Blogging for News Follow-up Notes
About a month ago, I said I would post notes about Blogging for News, the course about blogging for news organizations I taught at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference.
Overall, I thought the course went very well and can only hope that the next time I teach something like it, it goes even better. l o t s m o r e . . .
Addendum 7/11: Today, I received some photos from the conference, including one of me teaching the course. They’re great photos! Thanks!
July 11th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
I’ve come to two conclusions: 1) SLA really did wrong by you and your students 2) it’s really, really, really hard to teach blogging and about blogs because attendees come to the class with extremely different experience levels and *expectations*.
July 11th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Hey Christina,
Thanks for your thoughts.
1) I wish instead of crowding our class with more students, SLA would have let us have two sessions. We offered to do that. I’m not sure why it didn’t happen–maybe we needed to push SLA to do it instead of waiting for them to say “Let’s do another session.” It’s also quite likely that it just wasn’t possible because of a lack of convention center space or some other factor. With two sessions, we could have done one specifically for news types and maybe done another general session for other kinds of librarians.
2) I totally agree with the idea that people come in with all sorts of experience and expectations. I was hoping to explore what people wanted to learn a little bit, but that’s something I dropped because of the 30 minute delay. One of the reasons why I contacted course participants was to attempt to be clear about what the course would be. If it didn’t map to someone’s expectations, they had the chance to drop it. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet everyone’s expectations, but I just can’t do that and I think we all need to recognize that.