I just had my Technology for Information Professionals “midterm” exam. It was postponed three weeks because we hadn’t yet covered all the material that was to be included. We had 105-110 questions on the study guide (depending how you broke them up) and 25 were on the exam, which was worth 60% of our grade. I didn’t buckle under the pressure, thank goodness, but my brain has officially melted and it’s oozing all over the computer lab as I type this.

I present the following as a draft to my course evaluation, which will be made public through our course evaluation process at the end of the semester. Well, maybe not a draft, but certainly a rambly rant about what I think needs to change in order to make the course more effective.

The purpose of this technology course is to address the disparate technological aptitutes among the students in the GSLIS program. We all come from various technological backgrounds, and the course is designed to bridge those differences and allow us, as future librarians, to communicate with a strong technology vocabulary. After all, patrons will go to the nearest librarian on duty when the public access computer they’re using decides to explode. Librarians need to feel comfortable working in a technology-based environment.

Sounds good, right? It hasn’t been as effective at achieving those goals as it could have been.

I have enjoyed the content of the course, and have learned much regarding computing technology, and a little about how libraries use technology, etc., but the assessment process has left much to be desired. First, we were given a study guide in the beginning of the semester that was essentially a big, jumbled mess of questions that didn’t seem to relate to each other in any sort of categorical sense. I’m a library student. Give me categories, please. I wasn’t able to make much sense of the question list until one week before the exam. Prior to that, I had tried to answer the questions as we covered material in the lectures. I found that to be quite difficult, because I had to simultaneously sift through hundreds of slides from the Powerpoint file, while trying to pick out the relevant questions in the study guide. It was overwhelmingly frustrating, and each time I sat down to study, I became more and more confused.

If, however, we had been quizzed after each unit, and if the study guide were broken down thematically, then studying would have been a breeze.If all the networking questions, for example, were set out together, we could have pieced together the details much more effectively and efficiently. I do understand that it was probably the instructor’s intention to jumble everything up so that we had to work hard to find the related concepts among the questions and to figure things out on our own. While that is certainly an acceptable goal, the implementation was frustrating, confusing, and highly inefficient. It wasn’t until right before the exam that the Big Picture of the concepts began to emerge. And then I could finally go back to the very detailed questions and begin piling them together to make some sort of sense.

That method is contrary to all good sense. It’s backwards, really. I’m not against having to work hard to learn the material, but I despise inefficiency. And it’s downright unacceptable for the assessment process in library school to be inefficient. Even if, in my hypothetical model, we had a large final exam to pull it all together, I still think quizzes would have been a great way to help us to prepare for the exam, just to make sure we were understanding the concepts at hand. Not to mention the saftey net it would have provided for our grades.

And I have to mention the sheer size of the instructor’s lecture slides. Hundreds and hundreds of slides per unit, and I think there were maybe five or so units. Not only were they expensive to print, but in order to glean important information from them, you had to use a magnifying glass. Many of the slides were screen caps of web pages with definitions of techy terms. To save space (and money) I printed the slides six to a page, double sided, so that screen cap was teeny tiny, and not so useful to me. Thank goodness I was able to repair my glasses in time.

All in all, I appreciate what this course is trying to do, and I do think it’s necessary for our profession to be, if not tech savvy, then certainly tech literate. I just hate having to waste time and energy on something that could be taught so much more effectively. It’s a problem that other students in different sections are having as well. I should also say that my issues with the course do not have anything whatsoever to do with my opinion of the instructor as a person, or the effectiveness of her lectures. The information that we’re exposed to in class is valuable, and she is able to provide context along the way. So, I suppose this whole blah blah blah is really only about the assessment process.

I want to make note of all these things while they’re fresh, because I want to provide a concise evaluation at the end of the term. I’ll have to come back to these notes when that time comes.