Collaborative Librarians as Teachers

Apparently the new role of the librarian is teaching.  In class I learned that in order to better prepare for our roles as teachers, we will be creating screencasts, webinars, and a blog (this one).  All this computer stuff is new to me, so I must say I am not entirely looking forward to another semester spent learning new technology.  Also, I am slightly apprehensive that librarians are heading in the educational direction, because I purposely dropped the education part of my undergrad music ed degree.  I am slightly curious to understand why teaching is such a large part of the field now - is it teaching colleagues, or patrons?  Why do librarians all of a sudden have to teach so much now? - Is it because technology is moving so fast patrons and/or colleagues cannot keep up with it?  I'm also curious as to whether public librarians have to teach as much as academic or school librarians.  With new information and in accessing information, it is important for librarians to remain connected to each other.  Colleagues and professionals in the field can help a lot by keeping each other in the loop with what is going on in the library world.  With online tools such as Twitter and blogs, it seems that librarians can keep track of almost anybody or anything in the field.

A particular method of instruction is the workshop.  I found it interesting that the reading from Create the One-Shot Library Workshop by Veldof covered all the pros and cons of the different options in working with or without others to produce a workshop: the options are working individually,working individually with a sounding board, working with a partner, or working with a team.  Here at SI the answer would be with a team.  I am still surprised by how many semester class group projects we do here.  I do believe SI will have more than prepare me for working with all types of people.  I wonder if the best results for such a workshop would be the result of a team effort?  It seems unlikely that someone would want to create a workshop entirely individually with no feedback whatsoever.  My theme for the day seems to be working collaboratively in connecting with fellow librarians to remain knowledgeable and accomplish instructional tasks.

Drawing from the Yelinek, Johnston, and Griffis articles, it looks like creating instructional tutorials, pathfinders, learning models, etc. online is not only beneficial to users, but is also cost-effective.  I would say that librarians working together as a team could most effectively utilize these various free online tools for instruction.  By working as a team, librarians can best anticipate users' needs by coming from multiple perspectives.  Hopefully as a team, the amount of time spent on creating an online tutorial could be lessened, and by using free online tools, the total cost of money and time would be quite low.  Users could greatly benefit in learning something new from such an efficient creation.