Blogging in the Liberal Arts Classroom

"Barbara Ganley has posted her complete BlogTalk paper titled 'Blogging as a Dynamic, Transformative Medium in an American Liberal Arts Classroom' which, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic and articulate reflection on her successes using Weblogs in the classroom. It's another great resource for teachers of all levels...." [Weblogg-ed News]

Will is right that this is an interesting read. I particularly like this quote of a quote (that Will also pulled) about NetGens:

"Arguing that 'the world has changed; the classroom has not,' she notes that schools continue to ignore the social aspect of learning that Weblogs offer to a generation that is increasingly familiar with the digital commons, moreso than their teachers. She has a great quote from James Duderstadt:

'They expect--indeed, demand--interaction, approaching learning as a 'plug-and-play' experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially--to read the manual--and instead are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation...They learn in a nonlinear fashion, skipping from beginning to end and then back again, and building peer groups of learners, developing sophisticated learning networks in cyberspace. In a very real sense, they build their own learning environments that enable interactive, collaborative learning, whether we recognize and accommodate this or not.' "

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If your library's strategy is to answer these kids' reference questions by sitting behind a desk and waiting for them to walk up to you to ask them, you will be answering a small fraction of their questions. You have to meet them in their world, and increasingly this will mean via IM, SMS, and online, synchronous reference.

"Take a look:

http://sjcpl.lib.in.us/asksjcpl/asksjcpl.html

The site instructs our patrons :

Ask a question via a live chat session Monday through Saturday during the Main Library hours of operation. We have user names for AIM, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger. A professional librarian will gladly help you find the information you seek, be it in print or online.

For AIM, our screen name at SJCPL is asksjcpl.

For Yahoo!, our screen name at SJCPL is asksjcpl.

For MSN, our screen name at SJCPL is asksjcpl@hotmail.com

I am very happy our reference staff has jumped on the IM thing!!!" [Tame the Web: Technology and Libraries]

Cost of software used: $0.
Time spent on marketing materials: obviously quite a bit.
Time spent training staff: probably even more.
Saving thousands of dollars and being accessible via mobile phones: priceless.

And on a side note, check out this comment from Cheri Campbell about Ohio's statewide online reference service. They're using Skype to communicate with each other during their shifts - excellent!