After playing with Infogr.am for a bit to get used to it, I decided to do some more in-depth statistical research on social media use among young adults. One issue that I kept encountering this spring among college students was trying to create citations for social media stories (e.g. Twitter). That set off ye olde lightbulb; how many adults access news through social media?

Thanks to a great Pew Research survey, I was able to compile the following infographic on the prevalence of social media as a news source among adults. Why is this important for library professionals? Part of my responsibilities include fostering critical thinking among my students through library instruction and one-on-one consultations. If my patrons, my students, do not have those critical thinking skills, they could possibly use flawed news & data provided by these social media sites as “real”. This is an emerging issue, for sure.

(This was admittedly the first thing that came to mind after I found out one of our assignments was creating an avatar.)

I’m an avid gamer, so I thought I’d branch out a bit with my avatar. I created mine using the RPG Creator on DollDivine.com!

It’s simple, but if you cartoon-i-fied me, you’d come out with something pretty similar.

…okay, you know I had to put some Batgirl, as drawn by Bruce Timm, in here. Babs is my heroine.

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.