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Statement of Competency K

In which I discuss my competency in designing training programs based on appropriate learning principles and theories.

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As Drucker (1994) points out, changes that are occurring in technology this time create fundamental changes in society as well. The speed with which information is delivered and the ease of access to information and knowledge fundamentally changes the dimensions of our world. In this new society, learning becomes a process that never ends, and our most important asset is the skill of learning, not the accumulation of particular knowledge. In this new society, the ability of librarians to help their users in this learning process is very important. The role of librarian is not just to retrieve the information or answer the question, but it is to teach and instruct the users how to be navigating through the world of information and empower them with the understanding of its structure.

Librarians and information professionals are often in a situation that requires understanding of basic learning theories and principles. The media librarians in schools need to understand the fundamentals of learning in order to support the educational process with their collections; university librarians need to know the principles of instructional design in order to provide students with effective help with number of different informational resources. And public libraries are increasingly are the only available entry point into the world of the computer literacy for a number of people. An essential part of the library services is understanding how users learn as well as delivering the instructions and teaching particular communication skills.

There are three main theories of the learning process:

Behaviorism which focus on the measurable aspects of learning and emphasizes conditioning as the way to acquire new behavior and knowledge. The conditioning could be achieved through classical conditioning where learners’ actions are rewarded or punished. Giving gold stars to the good students or new-year bonuses for good work would be examples of that. In education, the application of this theory is reflected in the emphasis on measurable results, like the emphasis on testing and test results.

Cognitivism emerged from the behaviorist learning theory, but it reaches beyond behavior and focuses its research on human memory and its role in the learning process. The understanding of short term and long term memory retention had a direct influence on design of the instructional material. The instructional design focus its research on the ways that the arrangement of media and on content that supports the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the learner. The most common instructional design model is ADDIE, which is acronym for:

Analyze – analyze the learner or task that need to be learned
Design – formulate the learning outcomes and determine the way of instruction
Develop – create instructional or training documents
Implement – implement instruction and disseminate the material
Evaluate – evaluate the achieved goals

Constructivism approaches the learning as action of the learner which actively constructs new conceptual systems based upon existing and past knowledge and experience. Each person makes sense of the individual information in the context of his personal knowledge. The knowledge is the composition of information that is acquired and defined through culture, past experiences, or education, and put together in a meaningful structure. Adding or rejecting of new information depends on how it fits into the existing knowledge construct. In education, this learning theory is formulated as active learning along with various discovery and hand-on models.

My instructional guide for Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection [CHNC], my EVIDENCE 1 for this competency, was developed using the instructional design ADDIE model. An instructional guide was designed to help older public library patrons to use the CHNC. Reflecting the particular need of its intended audience, the information is presented clearly and in the familiar format of a newsletter. The guide provides information about the scope of the collection and describes in details various searching options. The newspapers in the database are not indexed but key-word searchable, and that can create a number of problems, in particular in the case of the historical newspapers. Users are given a number of technical tips about the searching techniques and given some examples of change in common word usage. The guide also gives the instructions about options users have to view, save, and print their search results. The guide also provides the contact information of institutions and individuals that could be contacted for further information about the content and use of the database.

The bookmaking workshops proposal, my EVIDENCE 2 for this competency, was developed based on the constructivist learning theory. The purpose of the workshops was to teach students simple bookmaking techniques and in the same time make them aware of bookmaking traditions across various cultures. The students would learn about, for example the Buddhist tradition of palm leaf books or Chinese accordion books and the modern ways to make this book format, in hope that experience of making this books for themselves will create new perception and sensitivity toward books formats and different cultures. The proposal gives an illustration of each book format, gives scope and learning outcomes of each individual section of workshop, and a list of materials necessary for completion of the hand-on projects.

Reference:

Drucker, P. F. (1994). The age of social transformation. The Atlantic Monthly, 274(5), 53(18).