Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Misfire: Library Instruction Workshop notes

On Monday I attended a conference with my new laptop intending to test out Google Docs for notes because I don't feel like activating Office 2007 on it quite yet, if ever. We had to switch from a classroom to a computer lab midway through the conference, and I was suddenly delighted with my decision: no having to connect my laptop (don't you hate juggling limited desk space with an existing computer?) to seamlessly continue with my notes!

The conference was entitled Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop that was very useful to me for my evaluation role at work. While my assessment focus (without the hatchets) is not exactly along the lines of the academic librarians that made up the majority of the conference, it was refreshing to voice some of what goes on in my brain and find that no one else has easy answers or solutions to what I'm running up against either. I received some terrific ideas regarding concise pre-assessment measures as well as evaluation factors midway through a class that I think (hope) will lead to better online instruction for the classes I teach.

While I was formatting my Google Docs notes to post as a website, I accidentally misfired them straight to my blog and it published without title, proper formatting or warning. Oops. I removed them immediately and I don't think it hit RSS feeds. If it did, I apologize for that bit of randomness. If you're interested in library assessment, I encourage you to read my notes the way they are intended and check out the resources. I'm probably not going to flesh them out more than the outline but am happy to elaborate if you have questions. Kudos to the planning team for a great session!

2 comments:

Alison Aldrich said...

It did hit my reader, but that's okay. Very useful!

Nikki Dettmar said...

Thanks for the feedback Alison! At least now I (and others) know that publishing straight from Google Docs to blog isn't a good move if I want to include a title and introduction, as I did for this post.