So You Want to Be a College Professor - commentary

A recent Wall Street Journal article is a must read for every existing full-time and adjunct faculty in the US. Also, any current undergraduate student who longs to be a college professor needs to understand what is happening to their dreams. The former ivory-covered halls ain't what they used to be.

The last two sentences of this opinion piece sums up the results of the changes I have seen in my 25 years in higher education, working at a major research university, a small private university and one of the largest community colleges in the country. It all boils down to these two sentences directly quoted from the piece entitled So You Want to Be a Professor by By Naomi Schaefer Riley:

"Higher education has gone so far off the rails in recent years that parents and students hardly know what they are supposed to have learned in a freshman composition course or in Sociology 101. And as long as there is a degree waiting at the other end, they hardly care."

While there are several societal trends behind the dumbing down of America which also infects the highest rung of our education ladder, this piece does begin to speak to one, so give it 60 seconds . . . http://tinyurl.com/dkyjou

Thing 23: Final Survey

I have completed the final survey.

Thanks you again, NEFLIN staff, for creating this wonderful opportunity. It took a great deal of my time - more than I thought at the beginning - but in return for the time I invested, I learned a great deal. I doubt that I would have encountered many of the Web 2.0 tools introduced through the "23 Things" without this experience.

Thing 22: Staying Current

Keeping up with the Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 tools.

I have been actively seeking out and finding training on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 tools since I started the NEFLIN 23 Things project. I have participated in several webinars that I could work in around my work schedule since I am a reference librarian. So far I have engaged in learning with Webjunction, NEFLIN, Solinet and LibraryJournal. I am now on their mailing lists and have links to their websites to check regularly for new offerings. I learn a great deal from online sessions and prefer them.

I plan to track trends and the latest online tools through my regular reading of news sources like Business Week and WIRED and the NYT, as well as the usual library news sources. The latest trends are often mentioned in the business and tech news sources before the library ones.

In visiting links in this Thing I have discovered several that I have added to my RSS aggregator so that news will come to me. 'Coming to me' is one of those things that makes my work life easier. I love RSS feeds for that reason.


Keeping up with What is Useful.

I have found that best way to retain and use what I have learned is to begin teaching it to others. I have decided to pick three or four Web 2.0 tools that I think would be helpful to our English faculty and create a workshop around how they can integrate them into their classes. I'll test out the ones I picked with a couple of faculty and if the 'test' class goes well, I'll see about offering it to a much larger audience of faculty. No one is currently taking this type of approach with our faculty. One training session focusing on one tool is the rule of the day. I think integrating a few useful tools might be a better way to go as the package will offer more functions and be more useful overall and might encourage our faculty to adapt some of the Web 2.0 opportunities into their teaching.

Thing 21: Student 2.0 Tools

The Assignment Calculator

The Assignment Calculator is a great student-tool and can see our students using this more quickly than the RPC. Time is such a major constraint for our students, since many of them work and then go to school. The Assignment Calculator can really help them stay on target. FCCJ students may see the RPC as taking more time to read and incorporate than their time will allow, even though their results would be better.

The RPC and Teacher's Guide

I love these tools. I am going to add them to our library blog to both the faculty and student sections. I plan to create an email to send out general to our faculty at the beginning of next term about these tools.

In the Teacher's Guide there were several very useful documents. I'm going to print out and keep a couple handy. Narrowing the topic down is a problem I see often. Students have a general topic like the Civil War and do not know how to narrow it down. One of the handouts covered this beautifully and gave a concrete example that could be adapted to most any topic.

The RPC would need a faculty introduction in class for students to use it. I think I'll explore working with a faculty member to do a joint project in the fall as a beta test of using it. I think the Assignment Calculator and some of the handouts will be adapted immediately.

Thank to the Golden Gophers' faculty for the tools and to NEFLIN for the introduction!!!!!

I have been thinking so much about the students that I have not had time to think about library projects specifically and these tools. Helping faculty and students is our primary job.

Thing 20: Books 2.0

Q.1. What are you observing in your library about books and reading?

In the library I notice that the fiction readers most often come in looking for works by a specific author either because they have read one book before or because the author was recommended by a friend. This is definitely more predominant than looking for a genre.

Q.2. Do you think these Book 2.0 tools hamper or enhance one's reading experience?
I think the Web2.0 tools are great for:

-- Individuals who do a lot of reading and want to research on their own for new titles to get;

-- Teachers looking for books reviewed by others to use in the classroom or to recommend to students;
-- Librarians exploring how to expand their collections in new directions; and
-- Authors, present and future, researching what avid readers find interesting.

Once a reader finds an appealing tool that is easy to use, it can only enhance their experience as a reader.

Q.3.Which of the sites/tools did you visit? What are they appealing features? Any features seem unnecessary or just there "because"?


I explored most of the sites listed in Thing 20 which took quite a lot of time. Personally, I liked Overbooked and Wired for Books and plan to return to those sites frequently, and also to keep exploring the Internet for more. I will use these two sites not only for my personal reading but for the library.


Bookbrowse, while great for every reader, has a “children's and teens” section which is great for schools for both teachers and media specialists. I also like the the following features: tag cloud, geographical setting and time period. Those are very helpful when trying to help a reader find exactly what they are seeking when they do not have a title or author in mind.


Booksprouts seems to be a great resource for teachers who want to start book clubs in schools for students. The feature that makes this most appealing to a school is once the club is set up it can a be 'private,' making it safe for school-age children and only the moderator can select the book for the group.


BookGlutton has an online reader which I thought would be great for those who are home bound for a time due to illness or an injury. You can read with a group which could make the home bound feel less isolated. Plus all you need is a computer and the Internet – no Kindle required.


I found Booklamp a very creative concept, but would have to explore it further to be able to use it effectively with our readers. I may experiment with this and a couple of English teachers to see how they could use it in their classes.


Among the book swap sites I like SwapTree and may get involved this summer. Bookcrossing I have known about for some time and have shared the idea with others as well as participated.

Thing 19: Other Social Networks

I liked the article Building a Social Networking Environment at the Library by Steve Campion, he writes about some of the real problems we encounter in our system. We can create new content using the Web 2.0 the tools but getting the attention the appropriate administrators is very difficult. Since we are understaffed, everything extra we do comes out of our own time. If administration is not willing to grant us a few extra hours a month to create and update content, it is not to our advantage to add extra services, like Web 2.0 services. If we proceed and create new services on our own time, then in a few months it is interpreted as already a part of our job duties. It is a real Catch-22 in a system where libraries are tcurrently near he bottom of the priorities for services because of serious, system-wide budget constraints.

If I were to create a profile for career purposes based on what I saw in this exercise I would choose Ning. I am in fact planning on setting up an account during the summer when my work schedule is not as intense. I take my presence on the web seriously. It is my face to the world and I wish to spend time designing my site content before I get started. Thanks for alerting me to Ning. I did not know about Ning before the 23 Things.

Gather was very interesting and I am intending pursue it also because we have several students who are writers. I am thinking of developing something describing Gather to distribute to our English faculty and they will then further disperse the information out to students. In addition, I am planning on developing information to readily hand to students who come to reference desk and identify themselves as present or future writers. I did not know about Gather either before the 23 Things.

I believe that these are the social networks for our library to explore rather than Facebook and MySpace. Thanks again !!!!

Thing 18: Facebook

I have had a Facebook account for about two years. I have found it useful for finding old friends I have not heard from in years and discovering what they are doing now. With what people write on their walls I do not see it as a good tool for promoting your career. If I were some of the folks I know using Facebook, I would not want perspective employers to see what I had written on a bad day. I know that some employers do check Facebook at job interview time. Facebook is not appealing to me personally.

While I looked at several libraries’ Facebook pages, I would choose on other social networks to accomplish the same things. I would only use a Facebook presence to direct those interested to over places. It has only been in the last two months that our top administrator has done anything with Web 2.0. There is now a Facebook page for the college. So there is some merit to establishing at presence. I will be talking to colleagues about this soon.

MySpace is blocked at my library. I was unable to view the suggested MySpace Web sites except at home. That will not be of much help to me for creating a presence at work. I do not intend to create a MySpace page for myself and there is no possibility for the library. I will pursue a more focus social media network for both.

From all of the other wonderful resources in Web 2.0 being explored through the NEFLIN 23 Things, I think we will be able to find other, more acceptable resources to use for our library’s web presence than Facebook and MySpace.

Thing 17: Podcasts

Podcasts have been one of my favorite things in Web 2.0 since I discovered them about two years ago. My favorite place to find them is iTunesU. So I decided to spend more time of the other suggested sites for this 'thing.'

I did not care much for Yahoo Podcasts since the only way to find podcasts is to use audio search which also includes music which means you have to type in the word “podcast” each time. I like browsing lists, but I did find a series entitled "Coffee Break Spanish" that I thought was very useful. It is recorded in Scotland so the Scottish accent you hear when they are speaking English made it more fun for me, but might be disconcerting to others. If you click on the menu choice 'other language' you will find other languages in addition to Spanish including “One-Minute Danish.” Go to website and check out the Lesson Library: http://www.radiolinguamedia.com/cbs/www/index.html

At the Educational Podcast Directory I found that a quite a few of the podcasters had not posted for up to four years. So it is possible to waste time on this site looking for current information. I love the concept of podcasts tailored to different public school student levels. You would not have to worry about INTERNET safety using this website for those under 18 years.

Podcastalley was not a site I plan to use in the future. No directory immediately evident. Search features of selecting the 'genre' and then typing in keywords in the next box would not work for me. When I picked a 'genre' and went to that section the podcast list was numbered, but there was no apparent reasoning for the numbering. Was #1 the most downloaded? Or was it the most recent posting? Also, most of the podcasts I did find had to be downloaded. There was no feature that allowed you to listen to them online. I downloaded one file.

Podcast.Com. On the home page was the Coffee Break Spanish that I first found on Yahoo. I like this site best because I can either download the episode or play it online. Also, I found “Episode Info” button very helpful for an overview of episode-content. I listened to an episode on “ Don't Ruin the Vacation” from “This Week in Photography.” The link is readily available in its own box for easy cut and paste. Catch this episode: http://podcast.com/episode/36267670/55150/

There are so many podcasts available on the Web. I usually find podcasts on the topics I am researching and so do not see myself starting podcasting at this point in time. I'd like to have something uniques to contribute.