Librations

I recently finished a housing search in Boulder, Colorado.  After seeing nearly a dozen apartments, I ended up with a fabulous place to live.  But along the way, I also saw the most frightening rental property I have ever seen.  Let’s call it “the cottage.”

The cottage was advertised in the local paper with very little detail–just a price, a neighborhood, and a phone number.  The price and location matched what I was looking for, so I called the owner to find out more about the property.  He described it as a “rustic” one bedroom, single-family home, and warned that a tenant had just moved out, so it probably needed a good cleaning before anyone else could move in.  I made an appointment to see it later that morning.  I had a very what-the-hell attitude since it was the first day of my housing search, and I figured that it couldn’t hurt to just take a look.  It wouldn’t waste much time, and I had other apartments to look at later in that same neighborhood.

I arrived at the cottage to find that it was an in-law building built behind another home and accessible only from an alley, not the street on which its address implied it sat.  It was surrounded by overflowing dumpsters and recycling bins.  The entire house was no more than 250 square feet, and it smelled of dead mice and mold.  It appeared (and smelled!) as if it had been vacant for some time.  There were no interior walls, and the ceilings were only about six feet high.  There were holes and cracks in the wood flooring that appeared to be open to a crawl space below.  There was no overhead lighting.  A previous tenant had been heating the building with a space heater.  The refrigerator was mid-1950s vintage–and not in a good way.  I’ll spare you a description of the bathroom.

Basically, this place was a nightmare.  The punchline to this story?  The landlord wanted $900 a month plus utilities.

So why am I posting this on Librations?  What does it have to do with libraries, or beer for that matter?  First, I really wanted a drink after seeing this place.  And second, this is a great example of how I could have applied my super-librarian powers of information literacy skillz to a real-life situation.

Even though the cottage was advertised in an actual newspaper (this wasn’t some shady Craigslist posting), and the owner paid money (albeit a small amount) for the ad, this doesn’t mean that any of the implied authority that comes with such a source should be automatically associated with the product being advertised.  As librarians, we deal with this sort of thing all the time.  Venerated publishers can do sleazy things (like Elsevier publishing fake journals to sell pharmaceuticals).  And Wikipedia (the anti-Elsevier?) has a large number of well written, clearly cited, and authoritative articles, particularly on topics related to popular culture and technology.

The owner’s use of the term “rustic” probably should have set off alarm bells in my head.  In a similar vein, pseudo-research about controversial topics can often be spotted based on the language and style used to discuss an issue.

And finally, sometimes you just have to dive into something to figure out if its credible, relevant to your research, and appropriate for the task at hand.  Man cannot survive on abstracts alone.  It was in the owner’s interest not to tell me too much about the cottage over the phone, so I had to see it for myself and experience the horror first hand.

Seeing this terrifying building wasn’t a failure, just as coming across an article or a book you end up not needing isn’t a failure, either.  It’s just part of the process.  Research (and house hunting), isn’t always clean, linear, quick, or easy.  Sometimes it involves dead ends, wrong turns, and readjustments.

And what’s a good house hunt without at least one horror story, right?

Last week I was browsing through the links provided by my friends on Facebook (impressed by the way we are all using these technologies to increasingly share and disseminate information) and I came across a snarky commented link by a former professor of mine from my college years. He had shared a link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education  about  “teaching naked”. Whoa! Wait! What? No, it’s not an article about liberating your inner nudist, but actually about teaching without the comfort of certain computer technology (I know… not quite so exciting, huh?). You can read the article for yourself but it’s basically calling for college lecturers and professors to stop using their powerpoint presentations as a crutch and go back to lecturing and creative teaching. This article caught my attention on several levels: as a student who experienced the transition to powerpoint presentations from straight lectures in college, as a graduate student in a School of Information where digital information technology is pervasive and ever present, as a budding champion of information literacy. I personally think this article should be printed out, old-fashioned style, and put in every (SI) professor’s mailbox, but that’s another story. The article has a great point, that I hope I can carry with me as I move through my profession: to really reach people you have to be creative, innovative, and passionate about what you’re sharing. You can’t rely on your slides to push you through your “lesson”. You have to reach inside yourself and [insert cheesy imagery about self-esteem here, personally I see Bastion fighting the Nothing or the Goonies pooling their talents to beat the Fratellis and get the Rich Stuff]. I know this sounds quite idyllic and naive and I know that it can be hard to be “innovative” all the time but teaching and learning isn’t a solo project–it’s an iterative process through which students and teachers share and analyze information. (Right? At least I think it’s supposed to be that way). It’s a challenge to find or create, as we have all discussed, “teachable moments” in a daily professional setting. But the article cites some interesting evidence about how lectures are more memorable if taught in a dynamic way that includes discussion and two-way communication. The article reminded me that no matter how technologies change, the way we as human beings interact and bond with each other doesn’t necessarily change. We all want to be part of the conversation and feel like we have something personal to contribute or to gain from interactions (even in class). This is why I totally agree with the article’s premise: that profs (and any other teachers–librarians, project coordinators, whatever) need to be dynamic and inclusive when they are sharing their knowledge with others. I think we’ve all seen examples of using technology to extend the power of sharing (ahem, what are you reading right now?) and examples of how it can be used as a crutch with narcoleptic results (I will not name names). So as we move forward in our lives and try to share our experiences with others we have to remember not to let our technology control us, but to control our technology. Isn’t there a movie quote about that somewhere?

So I think I may have backed myself into a story-time corner here.  I’ve got a lovely group of about 25 babies (ages 0-24 months) and their caregivers who are going to show up and expect the normal routine.  The “Hello and How Are You” song, followed by the song where we review all of the past themes from the series.  I’m in the midst of jungle animals, and as I add the animal onto the felt jungle, we sing a song about what sound that animal makes, and we all make the sound together.  This was perfectly fine for monkeys, elephants, lions, parrots, and I even managed one for hippos.  But, I cannot for the life of me figure out what sound a zebra or a giraffe makes.  (They don’t teach you that in library school.)  If I make something up, will I be promoting misinformation?