caropinto

Moonlighting

Here's the original post: Caro Pinto's Media Diet on the Technology for Teaching and Learning blog back in 2011.

Howdy folks, my name is Caro Pinto and I am the social sciences & emerging technologies librarian at Hampshire College. I am pleased to be a guest blogger here for the next two weeks to talk about strategies for for locating and managing web resources for research and learning.

Inspired by the Atlantic’s Media Diet feature that queries journalists, techbiz thought leaders, and musicians what they read and how they keep current, I thought I’d share my own media diet. My media diet’s goal is keep me current with trends in higher education, digital humanities, technology, librarianship, and my faculty’s subject areas.

I generally rise at 6:00 am and immediately check my email on my iPad. I do a quick browse of Chronicle of Higher Education articles to get a lay of the land. I usually have some coffee and my day beings to hum along. I then grab my Macbook Pro and fire up Twitter and begin to look content I subscribe to in Google Reader.

At this early stage of the day, I only scan articles and decide if I want to read them later (come back next week to learn more!) or if it’s critical news that I want read immediately. I go through the Chronicle of Higher Education through the email blasts they push daily. I go through my Google Reader lists that are organized topically: librarians, archivists, higher education, digital humanities. I subscribe to individual librarians, archivists, and digital humanists and relevent organizations like 4Humanities and the Scholars’ Lab. Though I am the social sciences librarian, the digital humanities movement resonates with types of digital projects I want to spearhead at Hampshire.

While my folders on Google reader are focused on librarianship, higher education, and digital humanities, my Twitter account is far more varied. I follow media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon.com, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal, political reporters like Ryan Lizza, Ezra Klein, Dahlia Lithwick, and Ana Marie Cox, library and info science thought leaders like Stephen Abram and Lorcan Dempsey, technology sites like Cult of Mac, TechCrunch, and AllThingsD, and collection development resources like The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and a long list of University Presses. I also follow various vendors like JSTOR, EBSCO, ProQuest among others to track larger trends in library services and to learn about outages or other technical updates.

Many librarians/archivists have robust Twitter presences and I follow several hundred of them. The info pro community on Twitter is strong and I often ask questions of my colleagues or respond to their inquiries. These relationships are central to my work and professional development.

I engage with Twitter all day long while I work and save relevant articles to read later on my iPad. I synthesize while I read at night and keep notes possible research questions or trends I need to track. This process helps me set priorities for possible projects and potential research quests.

Even though I do technology and my office is nearly sans books, I also receive various print publications at the Library that I read weekly and monthly. I always read The New Yorker, Bloomberg, The Harvard Business Review, Library Journal, The Economist, Harpers, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, College & Research Libraries from cover to cover.

I also have subscriptions to scholarly journals like the Journal of Modern History that I read in JSTOR and EBSCO. Those services push content to me via email when new issues are available.

Keeping current with news, information, and technology is a core part of my job and central to my continuing professional development. I count myself lucky that I am empowered to read widely, ask lots of questions, and work with such amazing students and faculty. Serving the Hampshire community inspires me to stay current, test my assumptions, and imagine new library services.

Come by next week to learn how I organize and manage all of content streams.

“She likes people!”

Just another afternoon at Hampshire College.

Bus Stop Meanderings

Happy Friday, dear Internetz! Above, the view from the bus stop in downtown Northampton.

Waiting for the bus to Hampshire, I saw the army of UMass teaching assistants waiting for their express bus to Friday sections. They were all wearing their Friday best, ready to impart knowledge and facilitate discussions among the undergraduates. Oh the memories! I was one of them during grad school part I; I learned to teach during those Fridays.

Teaching is a craft that requires a lot of care and feeding. I am skeptical that ‘natural’ teachers exist, but I do know that the best teachers are those who believe that their craft should always evolve, who wonder at the end of every session what he or she could have done better, and finally, those who know realize that you have to think about how to engage all the students in the room with you, not just the middle, not just the best, and not just the worst.

I’ve been lucky since grad school to worked in library positions where teaching is healthy part of my portfolio, but most importantly, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have colleagues who are willing to watch me in the classroom and offer constructive suggestions about how to be more effective.

It takes a village to teach a class of students; may we all find ways of supporting each other inside and outside of the classroom so we can do the work of educating our students, and each other.

It’s the InfoBar!

Hey, internetz, as you may recall from past posts about my job(s), I love working on reference desks. Between the people watching, random questions, and the opportunity to develop relationships with students and faculty, it’s a pretty fantastic way to spend a chunk of my week.

Here at Hampshire, we have an experimental reference desk called the InfoBar. It’s a consolidated service point for the library, media services, and IT. The bar sites right at the library entrance; we’re the first folks you see when you walk through the door. Did I mention we have bar stools and pens?

I am a fan.

This is my first shift and I’ve already helped folks with basic directions (hey, we want students to feel comfortable and welcome so they will come back and ask for help with their projects) and some more complicated technology questions about Hampshire’s courseware system, Moodle. I imagine I will get some heavier reference questions once the dust settles from the first week of school and students begin to get into their reading and various projects.

#Reading

“Usually I was not so moralistic, believing as I still do that it was my duty to teach the curriculum and not to pontificate, to inspire debates, not weigh in with verdicts. I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that valued people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back.”

-Garret Keizer, “Getting Schooled: The re-education of an American teacher,” Haper’s Magazine September/2011

I am so fired up to teach after reading this essay! Helping students achieve information fluency is one of the reasons why I became a librarian, to watch students’ worlds get larger and more complicated, and watching them grapple with all of life’s ambiguities.