One of the tasks for the CJRLC Tech Challenge is to teach some 2.0-ish stuff to someone else. In 2 weeks I’ll be teaching several staff members at MPOW about blogging, but in the meantime I thought I’d write about some more impromptu teaching I did not long ago. I was happily minding my own business when a good friend said, “Hey, you know about this 2.0 stuff and I don’t, so can you teach me all you know?” Wha-huh?!? Of course I can! You don’t need to ask me twice!
Rather than teaching her all I know in one sitting, I decided the best tactic would be to consider what her information seeking/online behaviors are. Since she likes to do all kinds of independent research on all kinds of topics, I thought it would make sense to show her del.icio.us and to get her set up with an RSS reader. I think both impressed her quite a bit, perhaps the RSS reader more so. (As an aside, in the on-going search for the perfect RSS reader, I’ve since joined the ranks of people flocking to Google Reader.) Del.icio.us, I think, requires one to actually use it for a few days to truly understand it’s usefulness.
Anyway, I think that teaching 2.0 is on the one had really easy — the sites are designed to have a low learning curve and usually have pretty obvious and intuitive navigation — but the other, harder than I thought — there’s so much to show off, newbies can be overwhelmed. One of the things that worked in teaching one-on-one wasletting the student play around and click on the things that caught her attention. Sometimes following the user’s preferred pattern for exploring a site is the best way for them to get comfortable using the site. I’m not sure this could be applied to a large class setting (like the ones I usually teach in our 9-person computer lab), although maybe having ten minutes of play-time before getting down to the nitty-gritty might be fun (although it also might put students who are already uncomfortable using computers further ill at ease).
The other thing that worked was tailoring the lessons to the student’s interests. Showing my friend that she could subscribe to blogs that specifically meet her research needs and showing how she could share her del.icio.us tags with her research buddies spread across the county (and the world) was a better hook to get her interested, than showing her how I subscribe to sports blogs. Again, this works better teaching one-on-one, but in a public class, it might be nice to come armed with some blogs on variety of subjects to get each student subscribed to a blog they might have some vested interest in going back to their RSS reader to read.
I can’t wait to start teaching some of these things on a broader scale through our public computer classes here at work. I attended Janie Hermann’s CIL cybertour on teaching 2.0 in public libraries and I know I have a lot of work ahead of me to transition from teaching mouse skills every month to being able to offer fun stuff like Flickr and bloggigng, but I am so ready for this challenge!
Filed under: 2.0 Tools, RSS, del.icio.us, tagging
