As if "the dreaded one-shot workshop" wasn't enough, we're now moving on to the webinar. As far as I can tell, the webinar is a one-shot workshop, but distributed across locations and technologies, though it seems that more interaction is encouraged. I guess the webinar is meant to be more of a class than a presentation, but the teaching element was, I felt, just as appropriate in our fact-to-face sessions.
We read two articles from Public Service Quarterly about embedded librarians, who are assigned to exclusively to specific departments within academic institutions. According to Matos, Motley, and Mayer, the traditional model is placed (physically) into a department and meant to support the faculty and students in a variety of library-related ways, whereas the second model is a sort of distance-liaison, that department's sole point of library contact via a collection of communication modes (2010). The case study for the traditionally embedded librarian felt that her physical proximity to students and faculty allowed her to connect with and enrich her department (music) in ways that would have never been possible otherwise. The connected liaison case study librarian accounted the ways in which technology and different lines of communication had helped him to field questions, maintain a collection, and provide distance education for his business and economics department. It seems that face-to-face interaction with one's user base affords more complex relationships within one's department, but it is undeniable that technologies such as those developed for webinars allow librarians to reach today's users that may not be willing or able to visit a physical library or office.
We also read a chapter from How People Learn on effective teaching. The main points were that an effective teacher possesses knowledge both of the subjet area and the ways in which her students learn. Examples in history, math, and science emphasized the differences in effective teaching strategies between subjects, but what stayed consistent between all were the importance of subject principles and context within a student's own concept model, the greater concept map of the subject field, and life outside the classroom. Effective teachers understand how to engage students by eliciting and building on questions and held concepts from the beginning of the course. The takeaway for a librarian, who doesn't have a semester or year to build a lesson plan, might be the importance of gaining an understanding of a patron's current knowledge of a subject, and of communication in determining how to provide the best help in response to a question or in a workshop (or webinar).
I definately see the same similarities between the one-shot workshop and the webinar. Different mediums mean at least some different considerations will have to be made. For example, how to handle the absence of visual cues, such as facial expressions during the webinar.
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