Opening up the classroom with twitter

N.B. This is a reposting of part of my Day of DH.

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I spent a bit of yesterday keeping up with the first ever #catbkchat – a twitter book club for members of the cataloguing community – as preparation for our last Advanced Cataloguing & Classification session on Monday afternoon, in which we will be livetweeting our class discussion between 4 and 4:30pm.

I usually schedule an hour of this 3-hour final session for a class discussion of the ‘future of cataloguing’, so, in theory, #catbkchat seems like a serendipitous happening – especially since one of the chapters in the chosen book is available free from the author’s institutional repository:

Sanchez, Elaine, “RDA, AACR2, and You: What Catalogers Are Thinking” (2010). Staff Publications-Library. Paper 25. http://ecommons.txstate.edu/libstaff/25

The students were enthusiastic when I asked them if they thought it a good idea, and I am encouraged somewhat by the reading I’ve done around opening up the classroom for the PGCLTHE course UCL provides for all us new lecturers.

I know we should always be research-driven in everything we do, but I must admit to feeling reassured by Susan Greenberg’s post yesterday, ‘Tweeting in the classroom‘. I guess it’s just human nature to trust in the anecdotal reporting of someone we know – and as Susan’s experience corroborates rather than contradicts the educational research, that’s OK?

Anyway, today, with a day’s distance from the #catbkchat discussion, I picked out some tweets to spark discussion. I’ll retweet them on Monday, so I won’t quote them directly here, but they fall into these categories:

• Sanchez’s methodology
• Systems implications for switching from AACR2 (current international cataloguing code) to RDA (new code being introduced)
• Cost of accessing RDA versus lost (in eyes of tweeter) opportunity to publish open source / copyright commons
• Cataloguing instruction on MA LIS courses
• Suggestion (by tweeter) that catalogues are under threat of disposal
• Balance of consistency of catalogue vs. keeping up with new standards for web publishing (library catalogues mostly MARC as opposed to XML (or even MARC_XML)

I’m really keen to see:

1. What the students made of Sanchez’s work themselves
2. What they think of the points made in #catbkchat already
3. If anyone outside the class tweets into the discussion
4. How the students respond to outside-class tweets / tweeters
5. How we all feel about opening up our class for this sort of discussion – does it work; benefits / disadvantages; should we do it again next year / in another class and if so, what should we do differently?

We will just have to wait and see …

Image: http://twitter.com/#!/AnneWelsh/status/48710394512015360