In my scatterbrained-ness, if that can be considered a descriptor word, I have decided to return to my roots for this instructional design research project of mine. Over the last few days I’ve read several papers by M. David Merrill, Jay McTighe, and Grant Wiggins, all of which I have been greatly impressed and which have filled up my reading journal immensely, but I’ve been feeling like I’m missing the point of the whole exercise. If what I’ve really wanted is to grasp the basics of ID as it pertains to librarians, I decided I needed to go back to the starting point and retrace my steps.
A simple Google (or in my case Bing – got to get those Bing Rewards points so I can earn a $5 Amazon gift card) search for “instructional design for librarians” brought a slew of great material. Some of the results were for ALA webinars or events, which by the way, if you’re paying for these things out of your own pocket can be horrendously expensive and near impossible to convince the wife is a good way to spend that $200+ we don’t have, or book review links for a book titled Instructional Design for Librarians and Information Professionals (a future purchase maybe?) but there were a few that I found a renewed appreciation for. The Designer Librarian, a blog by Amanda Hovious, was a really good starting point with a thought provoking post from April 2016 titled Can Academic Librarians Really Learn IDT Through PD?. I agreed wholeheartedly with her premise that professional development would only scratch the surface of ID and wish I had the time, resources, and attention span to go back to school for at least a certificate in ID, but unfortunately, I have an 18 month-old daughter that takes up the bulk of my nonworking life, very little in the way of disposable income (if my wife and I decide a $200 ALA webinar is probably not in our financial best interests, there’s no way I can spring for a $7000 certificate program), and my attention span as we’ve noted previously is about that of a goldfish.
Another good source I found with my simple search was a series of blogposts from 2015 by Lindsay O’Neill on the ACRLog about her first year as an instructional design librarian and first year academic librarian. I really wish I had put more effort to network and make use of the resources I had at my disposal while I was working on my MLIS, but that’s the problem with being a quiet, highly introverted person I guess and a whole other topic in and of itself. A little deeper in my search I found a rather old blog series (though intended to be a 14 part series, it looks like she stopped at number 6) from 2012 by Lauren Pressley titled Teaching Strategies very interesting as well.
The last source I found, and I can’t recall how exactly I stumbled across it, was a Georgia Library Association’s Carterette Series webinar titled Instructional Design: An Introduction for Librarians put on by Karen Viars. The webinar was a simplistic, macro-level 30 minute view of instructional design, but I feel like it really helped to ground my research efforts and give me a little more direction. I believe I’ll finally be able to see the whole forest and stop getting lost looking at the trees. Obviously, I’ve got a lot further to go if I want to make this a useful skill by any stretch of the imagination, though I suspect I’ll actually start making more forward progress and less wheel spinning. Next up, review my reading journal and make sure I’m actually internalizing what I’m studying.
Confessions of a Scatterbrained Librarian 