Miss Me?

Classes started up again on Saturday January 30th. At the end of this semester I'll be half-way done! I'm taking 2 classes this semester: LIS 451 and LIS 488. Pardon me for speaking in Librarian. I will attempt to translate.
LIS 451 is also called Academic Libraries. What does that mean, you ask? The following is from the (daunting) 17 page syllabus, "This course surveys the development, current state, and future directions of community college, college, and university libraries. The focus will be on broad issues within a context that connects academic libraries within their parent institution and the broad context of higher education. Such issues include managing change, scholarly communication, publishing, information technology, advocacy, staffing, budgeting, public relations, policies, services, evaluation and assessment, planning, and higher education environment. The course approaches these issues from a systems perspective and the framework developed for ASERL. Prerequisite: LIS 407."

Our first class was the equivalent of a technological train-wreck. Our instructor is based in South Dakota. Yes, I said South Dakota. Our first class meeting was conducted via an on-line meeting using DimDim. It was horrendous. Future classes on-line classes will be conducted using Elluminate. We've been told this is better. I have high hopes. Fortunately we were able to divvy up the reading assignments for the first week amongst a group of 4 so instead of each reading approximately 200 pages we read about 50. Right now I'm researching a topic for the first paper (10 pages) which is due Saturday 2/20. In addition to reading 4 chapters and 2 articles for this week I'm reading at least 8 articles for the paper. Some of which are almost 30 pages long. YIKES!

LIS 488 is Technology for Information Professionals. The following is from the 11 page syllabus: "This course covers the conceptual and contextual foundations of computing, networking, the internet, social networking, and digital publishing technologies as used in information-intensive professions.  There is an emphasis on the terminology used in the professional LIS literature.  The course serves as a gateway to other technology courses offered at GSLIS."
 
The instructor for this course is Linnea Johnson and she's based in Boston at Simmons College's main campus. She's really cool, super nice, wicked smart and really knows her stuff in a geeky/techy way. Our first on-line lecture was an MP3 which I was able to download and put on my iPhone so that I could listen while working up a sweat at the gym. It was a chronology of the history of communication and computers. Really neat. She also included a slide lecture that had links to 13 youtube videos. One of which was a clip from a David Letterman show featuring Grace Hopper. Watch it. She's a hot ticket, as we say. I love her visual demonstration of a nanosecond.

We're also using Twitter in LIS 488. We're using a hashtag which aggregates all our tweets about class-related messages. I'm relatively new to Twitter so it's fun to get an opportunity to use it. If you want to follow me you're welcome to. I mostly tweet about library-related stuff that I find interesting. Micro-blogging on Twitter is challenging since it's only 140 characters. That's right,  140 characters. Not words. No mucho blah blah blah as I like to say.