The Internet is Down: How to Succeed in an Unexpectedly Low Tech Classroom

Image supplied by the WOC in Tech Flickr

I recently did a blog post for The Ohio State University Libraries Teaching & Learning blog, giving some tips, and new practices to bake into your habits that can help you when you run into the worst case scenario, flaky internet, your database being “down for unexpected maintenance” right when you are ready to demo, or the internet just plain going out.

Check it out here https://u.osu.edu/tlmaterials/2019/02/08/the-internet-is-down-how-to-succeed-in-an-unexpectedly-low-tech-classroom/

Eblip9 - A Takeaway

A couple weeks out, I'm glad I jotted down an afterthought.

The realization that thrilled me the most,

Evidence Based Librarianship 

=

Anthropological Based Librarianship

My undergraduate degree focus was Cultural Anthropology. The many facets of culture were and still are fascinating to me, and my consistent insistence that librarianship needs more data driven results is directly related to the anthropological studies I did in undergrad. Although not considered a hard science, there is far more to anthropology than " I saw someone do x, all their culture must do it!". 

An anthropologist must know their own biases before they start, as a human it is about impossible

The semester is at a close, and I would love to throw numbers at you...

But I have only a few that matter right now.

A year and 5 months in a new state, 2 positions held, 54 class sessions in this Fall semester, 50 this past Spring semester, all across 4 campuses, and 1 ACRL Immersion program completed.

While I have physically recuperated from fall, I'm still working on spring, and I still have a firm lingering mental fog. I have interacted with every single new freshman in some way these past two semesters for one side of the house. This is HUGE. More faces know and wave at me, more than I can possibly remember (but I try!).

Now comes the summer, which for me is a second to catch my breath and start to reevaluate how I am teaching. Deja vu right? This happens every summer, time to create new learning objects, Time to really compartmentalize my teaching modules, and of course time to work on some unique course specific projects.

But back to the learning objects, for me it is really time to flesh out and complete a big one this summer for our first years. I want them on a more level playing field with two basic things, keyword searching and web  source evaluation. I am really digging into LibWizard to manipulate it beyond its original means and make it SHINE. I have poked and prodded it and wondered WHY, and then found ways to make it do it regardless. I was fairly disappointed that you could create conditional logic in a quiz, but for some reason not in a tutorial & assessment. I realized I then had to bake a tutorial into a quiz or a quiz into a tutorial, and yet still somehow keep the accessibility and general all around user friendliness of the object, not an easy task. This is worth of an entire post, and one will come later in the summer when my object is closer to completion.

The true test will come once I have this in front of our students and let them loose on it.

 The one thing that makes this mountainous task just feel like a really large hill is that I just completed the Teaching with Technology (TwT) ACRL Immersion. Four great team leads, some of the most thoughtful readings I have ever had assigned... and a huge gap in my education has been filled. I know more terminology to speak about things I have been doing, understand the why's behind many of the things I've been doing anyways, and have more tools to guide my object creation process in a more deliberate manner. I think it has made all my actions when it comes to learning object creation more deliberate, with enduring mental post-it notes keeping statements lingering in my head as I work.