Sunday, December 7, 2008

ACRL Assessment Immersion notes part one

I had the very good fortune to have attended the ACRL Assessment Immersion in Nashville, TN the past 4 days, and I must say it has really been exceedingly helpful. I had attended an Immersion for Teaching a few years back, and found it was a very important experience in terms of my development as a teacher.

And my expectations were pretty much exceeded in regards to the amount of useable information that I will be taking back with me. Our Teachers/Leaders are Anne Zald, Deb Gilchrist, Megan Oakleaf, and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe.

The only hard part of immersion is the gruelling schedule, which goes from 8.30 in the morning to 9pm at night (with meals and breaks of course). But as an experience for someone who will be doing assessments, in terms of what you learn, and how you learn it, it is literally the best thing you can do to get a thorough balanced overview and also practical tools.

I am snatching a few moments in our final day to note a few things that pop up in my head, but probably when i have more time to reflect and collect my thoughts, I should have a little more.

One of the main revelations for me was learning of the existence of database/assessment collection/data management systems like Zoho, which appears to be a Google docs like version of Access. This is definitely something I'd like to look at for our library.

So, we are about to do an activity, so I will wrap this up for now. :)