Our first assignment for my LIS 635 course was to both establish a blog and craft an Essential Question that will guide our personal direction during this whirlwind five weeks.

Blog; established. Welcome to GlennBradley.net, my official website! Currently, I’m running a generic template on top of an install of WordPress as a stopgap while I attempt (keyword: attempt) to develop a theme of my own using Bootstrap. It’s a longstanding project, as this wonderful thing called nearly-full-time-work-and-a-full-time-class-load keeps getting in my way. But anyhow, welcome to my blog!

Now for the Essential Question. As you can garner from my Resumé and About Me pages, I work in an academic library as a part of the public services division. My responsibilities revolve around engaging our users through library services and instruction on both a classroom level and one-on-one. I work with a wide variety of ages and skill levels, but a commonality I keep seeing between these demographics is the prevalence of technology, specifically social media and technology.

Thusly, my EQ is directly tied to my aforementioned work and my passion for information access: How can I/we incorporate the evolving slate of “2.0” technologies, including social media, to build critical thinking skills among my/our students/patrons? Think of it this way; the way we access information is constantly involving. For my students at least, Twitter news feeds are replacing the traditional newsprint papers for ease of access. We can access these bits of information quickly, but providing students with a toolkit to better understand how to construct these bits of information into a feasible understanding is paramount to my responsibilities as an instructional librarian.