what we can do.

  2. Eunsung Amii

    Thank you for sharing your perspective. Since my undergraduate year, I always stuck on technology education as a technology teacher. For 12 weeks, I have been a bit worried about my position as an educator and about what I am going to do, how to be satisfied with my work. I appreciate your video too.

  3. Phil

    @Karen – I appreciate your description of the learning context that you work in, namely libraries, and how that differs from traditional classrooms. One of the most important differences you point to is how you, as a librarian, don’t typically enjoy the benefit of a sustained engagement or interaction with the student. Unlike teachers in regular classrooms who see and interact with their students on a regular basis for at least a semester, if not an entire academic year, you don’t have that benefit and so it’s more challenging to identify contextual factors that would allow you to make effective use of the technology. As you describe, you usually work with learning scenarios in one of two contexts: (1) one-on-one assistance, or (2) a specialized workshop or training session. That said, I would suggest a couple of possible approaches that your library already may be doing. Disseminating surveys (both online and off-) can generally give a rough idea of some of the general characteristics of your users; and so while you can’t necessarily use this data in your one-on-one sessions, it can help inform the development and design of technology-related scaffolds (e.g., handouts, web-based materials). Along these same lines, because it’s easy for people to forget, the library can promote these in a persistent way through email announcements on a regular basis and prominently displayed flyers around the physical setting. As incentives, there are also options of tossing the occasional promotion – e.g., gift certificates for books, software. Regarding the workshops … in this more directed teaching environment, you’ve of course, definitely got better opportunities for better understanding the audience because presumably, a student wouldn’t register for a workshop if it was something they already knew. For example, if it’s a workshop on how to use EndNote, then you can generally assume that only those who are interested in learning Endnote will register. But, of course, there can be signficant variations of knowledge within that group of students who register for the workshop. This can be a good opportunity for doing informal, insta-polls to get a general feeling for the range of skills or interest. For example, in the case of workshop on EndNote, you take a quick poll with some basic questions like — What is your academic major? Have you ever used an electronic bibliographic software tool? Are you completely new to EndNote, or have you played with it a little bit already? And in terms of technology, if everyone has a cellphone, you could use a very simple poll-taking software like polleverywhere

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