Thursday, February 25, 2010

Working hard or hardly working?

Come by the CCHS Learning Commons and you will see a lot of students, doing a lot of stuff. Are they working hard, or hardly working? Two recent blog posts had me thinking about this.

New tools are replacing the familiar, and work looks different. With students what might look like messing around on Facebook may actually be very valid work.

As an example, in Jenica Rogers post, Attempting Elegance, she reflects on transliteracy as literacy in using new media. She was pulling photos off her iPhone and communicating on Facebook and Twitter during a seriously busy day. Why? She was studying her library's  Facebook presence because they are "about to use it as a reply venue for our lobby’s suggestion board". She was Twittering a source regarding assessment data. All work, all important, and these are the tools that are most efficient for her and the stakeholders she works with.

Stephen Abrams writes in his blog, Stephen's Lighthouse, about building relationships as being of primary importance to libraries, and perhaps more relevant data than circulation statistics. Harder to quantify as well. "...the foundation of library relationships is communication – one to one and one to many. It’s not really what we measure a lot – circulation. And it’s not easy to measure."

We need to be doing more with these communication methods  in the CCHS Learning Commons. We will definitely be creating a Facebook Group as well as a Twitter feed. Our wiki portal will be updated to include a photo stream from our account for images of the work and fun we experience daily.  So if you see us typing away on Facebook, you might think we are hardly working, but we will be working very hard to build our relationships with students and staff through these dynamic communication tools. Just like our students.

Photo Credit:
Abram, Stephen. Stephen's Lighthouse. 2.25.10
The Foundation of Library Relationships
http://stephenslighthouse.com/2010/02/24/the-foundation-of-library-relationships/

via
The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian's Weblog

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1 Comments:

Blogger Susan Erickson said...

I think today's "work" looks a lot different than yesterday's "work". It's kind of like "this isn't your father's Oldsmobile." I love that the new foundation of libraries is communication, rather than the quiet, sterile atmosphere when I was younger. Good questions to ponder.....

February 25, 2010 at 8:35 PM  

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