Learning Philosophy

 

For my discussion forum in my instruction class we had to define our learning philosophy and how do we define learning. Do we need to be able to explain? apply? Is it a change in knowledge? Capacity? The following is what I wrote, however this topic really has me thinking about how from the time we are born we never stop learning. There are just different levels and depth of learning or as I compare it to building blocks. Some people want to collect as many building blocks as they can while others are happy with just a few. Here is the following forum post I did:

Learning to me has always been a moving, dynamic, continuous progression. I am a visual learner, so I like defining learning by thinking of wooden building blocks. We learn by doing, reading, or having the "experts" (teachers, mentors, etc.) give us the tools or language that we need to succeed by engaging in the material that eventually form our building blocks. However, it is through reflection and inquiry that we strengthen our knowledge of the material. This is similar to the portion of the "Theory in Context" lecture in which the professor explained, "Building understanding through inquiry" where she discussed her own personal theoretical position. She also goes on to talk about providing the tools and language and building on the prior knowledge of the person who is learning. Therefore, I believe a transfer of knowledge does take place because when one is born they know nothing, but as they learn one builds on that previous knowledge. As the book, How People Learn states, "All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn" (2000, p. 53). Once somebody has been able to apply what one has learned the transfer of knowledge has taken place and the person can embrace that building block into their collection of knowledge to build upon. Therefore, by adding that block to one's collection one can build different things with the knowledge they have collected and that past knowledge will help them learn future things. By taking it one step further if the person is able to explain the concept or whatever is being taught to that person, they have taken another transformation. They have become an expert in that field and are now able to transfer that knowledge to others through mentoring and teaching.

My personal example of this transfer of knowledge would be going back to my learning map with Government Documents. (My learning map will be a post for another time) Even though I am self taught and need to spend more time reflecting and learning from experts, I have learned enough to have the basic learning blocks. My boss at work now wants me to explain and transfer that knowledge to train a co-worker how to process Government Documents.

In summary learning to me means one has gained enough knowledge to increase their number of building blocks and can apply these building blocks to accomplish what they set out to learn.

So, how do you define learning? Is it a transfer of knowledge? Does my building block metaphor make sense? Is there a difference between application and explaining?

Elevator Pitch

I’ve heard it from a few different professors and others professionals, that for networking and other purposes we should have an elevator pitch ready to go. Basically, no matter what profession we’re in this is something we should think about and have it ready. Do I have one? Nope.

However, when talking with my classmates a couple of weeks ago it was brought up that if librarians had better elevator speeches then maybe we would have a better image and people would realize that we’re not outdated and not useful anymore because of the Internet. (This came from a couple of us that work in libraries that we had trouble telling people what we do for a living. I have also noticed that even some librarians I know have trouble telling people. I’ve also seen that people tend to call anybody who works in a library a librarian, so that might be its own issue.) The biggest thing I get when telling people that I’m in library school is, “Isn’t that a dying profession”. I think in this case an elevator pitch would be perfect. 

For those who don’t know an elevator pitch is simply, what you do and why it’s important in 30 seconds or less. It’s mainly selling yourself in the time it takes an elevator to go from one floor to the next because you never know who or when you’ll run into potential employers. I have meet people on the airplane or waiting for the train or airplane. To make it in any career field we need to constantly be on our toes and at the ready because interviews could happen anywhere.

So, do you have an elevator pitch? What do you think is important to put in one?

Group Projects for School

The one thing everyone warned me about before starting library school was that I would be required to work in teams or do group work a lot. For my Library 203 class I had to listen to two lectures about teamwork and how to be successful when it comes time to work in teams. It was quite interesting I learned that the basic reason for people to fear or worry about teamwork is lack of control. Every reason given came back to the lack of control people feel. I can understand this feeling as that is what my concern usually is. I worry about others affecting my grade and wasting my time. However, learning to work as a member of team is an important skill to have to be successful in most career fields. One of the lecturers was Enid Irwin and he said, “You start your career when you start your classes”. Which I think a lot of people don’t think about, when entering grad school, you want to do well in team work and in your classes because your classmates and professors are potential colleagues or people who are doing the hiring. So, how to be successful in a team?

Both lecturers, Dr. Ken Haycock and Enid Irwin addressed ways of being a successful team member. The first is making sure you approach teamwork with a positive attitude; they both mentioned how this is important and can set the mood for the group and help a lot. Dr. Ken Haycock went into more detail by outlining questions you can ask yourself to prepare. I thought this was very important to figure out what you bring to the team. The following is taken from his PowerPoint presentation:

·         What strengths do I bring to the team?

·         What behaviors of other members of the team really “push my buttons”?

·         What are the implications for how we work together?

·         How do I modify my preferences for the sake of the team performance?

He didn’t list it, but he also mentioned knowing your weakness is a good thing. For example I know my strengths are I’m comfortable with technology and have a lot of good ideas. One of my weaknesses is that I’m a procrastinator, but really good with deadlines. So, I would inform the group that putting deadlines at least for my projects would be a really good idea. Behaviors that “push my buttons” would be if were scheduled to meet and your late. I think it’s important for you to know what you’re bringing to the team, so you can contribute in a helpful way.

The second strategy for success is planning and so many things fit under this. A lot of times teams will just jump into the assignment without thinking. It’s important to step back, get to know each other, determine what your goals are, how you’re going to accomplish what needs to be done and clearly define roles and responsibilities. Planning is a major step that most teams forget because they’re so eager to just get the assignment over with or they have a poor attitude about doing teamwork. I’m grateful that San Jose State University has everyone go through this because than hopefully all my classmates and I will be on the same page. Hopefully. Still nervous about the whole teamwork aspect, but not as nervous.

Skills for Online Success

In my library 203 class, Online Social Networking, one of the units we cover is if online courses are right for you and how to succeed in the online classroom. Some people think online learning is easier and just requires the right computer. This is not true especially if you want to be a successful online student. I took a quiz to see if online learning was right for me and the quiz said I was ready. However, when I started reading over the skills required to be successful, I could pinpoint exactly where my weakness and strengths are.

My strengths would be I’m very comfortable with technology. Technology has been a big part of my life for a long time, so it’s basically second nature to me. I’m comfortable with interacting with people online and feel that I have strong communication skills. I’m self-motivated because library school is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I will admit that sometimes after a long day it’s hard to muster up the motivation. I can be self-discipline when I want to be it just hard to come up with it unless there is deadline coming up. I’ve never been good at getting things done early. I always get them done on time.

Now my weakness or what I consider my gray area would be time management and organization. I have both of these skills it’s just I get busy or lazy and forget to use them. When I do use them (and I’ve been getting better at using them) I’m very successful with accomplishing things. The biggest weakness I have is procrastination  I have tried beating it out of me, but it’s very engrained into me.

Because I’m aware of my strengths and weakness I’ve started implementing things I learned from this unit and things I figured out on my own to be successful. Three tips that I have used for success are: designate regular intervals, create a desktop folder and create a browser folder. I created a folder in my Dropbox that is separated out into a folder for each semester, with a folder for each class. I took my netbook and made my classroom (D2L – Desire to Learn) the homepage along with bookmarking all the other important San Jose State library pages. The one thing I still have to do is set-u p a calendar. I also have learned that my house has to many distracts and have a designated library I go to for studying.

Hopefully by putting all of this into practice,  and organizing myself a bit more the first semester, I will be on my way to being very successful in school. I’m always looking for tidbits on improving my time management and organization skills along with battling the procrastination bug, please share in the comments any tips.

A New Adventure: Library School

Well, next week begins my adventure into grad school.  It’s hard to believe I made it to this point. As some of you know after about a year, definitely two years, of working at the UND’s (University of North Dakota) Chester Fritz Library I was sure that Library Science was for me.  Life got in the way and finally last year I finished my Bachelors of Science in Public Administration which paved the way to start library school. I will be attending San Jose State University online starting on January 23 although one class has already started. I’m excited and nervous all at once and just this ball of energy.

My goals while in grad school is to keep improving my organization techniques and to hopefully defeat my procrastination and of course learn all about libraries, information and all sorts of awesome things because I love to learn.  So, I have improved some of my study habits, but suggestions are always welcomed. Although studying does sometimes lead to this:

But I don’t think that can be helped. I will be blogging along the way about things that excite me, things I learn, papers I’m writing and anything that strikes my fancy about libraries. (And sometimes general life type things)

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Working on my next talking point. In the meantime enjoy this informative library video on what a library contains.




Brought to you by Sesame Street and the letter C, because C is for cookie and that's good enough for me.

What's in a Name?

I’m addressing the name of this blog and not naming in general. I would like to tell you that after hours of brainstorming trying to decide what name would work for talking about general library things and then occasionally going off on a rant about something else here or there. And something that would work for me to post reviews on and something I could use in the years to come, it just popped into my head and I thought to myself you’re a genius! But nope it didn’t happen that way…

I had a list of library jargon and attempts at different names took it home and showed to my husband as I was laying there babbling on about what I want to do, a smile came across his face as he was looking at my brainstorming, the kind of smile that says I have what you want. He said, “Interlibrary Litanies” and my immediate thought was I love it. Then he wanted twenty dollars and I told it wasn’t going to happen, but I will give him credit.

For those of you who may not know it’s a play on Interlibrary Loans (ILL), which is a great way for libraries to make accessible a lot more books and information to their patrons.

So, thanks Rob for the name to get me started on this journey of blogging! Although this makes me wonder since I was waiting for my muse to inspire me and it was Rob who did, does that make Rob my muse?