Paging the Oracle

A teletextual blogpost.

Dance lessons

I am typing this while watching Strictly...It Takes Two, because that's the kind of crazy, risk-taking chancer I am. If this post gets infected with talk of Argentinian tangoes, I apologize in advance.

PowerPoint projection put to good use

Last week was the first week of term for the students here, and I spent much of it delivering library induction sessions for the new intake. Monday saw the first time since graduation that I gave a solo presentation to students, but thanks to some canny choreography by my fab-u-lous colleagues the monumental nature of this event was less than it might've been: in previous weeks I had done a couple of library tours,  helped out in one session, and delivered part of another (a part of equal size to that which I would be delivering on my own in the Monday session), thereby lulling me gently into the swing of it all.

I'm covering for somebody who is off sick, so the first part of my preparation for these sessions was to find her PowerPoint slides from last year -- not so straightforward when the person who made them isn't there to show you where she filed them, and when you yourself are completely new to an organization and its conventions. Once found, the slides needed reformatting according to glitzy new style-guides (each one requiring a thousand pink sequins), and the content had to be updated in light of at least severrrn policy and platform changes that came in over the summer. All this allowed me considerable opportunity to rework things to suit my own particular style.

What if all the students have table-tennis bats with numbers printed on?

The first session would be for the Women's Studies students, and my impression was that it would be a rather informal affair. At one point in the preceding week I awoke in the middle of the night (imagine James Stewart in Vertigo) and thought to myself "what if it's so informal that there's no projector?" (an indication of the sort of paranoia that keeps me on my toes). So it was that I prepared an alternate routine: I made several good lines of notes of the things I needed to say so as not to be reliant on the slides, and took with me some induction brochures to hand out. Both these moves would prove to be good, sensible things to do, whether there was a projector or not. As it happened, my paranoia proved sound: this would be a PowerPoint-free induction session, and the small group permitted the flexible conversational informality of the library tours I had done previously. 

Now, longstanding readers of this blog will be aware that I am no great lover of PowerPoint anyway. Indeed, I am rather dismissive of it. But when you're starting out in a new job, it's a very handy crutch. It's also much easier to steal and tweak somebody else's slides than it is to make sense of and rework somebody else's lesson plan. In this regard, I've found PowerPoint a very useful framework upon which to build. But as an aid to learning, I'm still not convinced it's anything more than a bit of fancy: a distracting rectangle of light in which to capture attention (and in the scale of distractions it falls closer to someone running around in circles with a cape than it does to Kristina Rihanoff). In all my subsequent inductions I was able to employ my slides, and they seem to have worked ok, but they did feel a little surplus to requirements at times: in a small group it feels ridiculous to be using them, and in a large one the subtleties of a demonstration are invisible to viewers at the back of the room (much as subtle footwork may be invisible to a TV audience). I began to wonder if it really mattered what was showing on the screen behind me.

This was tested when I accidentally used the wrong set of slides for a session (postgrad slides for an undergrad group). The difference between the two sets was incredibly slight (part of the problem!) and I was able to avert disarster quite easily by being light on my feet and filling in with the appropriate patter as necessary. Good to get these things out of the way in the first week!

What if my music-hall doll-dancing routine lets everybody down?

My first session with the PowerPoint took place in a room where I used to be taught as an undergrad. It felt kind of weird setting up the projector and leading a class there but it was a small room and a friendly audience, and things seemed to go ok. I was more nervous about a longer session with a half-hour practical attached, but in the end it waltzed along nicely (though I definitely need to work on my 'getting everybody's attention again' technique!). As the week went on, my confidence got a lift, and I think by the end of it I'd become pretty adept at outlining the library service. I've been on something of a roll, and I've just finished the slides for my first bit of real teaching: a two hour session on literature searching (one hour of me talking and one hour of the students going through a workbook I've prepared, assuming my calculations go to plan). Again it's a reworking of somebody else's slides, but this time even more liberally so (cue dancing cats and dogs to illustrate Boolean). I might even get to do a bit of whiteboarding if I can find a suitable pen! I'm looking forward to it, in a funny sort of way, safe in the knowledge that I can fall back on the workbook if I miss my footing and things start to go a bit pear-shaped. Whatever happens in this session, I can build on it, and use the experience to inform my other lit-searching classes in the coming weeks.

What if I'm partnered with Anton?

Keeeeeeeeep teaching!

Ducks and Cover

Ah, 'Avocado', how I've missed you...

John Bowes Morrell is much changed since I last met him, twelve years ago. I suspect his unconventional partnership with Raymond Burton and Harry Fairhust has helped brighten him up. He's redecorated, and while I do miss the old wood finishes I have to confess that the modernist white paint-job looks rather smart. Harry's looking grand too, having kicked out the itinerant compscis and laid out some beanbags for his all-nighters.

I'm lodging with Harry now; have been for a fortnight. I share my digs with a lovely assortment of librarians, and am doing my best to blend in. Two of them, like me, only started recently, and also like me, are providing short-term cover for someone else (one of them even has a blog). The three of us, variously experienced in the dark arts of librarianship, have been enjoying an impressive spread of induction events (some of which go on right up to the end of my contracted term), and these have been invaluable in helping us to settle into our new home. 

Interlaced with this training has been the steady drip drip of actual work. My first task was to transfer the old subject guides across to a new system, and tidy them up a bit. As someone who's been tinkering with HTML for over a decade, this was quite a pleasant introduction to my new role, and I'd soon wrestled the lists into some sort of shape. Tidying them up further is an ongoing task and there are some dead links still to weed, but the work of an academic liaison assistant is many and varied and one must prioritise accordingly: for another, more pressing aspect of my work arrived this week: teaching.

I am not entirely green when it comes to standing in front of a group of people and speaking. I've run exams as an invigilator, I've spoken between songs when playing in a band, I've done presentations as a student, and I've assisted in library teaching sessions before (I got to do a little spot of that sort of thing again this week, which was fun). In October, though, I'll be giving my own student induction sessions, and that's both exciting and just a little bit terrifying too. Things are complicated slightly by a number of factors, primarily the not insignificant detail that I myself am still being inducted. This is balanced to a small extent by the fact that the library is undergoing a number of little revamps here and there that are not yet implemented, making lesson-planning tricky for everyone, not just us pesky kids. That the more experienced members of staff are in boats similar (if not quite identical) to ours does perversely lend a tot of confidence.

Not bumped into my old nemesis yet. Only a matter of time.

During the course of this week I also popped two important library cherries: I bought some books and I discarded some others. The purchases were not my own selections, and the discarded books were donations rather than proper weeding, but it's a start! I'm beginning to feel just a little bit like a grown-up librarian...

An Upward Movement

Just a quick note to let you all in on some good news: come September I shall be starting a new job as an Academic Liaison Assistant supporting social work and women's studies. I'm looking forward to putting my library school education to some use, and hopefully the work will help inspire an exciting array of future posts (my other blog already has a couple of bits of writing on the subject). Needless to say, I'm really rather excited! Having worked in my previous job for seven years, I feel I've had my fill of it, but I've enjoyed those seven years a good deal and I shall miss everyone there terribly. At least I am trading one city I love for another, and I hope my new role will prove as fulfilling and inspirational as my last.