Embedded technologists

I'm here at Canada Moodle Moot and one of the jobs that keeps coming up is an embedded technologist: someone who helps educators understand technology and how technology can be used in education. Now, many of the people here who are introducing themselves as embedded technologists are former teachers, or current instructional designers, but there is a place for librarians at the table.

There are embedded librarians who are bringing reference into the distance learning classroom, as part of their work as reference librarians. It appears that there could be additional job options available for a librarian who can also work as an instructional designer, showing how to use technology to enhance pedagogy.

What are they doing? Embedded technologists are showing teachers/professors and students how to use the features of the elearning application that their school is using (or help support a feral LMS). For example, they would help a teacher cut and paste embed text into the HTML block in Moodle  to get a Twitter stream into a Moodle course. They would also explain why the instructor might want to use Twitter to teach.

This is another option for technology oriented librarians who have background as educators (though you might not need a background as an educator if you have the technology chops) to become an embedded technologist.

I am not a fan of the idea that you can go back to school to wait out a bad economy, but I do have an additional degree in instructional design, so I have also provided a link so you can do more research on schools (US) that offer graduate degrees in instructional design.