Lights, Camera, Action!
The advantage of podcasting and online hosted video is that these technologies enable Librarians to engage students using multiple learning styles: audio, visual, and print. Text based guides and materials, even when they are web based, are one dimensional. Video streaming expands the ways in which we can teach about information resources and search strategies. Learning is a dynamic and social process and video steaming is the closest replacement available for in person training and interactions. Whether we create stand alone videos, or utilize teleconferencing technology, audiovisual tools enable us to create better personal learning environments in the online world.
Librarians should try to create as many different learning opportunities and environments as possible in order to reach as many students as possible. This is not a technology issue for me as much as a teaching and learning issue: how do our students learn best? How can I make the instructional experience more personal, more approachable? What format will my students utilize and respond to? Creating online video is not another item on the to do list - it enhances everything that I have already been doing.
Information technology and online resources change rapidly. Tutorials and research guides have always had a short shelf life, regardless of whether they were born print or digital. So the excuse that video based instruction is more time consuming to update just doesn’t hold water. Right now, I can more quickly create a print based document than I can create a video. But with a little more practice, I bet I’ll be just as zippy at podcasting as I am with other software. I still have some stage jitters, but I’m ready for my closeup.
Speaking of streaming video, my favorite and inspirational video of the moment is a talk by Meredith Farkas, who is now is my new Library hero. Thank you Meredith!
Building Academic Library 2.0
“The Academic Library 2.0 conference will address the phenomenon of academic libraries taking affirmative steps to deploy technologies and services that facilitate users’ virtually instant connection to diverse sources of knowledge and information, as well as to help users directly contribute form and substance to those sources.”