Black Holes of Technology and Creating Websites

As students finished creating their book trailers in Library Science this week, they were using a variety of film mediums: iMovie, green screen, stop motion, or animation. Meanwhile, multiple English classes at a time were using every available device to work on research papers in the library. This led to some periods of feeling stretched rather thin as Theater Arts students came to finish piecing together last week's silent movies on iPads as well.

By the middle of the week, the buildup of "cookies" on the computers and chrome books had one finicky database succumbing to the black hole of technology with multiple error messages cropping up on most devices. ("MMMM...I love cookies," says my inner cookie monster!   "YUCK! I hate cookies," says the librarian/research assistant in me!) Our normal fix of clearing the browser history worked at first, but then the devices themselves became irritated with us and began to play all sorts of tricks on the users. By the end of the day on Wednesday, I was ready to bring back the Index to Periodicals' Multi-Volume Shelves...you know, those giant green books...almost...

But I did take a few hours to rethink the unit beginning on Thursday for Library Science: Pathfinders. Did I really want to spend the days until Thanksgiving helping multiple English classes researching with databases and my Library Science classes creating pathfinders using databases? The unit after that I wasn't ready to start, but I needed something interactive and involving research so...they are creating websites.

Not just any websites. Fake news websites. By combining the last unit on evaluating websites and their research skills, students are creating websites that must challenge the evaluator to 1) believe it at least partially and 2) set themselves as an authority on the topic. They are already having fun with this, and I am looking forward to grading them over the Thanksgiving break.

Technology Tribulations

Today is this day we sort-of closed the library for a technology situation.

By sort-of, I mean we still had the CCP students in here working on computers, an English class came in for research, and the green screen was in use for two blocks. However, the main area of the library was closed because we were assembling multiple chromebook carts and having to unbox, barcode, label, and process 32 chrome books per cart! This generated a lot of piles of "stuff" around the libraries and filled multiple tables with stacks of devices.

The good news? This is helping us move more towards a 1:1 system, although with an ever-growing population and some aging devices it's an uphill climb. Also, these devices will be ready for use for fall semester exams in December!