Okay, luddite is the wrong word. I’m not afraid of technology and I don’t hate it in any way, I just don’t know as much about it as I should.
I mean, yeah, I tweet, I facebook, I’m addicted to my feed reader and I’ve had a zillion blogs in my life but I don’t use technology as well as I should in my work life.

I’m an instruction librarian, working mainly with the faculties of medicine and nursing at the University of Toronto.I teach information literacy sessions that are integrated into the curriculum as much as the course allows, and upload support materials into the course management software we use here at U of T (Blackboard). Fine. But, I haven’t yet jumped into online education, or e-learning or whatever it’s called aside from attending a couple of workshops and putting up links to our documents. Not good enough, in my opinion.

This spring, a few of my favorite colleagues in Medicine, Educational Technology, and the library and I won a grant to produce some online modules in information literacy for medical students. As co-principal investigator I really need to get my ass in gear and learn this shit. Ahem.

To that end, I’m spending a day a week in the Discovery Commons, the Educational Technology department within the Faculty of Medicine working in close proximity to co-investigator Avi Hyman and the technical experts I’ll be working with. So here I am at 3pm on my first day here and my brain is tired. I’ve been able to think and read and search for information in a way that I can’t seem to do in my own office or at home and am thinking about how to chunk the content so it’s manageable but that the chunks can work as stand-alone pieces as much as possible. Which platform to load it in, what the concept for delivery is and how to prove it. Ow, brain hurty.

I think I’ve got a couple of weeks before I’m really in th groove with this project. I need to do some more reading but at the same time get moving on the project work so that we can meet our deadline. Today I feel like I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know, you know?

One cool and easy to describe thing that I learned about today is Basecamp – the project management software we’re using. It’s a file storing and saving service, and I think it’s an example of cloud computing (buzz buzz). It’s much more professional looking than Google Docs, but you still need the individual applications to create documents like Word or Excel AND you need to pay for it. Neat though.

I hope to post weekly on my days here, to give you a picture of the learning process involved with creating e-learning modules when you’re not as technically inclined so stay tuned…