Webinar Reflection

Webinar Performed

My group wondered what there is to be learned about users' copyright in social media. My original interest was in proper attribution when sharing through a social service, but the topic morphed into "protecting your own copyright on social media services." It turns out that when the product is you, what you put into the service becomes part of the service. We discovered, when we put our three independently-researched sections together, that our webinar was in danger of being repetitive; in the case of social media, the terms of service you sign grant that service a license to proliferate anything you post and use it in any way they might see fit in relation to the service. I think we did a decent job catching this and differentiating the focus of our sections, but in the future, structural planning should take place once more information has been collected.

We did our best to hold attention and encourage a bit of involvement with some token questions and chat interaction. Our slides weren't spectacular, though; we had more than a handful that were simply text, and even some screen grabs of more blocks of text. It took seeing a few webinars to realize that the general presentation worry of flipping through slides too quickly might not be so applicable here; when your audience is staring at a screen and not you, your animation can come through in what you show them. In my section, I used a bubble metaphor in my descriptions that would have made a nice visual, and been a break from all the text.

We learned a trick from one of the first groups presenting that was very handy toward the end; rather than wait for a long, silent stretch for someone to think of a question, we made up "write-in" questions to help us casually wrap up our takeaways.

Webinars Attended

I learned about enticing boys into the library, supporting school communities affected by budget cuts, reaching patrons outside of social media, and creative commons licenses. All were very interesting and informative, and I enjoyed the casual classroom effect I felt during the presentations.

I found that some groups didn't quite realize that visual appeal is important in holding the audience's attention; some slides had more text than those of my own group, and I found myself quickly finding other things to look at after realizing that each slide lasted for a few minutes of talking. Others did a wonderful job of finding interesting and relevant visuals to show me, which I appreciated.

I found myself wishing for subtitles in some cases. It's difficult to understand some of the heavier accents in our class; I'm wondering if not being able to see the speaker has an impact on my ability to identify their words?

Overall, it seems that there are some subtleties that my original assessment of "webinars are just long-distance one-shot workshops" glossed over. I realize that I learned about a few of these issues when discussing distributed computer-assisted cooperation last semester. People interact differently through screens; I wonder how different these webinars would have been if we hadn't spent a semester of class together?

Week 13 Reading: Professional Development on the Job

Our final bout of readings told tales of teachers and library employees learning important skills beyond graduation. This has a history of being accomplished at conferences and courses outside of professionals' paid hours, costing them plenty of extra money and time beyond an already-full work week.

Teachers in Wyoming enjoy a forward-thinking program that allows them to develop new techniques for teaching during contract hours. The program is run by teachers and perpetuated by teachers, and there are monetary incentives for mastering new abilities. There is strength in this program because of the ability for learners to see the skills they are hoping to acquire in action in others' classes, and because teachers are able to see improvement in their own students as they come to master a technique in their own classroom.

Blowers and Reed describe a two-part program for keeping library staff on the up-and-up of modern technology. Reed's core competencies in four tiers utilizes in-person workshops with library staff to teach them the basics necessary to keep working through routine technical issues at work. Blowers takes the education on through to web 2.0 technologies with a more relaxed, fun approach through blogging in "Learning 2.0." Those working through the weekly lessons have the option of completing bonus tasks and get the nice incentive of an MP3 player if they complete/learn all 23 "things" covered throughout the course.

Our own Prof. Fontichiaro effected an overhaul of Blowers' Learning 2.0 in order to introduce her own school's teachers to web 2.0. Her aim was to re-engineer the tasks for elementary teachers, incorporating appropriate services and ways in which her students could incorporate their new skills into their own classrooms. Kristein noted that some teachers were interested in taking a second stab at her course during a slower time of the year, or during a semester when they felt more refreshed (as opposed to beginning in the middle of the schol year).

I found that the first article sounded overwhelming to me, but perhaps this is because I have not been training to be a teacher. The second two readings presented a much more interesting concept to me; while I found none of the "things" or "explorations" beyond my own knowledge or capability, it was very good to see plans laid out for houw to teach the knowledge to others en masse. I have some experience showing others how to do this or that through my student job as a consultant, but long-term lesson plans are still new territory to me.

Week 12 Class: Following people, professionally

After what felt like a cacophonous struggle to sort out my custom Twitter list last week, I was grateful to discover that I was not completely alone in my sentiments when we discussed the exercise in class this week. Prof. Fontichiaro revealed that the exercise had first been assigned four years ago; fewer students had had previous experience with the service, and the service itself - the features, the networks, and the content of tweets in general - looked different in important ways. Many students in this class had accounts before the exercise, but the content of the new lists we created wasn't as simple and clear as the lists of four years ago might have been.

As I noticed before, there's the issue of the single stream of tweets from an account; not all topics from a fellow in the profession will be professional, as one might prefer as a follower. Some students mentioned that they had, for this reason, created a second account for their professional tweets. Perhaps I shall do the same if I ever enter a point of more frequent tweeting in the future.

Another thing that became apparent was the significance of Twitter's API; Twitter's native web interface is quite limited, something that several developers for both web and mobile have made apparent through the capabilities of their own products. I noticed that lists do not show retweets, but this is only true of the native web interface; Chris, with whom I reflected about the exercise, was not aware of the issue at all because such a shortcoming was not the case for her through her mobile app. Prof. Fontichiaro also showed how her web service of choice allows her to wrangle multiple accounts, subjects, and lists at a time, something impossible through the native site.

The discussion moved on to PLNs: Personal Learning Networks. These are the professionals and peers you follow or otherwise connect with in order to keep abreast of current issues and developments in your chosen career path. Ideally, you might be able to gain advice or feedback from a few of them on your own projects and ideas. This concept falls in line with the networking mindset, something I still need to work on; I tend to pay more attention to concepts and ideas, and it takes me longer to remember the names that might be prominent in relation to them. During the Twitter exercise, though, I did stumble across Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, and I recognized his name and institution when it launched officially on Thursday. Methinks I need to work on building and cultivating a PLN on my own time without the requirements and deadlines of a class assignment in order to get the best benefit.

Week 12: Twittersphere Librarian Aggregation

Oh Twitter. What a concept. I've had an account for a while, but I'm not sure I ever exemplified the ideal user as envisioned by the site's creators or administrators. I follow mostly friends, not too many accounts for groups or institutions, and I hardly ever follow those I haven't met.

I collected 26 accounts for my "liblist" information-focussed Twitter list. I spent so much time staring at users' quick self-descriptions; without opening the full page for each one, I judged whether or not I would find them relevant or useful. It was fascinating seeing the extent of enthusiastic librarians and archivists defining themselves as such in their profiles, but here was where the shallow nature of Twitter starts to lose me.

Not shallow in an intellectual sense, but shallow in terms of stratification and organization of subject. In a full blog, if the author chooses to post both professional and personal material, it can be sorted with tags or contextualized. With Twitter, I can inspect the account of someone who includes digital libraries in their introductory list of interests and find more about their coffee habit or disjointed, context-less commentary than library-related content or insight.

When I viewed my list, I discovered that Twitter lists don't show retweets. This serves to throw the mix of the stream of tweets even further out of balance; not only do some users tweet at a much higher rate than others, but some make liberal use of the retweet button, creating a discrepancy in the feed I viewed before adding the account to my list and that account's overall presence in my liblist.

Griping aside, collecting this list helped me to gain a sense of the Twitter library-minded presence/community. There are many librarians, archivists, and information/data enthusiasts writing, reading, and sharing tweets about current topics and life's little things. The topics seemed consistent with those touched on in the full blog review assignment, though tweeters can fire off more article links with minimal commentary.

With the required number of accounts to follow set so high, I feel somewhat at a loss to come up with truly coherent conclusions. The range of subject material, rate of original posting, shifting frequencies of posting, and the sheer amount of information available for me to read in just a dozen posts in my list makes the scope of the medium so wide that I almost can't dig in. I like the idea of tweets on their own, but attempting to take in many in a stream does indeed fit the metaphor of attempting to focus on individual birds tweeting in the forest; if I do manage to focus on one at a time, it is at the expense of my attention on the others. Following others is easy, but the cacophony of contribution is not for everyone or everything, and it might even take a trained reader to sort it all out at all.

Week 10 class: Webinars, webinars

Appropriately, we were to experience an introduction to webinars through both in-class participation in and admin screen observation of Professor Fontichiaro's demo-presentation. This didn't quite pan out; we waited patiently for a large part of the class period (during which we merely observed and interacted in the usual analog fashion) for an email invitation to the session which never came. We eventually achieved session attendance after the right link was posted on CTools, but those emails never arrived. After experiencing a similar silence from Blackboard Collaborate when signing up for the free trials we need for our upcoming webinar assignment using umich.edu addresses, we are reminded that technology still affords collaborators some odd and unexpected complications.

Aside from the common-sense considerations (watch your time allotment, make your slides nice, a video of your face talking is probably not worth it), the importance of facilitating participation was reiterated a few times. With a webinar, participants might be tempted to let their attention stray; keep viewers involved with polls and question-answering in order for both host and audience to get the most out of the session.

We closed with a discussion about embedded librarians, and pondered why most of the class has never visited ours during her open office hours. It turns out that we library school students feel pretty capable of finding information and understanding library resources on our own. It seems to me that the readings gave us all a pretty good idea of how she has great potential in our community, but we all feel too busy or self-sufficient to put effort into integrating her ourselves.