The concept that has stuck with me most as I have completed various readings over the last few weeks is from S. Thompson’s chapter “Teaching in a Virtual Setting” from Virtual Worlds: Real Libraries. It is Thompson’s insistence that online educational platforms are “less likely to trigger social anxiety than ... face-to-face communication” (168) that has troubled me since I read this article a week and a half ago. Thompson mentions this advantage to online education several times in her article, yet I find that social/communication anxiety has been the major inhibitor of my experiences in online courses currently and in the past. I feel much more nervous and self-conscious about having people read my writing than I do about speaking in class and this often stops me from writing as much as I could to participate in online discussions.
As I continue with this week’s readings, I find myself wondering about the level of academic librarians’ presence in their institution’s course management systems. In our library scan assignment we were unable to examine this part of a librarian’s role in distance learning as CMS sites almost always require a username and password provided only to students and faculty. It would be interesting to be able to compare and contrast librarians’ presence in different institutions’ CMS – for example, seeing whether they use the “micro” or “macro” method of integration as described in Elizabeth L. Black’s article “Toolkit Approach to Integrating Library Resources into the Learning Management System” (497).
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