Author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
Column for February 1998
I recently led a library-school class in youth and children's services—LIS 406, to be precise—in a discussion about Internet filters, by invitation of Professor Christine Jenkins of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign.
In many ways, this class was routine. In the weeks prior, I chatted with the professor and distributed course material. The night of the class, students trickled into the classroom greeting one another and exchanging the usual anxious questions about upcoming assignments. I lectured, demonstrated, asked questions, and chatted with students (who occasionally, as students do, chatted with each other). We walked through a Powerpoint demonstration while I fielded questions, and I kept an ear out for the astute side comment that inevitably surfaces in any class discussion. It was a good class, and afterwards some students stayed a few minutes late to tell me how much they enjoyed it and to ask a few more questions.
What made this class quite different is that it all happened over the Internet. The students were scattered across the United States, from rural Illinois to the Virgin Islands; the teacher was in a computer room at the University of Illinois; and I was in my home office in New Jersey. This wasn't just high-tech; this was way-cool Jetson librarian stuff!
Sharpening my digital pencils
To prepare for class, I distributed the coursework and preparatory questions by e-mail the previous week (most of the citations were to publications on the Net, anyway).
For my chalkboard, I converted a Powerpoint presentation to HTML and posted it to a Web site. Just before class, students gathered in an electronic space—call it a virtual classroom—that they entered by logging in to the LEEP3 server housed at the University of Illinois library school.
The class and I communicated by voice and keyboard. I spoke to them over a telephone, and they heard me through RealAudio software on their computers. They wrote back in online chat sessions that I could view onscreen while the Web pages simultaneously displayed. They could hear me, but I could not hear them, except through the words they typed in a chat window—a little weird, but I adjusted to "hearing" through my keyboard pretty quickly.
The one quaint touch was that someone played "flipper." Remember the goody-two-shoes who always volunteered to change the transparencies for the teacher's overhead? These days, the "flipper" does some kind of magic on his or her end to advance the Web pages so the students and the instructor view the same page simultaneously. (I think regardless of the technology, classrooms are always going to have a "flipper" of some sort or another—it's a social role, like clapping erasers.)
Jumping ahead with LEEP3
There were two miracles taking place that night. One is that I was instructing the class from a small home office in the Jersey burbs. The other was that the students were able to be in that virtual classroom. LIS 406 is conducted through LEEP3, a University of Illinois program-scheduling option initiated under the leadership of Dean Leigh Estabrook (I never found out what LEEP stands for, but some say it's "Leigh Estabrook's Excellent Program"). The LEEP3 student body represents over a dozen states. At the beginning of each semester, students travel to the university for a week or two of face-to-face instruction. Then they return to their communitites, where their instruction continues over the Internet and through real-life practicums in local libraries.
You might not think that a digital class is a "real" class, but I witnessed it myself; the casual student chatter and simultaneous educational discovery made it feel real to me—so much so that later on Professor Jenkins had to remind me that the students weren't collected in one classroom. As she says, LEEP3 proves that "community-building can happen in an online environment."
LEEP3 isn't a poor cousin to the rest of the GSLIS program; in some ways, with its rigorous emphasis on electronic participation, it's a lead-the-fleet operation. As one student told me, "Every time someone who asks about my coursework says, 'So it's like a correspondence course?' I want to smack 'em! What makes LEEP different is the constant, immediate communication and the synchronous instruction/discussions we are able to conduct."
There are other, subtler advantages as well. Professor Jenkins told me that while discussing a picture book online she realized that "for the first time, every student had a front-row seat to see pictures and graphics as clearly as if they were holding the book or picture in their hands." Think this is just the teacher talking? A student wrote her afterwards, "I really loved the book, and loved that I could see the pictures clearly and up-close."
This quiet revolution has the potential to help the remote student, the working student, and the student-as-parent; LEEP3 is a bridge across which many otherwise disenfranchised library students can walk. I sincerely hope that LEEP3 can help ALA realize the diversity goals spelled out in the Spectrum Initiative (AL, Nov. 1997, p. 8). The students are certainly willing and eager; as one student told me later, "This has been one of the most satisfying educational experiences I've ever had." (Hey, if I could have gone to school in my pajamas. . . .)
Other library schools are offering distance education as well, and more are planning to. Browse the list of library schools maintained by Thomas Wilson (a research professor in the Department of Information Studies, Sheffield University, England) and see if the schools you know and love are moving in this direction. And if they aren't, ask them why not!