It was difficult to select my courses for this semester, my final one towards my MLIS. Knowing that these are the last courses I will get to take before (knock on wood) entering the professional workforce made it especially painful to say “I just don’t have room in my schedule to take _____.” In the end I made my decisions with help from some trusted advisers, the listed qualifications I’ve been seeing in job announcements, and the likelihood that I could pick up the skills taught in the course in other ways. So here they are:
LIS 2700: Managing Libraries and Information Systems & Services
LIS 2850: The Library’s Role in Teaching and Learning
LIS 2970: Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) for Librarians
INFSCI 2955: Systems – Web Engineering
A couple of these have really been an interesting departure from my past courses in the program. Although the Information Sciences program is housed in the same department as LIS, there are only two students in the course that I knew previously from other courses, and of course the instructor is unfamiliar to me as well. While I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be tech-savvy enough for the material, so far it has been at a great level – just hard enough that I have to push myself, but not too hard to handle. Check back with me when we get into the programming section =)
The GIS course is an online-only class, which is definitely not my favorite way to learn. I moved across the country to attend class in person, and have been slightly disappointed at the offerings for on-campus students in past terms. I must admit, though, that the instructors (one of whom I’ve met a few times socially, and she’s a recent grad from our program) have really put effort into making it more than just another “watch the video of the lecture” online class. I’ll probably write more about this in a later post…having been through a few different varieties of online courses I definitely have some things to say on the matter.
LIS 2700 is a required core course for my degree, and was the only one of my summer courses that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to taking. However, I must admit that the information we’ve gone over in class has been extremely practical (much more so than some of my earlier courses) and the assignments will be good practice in things like grant-writing and budgeting that I’m sure to end up dealing with somewhat regularly on the job. I’m doing a presentation later in the semester on Digitization, so check back to see how that goes.
My final course, LIS 2850, is in an interesting format – instead of meeting weekly, we are meeting four weekends throughout the summer for intensive, workshop-esque sessions. I was pretty unsure about this at the start, but we had our first session this weekend and it went really well, aside from the possible long-term injuries sustained by my posterior from sitting in a particularly uncomfortable lecture hall chair for nearly 12 hours! Note to self: bring a cushion next time. It was a bit of a gamble for me in taking this class, as we never met until after the add/drop period was over, but I’m pleased that I decided to take it in the end. Having taught before, a lot of the material (i.e. lesson planning) is kind of a refresher for me – but it has been over 2.5 years since I was last in a classroom (and that was with third graders) so it is good go over a lot of these things again and to learn to apply them to Information Literacy specifically. Our final presentations are a lesson on any IL topic that we choose. I’m thinking that mine will likely be on selecting and evaluating data sets. In the meantime, we are to give a short presentation on a non-academic topic at our next session and I need to pick a topic for that…any ideas?
