#blogjune Day 30: In which I did some PD

How does an elearning librarian spend her day?  Today, I attended a webinar screened by the media librarian from UoA (University of Auckland) about streaming audio and video files.  It was really interesting to see what and how they are doing this.  I know there is some angst in the library world about our tendency to have lots of "How We Done It Good" type PD stuff but I have to say this sort of stuff appeals to my practical side.  I usually get ideas and inspiration from things like this.

In the afternoon, I attended Nethui and spent most of the time in the Education stream, briefly venturing out to hear about the social media response to the Christchurch quakes.  Se if you can spot me in the Livestream video they had running - I'm talking to my former colleague Li.



I was a little disappointed that the focus, or perhaps more correctly, the participant dominance in the Education stream was from primary and secondary levels.  I was not disappointed that they were present - I think it is great - but the disappointment lay in the lack of tertiary level education participants.  I think the only tertiary level people there were librarians.  Still - there were interesting discussions, and of course, much overlap in terms of issues at every level of education.  E.g. Infrastructure, resistance from overwhelmed teachers to eLearning, need to focus on the learning not the tools and so on.  It's hard to know where to start but I think the answer does lie in the carrot & stick model, plus opportunities to hear from others about success stories.

One thing that is so necessary is the perceived freedom to "play" and to have risk friendly environments in which that "play" can occur.  This isn't easy - in the tertiary sector one is so conscious that students have paid large sums of money to be there and "playing" with a new approach can seem irresponsible. Yet, I've witnessed some great exemplars at MPOW where technology and social eLearning has been very effective in courses that you would think it would fail - such as construction and automotive classes.

This was hardly a normal day in the life for me, but it was a nice interlude.  And there was Oreo cheesecake.