Yesterday I considered Andrew’s suggestion that maybe it was counter-productive to have a separate “e-Services Librarian” position in libraries because it may give the message to other staff that they did not have to integrate things “e” in their workflow, If someone else is doing that then I don’t need to…
Kristina Alexanderson. (2012, June 23). T as in teaching Tech. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/7588800922/
Part of my job at the moment is teaching a unit called “Technologies for Information Services” to qualifying librarians, archivists and records managers. It is one of the first units in the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It makes sure all students are on the same page with their tech skills, that they get their hands dirty by doing a number of practical exercises, that they understand how to find out about new tech if they get stuck and that they know how technology is discussed and used in information services.
It means that my colleagues can be confident that students who go on to study in their units are competent with downloading and using software and have sufficient skills to deal with the tech covered in the units. It means that students who are returning to study after a career break (and this is a higher proportion in our department than others) are eased back into using technology.
But, but, but … I wonder whether we are taking up some of the course time with what should be a basic literacy that is the student’s responsibility, rather than necessary for us to teach. Whether by saying “this is what you need to know about tech” in one of the first units we are limiting student skills, rather than letting them experiment with tech applicable to each new unit. Having “done” the tech unit does this mean that they do not consider how new technologies fit in with the more-traditional library school subjects? Does it mean that my colleagues are less inclined to make sure students are developing their tech skills in other units because there is such little time to teach the other subject matter, and they can be confident that the students have “done” tech in my unit?
I tell potential students that to do well in the profession they need to understand and love working with both technology and people. I am 100% certain that technology should be an integral, core part of any professional qualification involving connecting people and information. I am not, however, 100% certain that the way to achieve this is in a separate, sequestered unit concerning technology, any more than Andrew is convinced that having a separate “e-Services librarian” is the best way to make sure e-Services are put front and centre of a library.
K. (2014, December 21). Teaching tech early, courtesy big brother. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/printthis/17188061100/
I see what my 12 year old is doing at school – using his iPad to film the coke and mentos experiments in Science and then comparing his footage with that of friends who did the experiment on a different day, playing it back in slowmo to watch the reaction blow by blow, superimposing a friend’s face over a still of the fizzy foam so that he looks like he has a hoodie on … and wonder what on earth I can teach the generation of undergraduates that will be in my class next year or the year after? Will they need the same confidence and competence building exercises? How will I be able to co-teach these students with the postgraduates who still use Internet Explorer and have never used Facebook or Twitter?
The scatter of competencies among students has changed in the five years that I have been teaching the unit. I have noticed far more on the “more competent” end of the spectrum, but the students who are unfamiliar with tech are still as puzzled and stumbling in the same areas as their counterparts were five years ago. I wonder whether we will get to a point where the page that I am trying to get all students on to is a little more advanced than it has been in the past, and if so, what that will mean for the less tech-confident students who most need to learn about technologies for information services.
If you are an employer, or a student who has recently completed an Information Studies course, I would love to hear your ideas. At the moment I am firmly sitting on the fence…
Interesting. We just deliberately pulled emerging technologies content out of other places and created an emerging tech unit.
I think the difference might be that we don’t teach them the tech. We teach them how to teach themselves tech and how to evaluate tech. We try to foster enthusiasm for tech and encourage students to learn by playing.
This doesn’t mean our students are using tech and learning tech in other units. They still learn SQL in another unit, HTML in another, multimedia production in another… It’s just that we have a place to deliberately teach the principles, values, and approaches in a systematic way. There are a whole range of issues around tech – social, economic, political, ethical and so on – that would get lost if we didn’t have a designated place in the curriculum to deal with them.
I also think libraries need specialists like eservices librarians. Not to do the grunt work, but to operate at a strategic level, work on policy, strategy, planning. I think we do need people who can champion projects and whose responsibility is to have a cohesive view of what’s happening in these spaces.
As they say in Pop Goes the Library, IT is everyone’s business. But we wouldn’t let a physical branch run without a manager, so why would we let an online branch run without one?
Hi Kate,
Out tech unit does provide the contextualization etc, and the thrust is “we are teaching for attitude not skills”… so the aimed outcome is that students will be fearless in the face of new tech, understand the language and concepts used to make sense of tech in their professional lives, be able to evaluate technologies strategically, know how to learn about tech, know how others make sense of tech … however there are still a large number of students who do not have the basic foundation technical skills (yet) to really build this knowledge.
My concern is that we have to go back to first principles for a significant number of our students. Like medical students cannot learn how to empathise with patients theoretically without fieldwork interviewing real patients (although at the Uni of Sydney students have apparently disagreed … http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-university-medical-students-invented-patients-for-assignments-20150605-ghgsy2.html), I don’t think information studies can understand the implications of asking an organisation to adopt a new technology without significant visceral experience of getting their hands dirty. The issue for me is how much we expect them to already have dirty hands and how much we provide the garden beds and seedlings…
Ok, this is interesting. Our students often come in *thinking* they don’t have the foundation technical skills, because they assume the bar is higher than it really is, but the reality is I could count on one hand the number of students I’ve taught in the last few years who really didn’t have the baseline skills.
I do wonder to what extent students self select for our course based on it being a Master of IT (or at least it was until this year – we now have a Master of Info Science). I get potential students saying ‘I’ve heard your course is very technology focused’ and I think that’s probably just a branding thing. In reality, it’s not, but it’s hard to sell that when it’s a major in an IT program.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that there’s such a difference in our cohorts. We should talk more about this.
I completed your course back in 2011, and I thought it was wonderful. In all likelihood I think I could have tested out of it (or whatever not doing the work is called) and just got the credit without doing the work. However, I found large chunks of the course so incredibly useful that I’m glad I didn’t. E.g. Zotero. I had loads of people telling me how wonderful Evernote and the like are all through my first degree. It wouldn’t have worked for me, ’cause they don’t run on my OS of choice (some GNU/Linux distro). Moreover, I didn’t have the ‘net at home, or a laptop, for my first degree. But Zotero, magic. Made my life so much easier!
My point being, just because I did know much of the stuff you were teaching, didn’t mean I knew it all. And just because I know tech, doesn’t mean I know all the useful tech there is.
The way I see it is, tech classes are still needed, even for those who grew up with tech. So many people don’t use styles or tab stops in their word processors. Yet, these two tools are so useful for ensuring a consistency of look in documents. I was taught these tools. The same with touch typing. Yes, it’s possible to learn touch typing without formal instruction. However, it’s easy with it. And once someone can touch type, they can touch type for life (same as riding a bike).
Please keep teaching skills and programs, even if not everyone needs everything you are teaching.
Hmmm, so the value is in having the time set aside and being asked to try specific areas of tech that you may not have tried before… that makes sense…
… I guess it means that I should aim to cover a very, very wide lot of tech and ideas…
Sadly I have had to remove the “everyone join Twitter and tweet in these 5 ways in the first week” exercise in the unit. We just don’t get allocated the time that was needed to mark this. The thing is, students over and over when asked to reflect on the task said “I thought I knew what Twitter was all about, I am tech literate, I hadn’t paid much attention to it or tried it out – but I now understand that it works completely differently to how I thought and that it has these added bonuses and these added problems that I just had not thought about before”… What I really, really liked about that was that, having experienced this in the first two weeks, students were then much, much more open to considering technologies from the point of view of someone who was not tech savvy; or were very happy to try out new parts of a tech and not pre-judge before getting their hands dirty. I am not actually sure how to create an equivalent kind of exercise with the resources I have any more…
Thanks for the positive feedback 🙂
Kathryn, we should talk about assessing this stuff because it’s bloody hard work but I think necessary. Next semester my unit will be a case study for a learning analytics project and I’m hopeful of finding ways to streamline assessment.