Tag Archives: online course

Preparing for the next several weeks

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I’m not sure why this is true but every year around this time life speeds up to hyperspeed and I wonder how on earth I will ever make it through. That’s the main reason why I haven’t posted much lately; I am rather overwhelmed.

One thing I’ve spent time on this weekend is preparing for my upcoming class for the LEEP program at UIUC GSLIS. I love teaching the course but it is a lot of work to prepare for it and to figure out how to make it fresh and new each time. And there is always room for improvement.

Then there is the online course I agreed last Fall to create for NASIG. That is due sometime in July. But even before that I need to complete preparations for my presentation at the upcoming NASIG conference in the second week of June. I’ll actually be co-presenting with friend Sarah Morris and we’ll be talking about managing electronic resources in special library settings.

All work-related projects seems to implode upon themselves at this time as well, and I am scrambling to keep up with lots of stuff there, too. One of my staff members left for greener pastures in March and he is strongly missed!

Sometime soon we will be going on a mini-vacation to do some fishing and enjoy the outdoors so that is something I’m really looking forward to. In addition, Keegan will be out of school soon.

This morning we went to church and I’m glad (as always) that we did, because we received refreshment and encouragement there. This afternoon we went to a few stores and mostly drove a bit in the countryside just north of us over the border into Wisconsin.

The next several weeks will be quite hectic but I know that our Heavenly Father will meet all our needs. Along that same vein, would you please pray for some people in my extended family and friends? My sister-in-law’s brother and his youngest son (age 11) suffered severe injuries and burns in an accident a week ago or so. They and their family need all the support and care they can get. Also, someone I wrote about some time ago, John Fawcett, who has battled a recurrence of cancer for several months, has decided to not continue any treatment. I imagine this means that he could die at any time and I know his wife and young children also desperately need prayer at this time.

Proposing an online course for NASIG

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Last week, Valerie Bross, co-chair of this year’s NASIG Continuing Education Committee (CEC), asked for proposals for CEC funding for the coming year.  I decided to submit a proposal for creating a pilot online course focusing on best practices and case studies for e-resources management.  I don’t know yet if it will be accepted or if it will emerge with a different focus, but I am excited about the possibility of helping to provide an excellent, inexpensive, dynamic, topically relevant online course for the benefit of NASIG.

The landscape for developing an online course has changed quite drastically in the past few years.  Meredith Farkas and colleagues, rightly famous for their excellent work on the Five Weeks to a Social Library online course, demonstrated emphatically that great value can be provided with little direct cost, using existing tools such as Drupal.  I think this is an exciting time and developing or possibly working on something like this fits well with my ongoing love of teaching.

Behind the scenes

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I was excited to read about a Flickr photoset of pictures taken of various areas within technical services at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan.  (Seen via librarian.net.)  This photoset provides a lot of insight into how books and other material are received and processed in technical services in a large library.  Having taught a course in technical services librarianship, I am well aware of the utility of this kind of picture collection.  Most of the students who take my course have never worked in technical services and don’t have much of an idea what technical services is.  The class I’ve taught in the past is an online course and one of the biggest drawbacks to an online venue is the inability at times to give students “hands on” experience.  This is particularly the case when teaching  technical services.  In UIUC GSLIS’s online curriculum (LEEP), each class has only one opportunity to meet together in person, called an “on campus day.”  Usually for a portion of that day, I schedule a tour of UIUC’s Main Library technical services operation.  Feedback from students has shown that this firsthand look at technical services is tremendously helpful.

Surely the next best thing would be to show and discuss this photoset in class or have students look at it on their own.  That would go a long way toward demystifying some of the physical aspects of this area of librarianship.  I’d love to see more such photosets crop up on Flickr or elsewhere.  Folks, let’s shed light on technical services in libraries of all sorts!  Bring “the back room” out into the open!  I think a lot of people, including our library users, would find such exposure fascinating and insightful.

Teaching an online course

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Today is a sad and troubling day because Michele and I heard from my mom that my sister-in-law, Linda, is very sick again and hospitalized for intense pain in her stomach region. She spent two weeks in hospital about four months ago for similar pain and had an operation to clear up intestinal adhesions. Now we wonder if that really is the problem or not. She is in surgery as I write this and we are praying for her and my brother Tim, as well as their children. Fortunately Linda’s parents are over here from Great Britain and staying with them right now. I’m regressing into feeling worse again with this cold or whatever it is, and it looks like Tristan has come down with it, too, judging by his runny nose and general crabbiness. Today I accepted an offer to teach a course this fall as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science in their distance education curriculum, known as LEEP. It’ll be a great experience but it scares me to death as I’ve never done something like this before. Just the thought of developing a syllabus is awfully intimidating!