While the webinar last week was fun and insightful (I believe it was my first one!) I would have liked us to have used a bit more of the options and functionality of elluminate. I certainly understand that our intrepid presenter might not have wanted to appear on screen, and I can relate. But not having really used the whiteboard, and not having the ability to see each other or speak to the presenter, the experience was reduced to a sort of conference call where one side couldn't speak but had to communicate through a chat box. In other words, a real conference call could theoretically have been just as fruitful, if not more. I do suppose the webinar saves on phone bills, and having our input in text form forced a sort of orderly manner and made it more possible to look back on previous comments.
Therefore, I think it will be interesting to see what folks do make use of when we do our own webinars. I think the voting functions especially could be very useful, and the whiteboard can be used to place helpful images that lend context to the discussion. I also hope most of us choose to be visible via web cam as I think it does add to the experience, and happy, confused, and slapping icons that pop up next to your name on a long list aren't ideal for emoting. Again, I don't mean to lay our fairly vanilla experience at the presenter's feet as it was very gracious of her to talk to us at all, and it was helpful to hear a real live blogger/librarian's outlook on Harper Collins. Actually, I wish I would have thought about the webinar a bit more in advance and come up with more interesting questions.
Planning for this week's workshops has been pleasant enough, though much more uncertain than planning for book clubs. When I think "workshop" I don't tend to think "ethical issues" but rather explicit skill building or project demos. Those "workshops" that do cover ethical issues are often, in my experience, thinly veiled opportunities for the group holding the workshop to push their own ideas or agendas. This is something I hope to avoid in our workshop, and something that libraries obviously need to be able to avoid, especially if workshops are led by library staff. And while obviously the goal is to teach, it's challenging to wrap my head around the idea that I'm not teaching someone how to do something per se, but rather exposing a very complex question which has no one best solution. I suspect these workshops, as far as they're interactive, are going to be very dependent on the enthusiasm and willingness of participants to express ideas. So the goal for me seems to be to put people in as good a position as possible to do so.
I agree with you about elluminate, Brett. It was kind of weird for her to be able to see and not hear us, while we could hear and not see her. Since we're on the same workshop team, I can certainly empathize with your desire to get the participants to express their ideas :).
ReplyDeleteI think your discussion of the ethical issues in the one-shot workshop assignment for this class is interesting. I agree with you - it seems this would be a way for people to impart their ideologies on others. I think it was hard for Kara and I to think of ethical issues that would make good workshops so ours feels fairly borderline... our topic is on usefully organized resources in the library - something on which there is research but is also part of the ALA code of ethics. Kind of an interesting mix. It will be fun to see what others come up with to present and how they do so. I'll be keeping your post in mind....
ReplyDeleteI think it is often hard to keep our opinions out of ethical topics, and so presenting on such subjects can be difficult. I suppose all we can do is try our best, and learn from the feedback we get from participants. I hope that your workshop went well!
ReplyDeleteI think you have a point about agendas, but we had some groups who managed quite well. We had one on copyright, and it was really just a presentation on some of the copyright issues that might come up in a library, rather than the fairness or unfairness of copyright. Another group discussed how to handle requests for books to be removed. It wasn't completely neutral, but they did give good guidance on the best way to handle it, regardless of how we feel about the request.
ReplyDeletepersonally, i hope never to have to give a webinar where people are staring at my face but i can't see them back. what if you had food in your teeth or something? as for the ethics question, i hardly know how we can keep opinions out of such discussions. perhaps this is because i never took a philosophy class. but overall, ethics are super relevant to librarians. i actually wish we had a stricter guide to direct our actions in certain situations!
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