Interesting article about a teaching/technology course for librarians

At the Second Life journal club on Wednesday, Prof Diane Nahl (Hawaii University) led discussion on: Pegrum, M. and Kiel, R. (2011) "'Changing the Way We Talk': Developing Librarians’ Competence in Emerging Technologies through a Structured Program." College and Research Libraries, 72 (6), 583-598. This is open accesss at http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/6/583.full.pdf+html. I forgot to advertise this in advance through the blog, but this is an article worth reading, as it concentrates on talking about the evaluation and outcomes of a course that has been run several times at the University of Western Australia, mainly for librarians. That means you get an insight on how people applied their learning to real projects in the library, for example, with some interesting examples. At the journal club we agreed that the barriers to applying the pedagogical and technical skills etc. were pretty universal (they were identified as time limitations, constraints imposed by the IT department (so you couldn't be as innovative as you want), lack of reward and institutional support, and working with faculty/colleagues who had more limited ideas about teaching and learning).