Well, that took a while, but… I have been informed that barring further administrative upheaval, I will be teaching LIS 644 for the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies this fall.
(There was a good reason it took a while, but it’s a somewhat personnel-sensitive reason, so I won’t retail it here. Suffice to say I’m not mad at anybody; these things happen, and everybody was acting for the best.)
When I took this course, it was a fun eggheady exploration into the wilds of networking from which I actually learned quite a lot, though not all of it practical. Now… it’s being turned into an “introduction to technology” class which I get to guinea-pig. (Yes, it’s weird having a 600-level intro course; it won’t stay 600-level, I am told. Curriculum design is all Greek to me, so whatever.)
The catch in that for me is that I’m going to be teaching an intro course to a self-selected group of tech-savvy people. That is going to be an adventure. If they’re not throwing tomatoes by the end of the semester, I’ll call it a win.
My somewhat-sneaky plan is to focus on project-management, policy, getting-employed, and state-of-the-world topics, rather than trying to teach HTML to a bunch of people who could probably school me on web development. I won’t shy away from the techie by any means (if they can’t get around in one or two library flavors of XML by the time they’re out of my class, I am just a loser), but my emphasis is frankly on nudging them to learn to train themselves, because $DEITY knows it’s what they’ll have to do out here in the wild. (Besides, we all know about me and banging things with rocks, right? And the dealiebob where I took a job running DSpace without knowing any Java, Tomcat admin, or Postgres admin? Yeah. They gotta learn to teach themselves this stuff.)
Can’t talk about the final project yet, because I need to surprise them with it and at least one of them already reads CavLec (you know who you are, hello there!). However, I can mention that they’ll be doing a short “job talk” for me, as well as putting together a position description and interview questions for a tech-related library job. (Which I believe is harder than it sounds; I certainly shan’t let them get away with laundry-list of requirements, so they’re going to have to think.)
My biggest hangup is the whole authority thing. I don’t care about their grades. I don’t think they should care about their grades. But I have to grade them, and that makes me capital-A Authority, and I think that’s goofy because they are only my students for a semester, but they’re professional colleagues for a lifetime. Still working on how I’m going to get that idea across… but all in all, I’d rather be treated as a colleague they want to get along well with than an Authority they have to placate.
We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, this is an exercise in me putting my money (or my praxis, at least) where my mouth is.
