Maryanne Mills, Librarian
One student’s not-so-happy experience with an online class and some recommendations to faculty on how to prepare for the new semester.
This was an assignment for the Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning class from @One. I had to interview a student about their online experience.
A little history lessonThis is my first post as part of @One’s Reflective Writing Club. To give you a bit of history, I became a librarian during the heady days of CD-ROMs where thousands of documents could be stored on a disc. Boy, we in the information industry thought we were so cutting-edge back then! I accessed articles and reports stored on ancient databases where I used a 2400 baud modem to access content via IBM DOS machines. Millennials will have no idea what I’m talking about 🙂
I’ll never forget the day back in 1996 when Sun Microsystems came to my company’s parking lot in a gigantic walk-in trailer to show off a new tool called Java that was somehow going to transform the World Wide Web–at that time a bunch of static text-based pages. I did not get it. At all.
Fast forward a few years to the time when a friend told me a startup based out of Stanford University was looking for librarians to help them refine their search engine algorithm. It was a chance to get on the ground floor of something big. I declined–why take a chance on a startup when I had a decent full-time job that paid the bills? If I knew then what I know now, I would have applied to that scrappy little company called Google!
I doubt the above example is what @brocansky was thinking about when she created this Prompt #1 . OK, so I expanded on it a bit. What I can say is that I love being an instruction librarian at a community college. My job has kept me in constant learning mode on new trends in education technology. Over the years I’ve wedded my passion for helping people find stuff to helping them create stuff (think makerspaces, digital labs, learning commons). An EDUCAUSE Review article from 2014 inspired me to pursue this new role for librarians. The academic library of today is so much more than books and databases and I’m so excited to be a part of it. I’m also happy that I found this Reflective Writing Club because while I have had this blog for a while, I am horrible at keeping it current. I’m looking forward to networking with everyone in the club and learning from each other!
Write On.