Week 5 Class Reflection

I am a rock, I am an iiiiiiiiii-i-island...

I really like the idea of engaging students with a "hook" as an introduction to a lesson. Our reading last week discussed this method in detail, but in class I began to understand how critically important this is. I saw a quote from Jeannie Fulbright posted on a teacher-friend's Facebook page, "If the purpose for learning is to score well on a test, we've lost sight of the real reason for learning." I don't necessarily agree with this faith-based, homeschooling mom's other views, but I think she hit the nail on the head with that bit of wisdom. I believe that I am a product of "teaching to the test". I can honestly say that I know just enough about most things to be a mild threat on Trivia Night, but I have no real expert knowledge on any topic. School never 1) taught me to think for myself, 2) encouraged me to transfer whatever knowledge of ideas or processes I might have to other contexts, or 3) prepared me for anything other than allowing me to get a pretty darn good score on the ACT. That pretty much pisses me off. Though I always enjoyed school, I never had a passion to learn. This is why it took me so long to figure out what I really wanted to be when I "grew up".

I appreciate what Jane McGonigal is doing- not necessarily because it involves gaming, but because she is focusing on transforming an activity that many people happily engage in for entertainment into something that these same people can learn from and help others with. She understands that learners must be passionate about what they are doing or the knowledge being presented to them will not be absorbed and transferred in order to create any meaning from it. Gaming is her "hook". I need to figure out what mine will be.

Our in-class bonus blog discussion was interesting. As we shared who we followed, I realized that all four blogs that I picked overlapped with other members in our cohort. Haha- what does this mean about me? Interesting. My biggest take-away from our talk was our question of who is the blogger blogging to? It used to be that bloggers had some sort of cache when not absolutely everyone was doing it. Check out this paper on the influence of early political blogs: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf

My favorite quote from the paper is “Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few.” (Katie Hafner, “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops,” New York Times, 27 May 2004). I totally agree with this, because for many, blogging is merely a method to "self-publish" in a manner of speaking- forget vanity presses. I have a friend who is blogging about greening your condo association with the goal of publishing his blog into a book- not really a mainstream topic of interest. I am his only follower so far... I think I'm the only one who has the link to his blog actually. Sometimes, as I followed my library land bloggers, I felt that I was the only reader of some of their posts as well. Again, librarians are not very good at promoting themselves, and though some like to think of themselves as "rock star librarians", they are only kidding themselves. I'm not saying that librarians' blogs don't have relevance in the blogosphere- far from that! I have found most of the blogs extremely interesting and informative, but we need to understand that we are a small part of a huge virtual world, and it will take more than blogging about issues in librarianship to other librarians to address real-life situations that affect our daily working environments and our futures.