Library Gazette

On Wednesday, February 25th the Wake Forest University Teaching and Learning Center sponsored a fair in Benson to provide an opportunity for members of the campus community to learn about the pedagogy, techniques, and tools currently in use by faculty. Lauren Pressley served as the representative from the ZSR Library and had an excellent display entitled “Teaching Information Skills in the 21st Century”. Lauren showed how librarians are using blogs, wikis, social networking sited and multimedia to create engaging learning environments for students. Many staff from the ZSR Library attended the event. Susan, Roz and I walked to Benson together and saw many other librarians engaged in conversations with the presenters.

Some of the displayed we saw at the fair included Leah Roy’s “ClassAct: Bringing Dramatic Literature to Life” which described an interdisciplinary theatre class that involves the ClassAct students acting out scenes from works related to the host class. Often the scene is delivered in a variety of ways that bring particular themes or concepts to light for the host class.

Sharon Woodard from Health and Excercise Science had a display on using the Turning Technologies Turning Point clickers in HES, and Jule Connolly from Mathematics had information about the newly formed “Math Center” to offer services similar to the Writing Center to Math students.

The fair was a great way to see what types of creative learning tools are already in use at Wake Forest, and it was a great place to get new ideas for engaging learners in the classroom!

Yesterday the Teaching and Learning Center hosted it’s annual Teaching and Learning Fair. The library had a booth, and as the library liaison, I chatted with attendees about some of the interesting and innovative ways that library staff teach their classes. Here are the slides that I used on the poster:

Many visitors were really interested in using blogs, wikis, google docs, or podcasting in their classes. In those cases, I made sure they had the information they needed in case they want to use the library hosted blogs/wikis/podcasts in their own classes.

The fair was a great opportunity to share what we’re doing, and talk up some of the tools and services we offer. Hopefully, we’ll see an increase in interest in some of these tools as a result of the fair. And if your faculty want to incorporate blogs, wikis, or podcasts, please let them know that we’re here to help!

Person Recognized

Renata Evans

Given By

Julia Bradford

Reason

Cheerfully helping me the two times I asked for help with retrieving something from off site storage.

Person Recognized

Mary Reeves

Given By

Lynn Sutton

Reason

For being so cooperative in taking on an extra program for the Library Lecture series - when she could have hit me instead!

Person Recognized

Carolyn Mccallum

Given By

Lynn Sutton

Reason

For being so cooperative in taking on an extra program for the Library Lecture series! Thank you!

Person Recognized

Scott Adair

Given By

Mary Reeves

Reason

Thank you for being my extraordinary, personal proof-reader.

Person Recognized

Renate Evans

Given By

Jane Stribling

Reason

Renate helped a work-study student and myself get several bins of heavy journals out to the student's car by "driving" a very "user-unfriendly" book truck for us. Her assistance was very much appreciated.

Person Recognized

Kevin Gilbertson

Given By

Mary Beth

Reason

Kevin worked hard to get the "New Books" feature up and then extended it to include "New DVDs" soon thereafter. Kevin's creativity and talent really shines. And we all love the service!

Person Recognized

Ellen Makaravage

Given By

Susan Smith

Reason

Ellen has volunteered to help clean up outstanding government documents/microtext processing problems. This is a task that was evidently daunting to everyone in the past, as there are outstanding items dating back to 2007, so we ( me, Roz, Mary Scanlon & Steve Kelley) are totally appreciative of Ellen's enthusiasm in taking on this challenge.

Person Recognized

Heather Gillette

Given By

Mary Beth Lock

Reason

Heather cleaned up restrooms on Monday morning that had been heavily used since Friday night's "Get Game." She went above and beyond the call of duty when she couldn't find Samantha around to help.

Person Recognized

Susan Smith

Given By

Lauren P.

Reason

Thanks for being part of Gary Miller's Podcasting class! Susan saved the day with quick thinking when we had a software issue that affected four of the computers in the room.

Person Recognized

Elise Anderson

Given By

Ellen Daugman

Reason

Generous guidance and support in multiple Presidential Grant processes.

Person Recognized

Judy Simmons Dedicated Deacon Winner

Given By

Patty Strickland

Reason

Judy, while showing me how to do a new job in OCLC showed me a button that has made getting the dovernment documents done easier and quicker. Becasue of her I do not have to edit every single record. Thank you is not enough.

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Scott

Reason

Craig helped get the Mandelbaum gift books. He packed,loaded,unloaded and put his truck at our disposal. What a mensch!

Person Recognized

Elise

Given By

Scott

Reason

Elise helped retrieve gift books from Dr, Mandelbaum's apartment. She packed, loaded, unloaded and put her car & student worker at our disposal.

Person Recognized

Mary Beth

Given By

Scott

Reason

Mary Beth helped get the gift books from Dr. Mandelbaums apartment. She packed, loaded and unloaded.

Person Recognized

Tim

Given By

Scott

Reason

Tim helped us unload heavy boxes of gift books on Friday the 13th.

Person Recognized

Prentice

Given By

Scott

Reason

Prentice helped us unload heavy boxes of gift books and move heavy microfilm cabinets.

Person Recognized

Mary Beth Lock

Given By

Mary Reeves

Reason

Thank you for all you did to keep Reserves/Media going during my recent absence.

Person Recognized

Renate Evans

Given By

Mary Reeves

Reason

Thank you for all you did to keep Reserves/Media going during my absence.

Person Recognized

Heather Gillette

Given By

Mary Reeves

Reason

Thank you for all you did to keep Reserves/Media going during my absence.

Person Recognized

Carolyn Mccallum

Given By

Mary Reeves

Reason

Thank you for taking care of everything for the Nina Lucas lecture when I could not be here to help.

Person Recognized

Barry Davis

Given By

Mary Reeves & Carolyn Mccallum

Reason

Thank you Barry for video and audio recording the Library Lecture Series' guest speakers, assisting with the burning of DVD copies for our speakers who request them, and converting the recordings to computer files that can then be posted on our Library Lecture Series web page. We truly appreciate all that you do for the Library Lecture Series.

Those of you who talk with me about ALA know that I feel very strongly about eParticipation, or allowing ALA members to participate virtually. So, it was great fun for me to pull together a talk on ALA’s eParticipation trends for this month’s Emerging Tech Talk. Here’s the presentation:

I was going for a few main ideas: the move towards eParticipation has a lot to do with an interest in making the organization more open and transparent, that eParticipation would allow more people to be involved, and that eParticipation isn’t too difficult. I also just wanted to touch on a few tools that folks are using so that everyone would at least recognize the names of them.

We talked about a number of tools, from Google Docs, Twitter, to CoverItLive. Susan found a funny comic when I was waxing poetic about how I love blogs and Twitter.

Out of this came several new talk ideas. Next month we’ll do Facebook, so if you have questions (about privacy settings, hooking it up to Twitter, etiquitte, etc) just send me an email, and I’ll incorporate it into the talk.

Another good idea was to take a few of these tools and do a session where we’re really actually using them. I’m looking into if that makes sense for the monthly Thursday Emerging Tech Talks, but might do stand alone sessions on them.

Please feel free to let me know if you have questions!

Update:

And here are the Twitter responses!

“Any time we either produce or understand an utterance of any reasonable length, we are employing dozens if not hundreds of categories: categories of speech sounds, of words, of phrases and clauses, as well as conceptual categories. Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual live” — George Lakoff - Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Categories in the library staff wiki help us automatically organize our pages. There are special pages such as

• Special:Categories
• Category:Technology_support

that are automatically created when you use categories on your wiki pages. This makes it alot easier to find and re-find that important piece of information!

To create a category, enter the following tags at the bottom of you wiki pages [[category:name]]. For example, putting [[category:technology support]] on a page will have it automatically show up on the technology support page.

Tag away & have fun . . . . .

This year I have been able to do a little more work with the Teaching and Learning Center as their library liaison. This has been fun for me, and a good chance to look for opportunities where the library and the TLC can work together on projects that help both organizations with our missions.

Today kicked off one of these projects, and one I’ve been looking forward to for a few semesters.

Every month, on the third Tuesday at 11:00 am, we’re holding an informal Educational Technology Discussion Group. This morning the TLC provided coffee, cookies, and chairs, and a group of 16 got together to discuss the use of educational technology. About half the group were teaching faculty, and the other half were ITGs.

This morning’s conversations focused on the uses of blogs and wikis to enhance out-of-class learning, multimedia projects, clickers, Sakai, and a number of other less widely-used tools. I was thrilled to hear that so many library hosted blogs and wikis have been positive experiences for the faculty in attendance, and glad to know that our willingness to go into classrooms to teach the nuts and bolts of these tools, along with multimedia and podcasting projects, has meant that faculty are more at ease using these tools in their classes.

We also talked about issues that I think of as intimately related to information literacy. The discussion touched on privacy issues, publishing in a Web 2.0 world, finding and creating information on the Internet, and information life skills (such as how to find information to teach oneself how to use a new technology). I tried to pipe up as much as was reasonable on these issues, because as far as I’m concerned, they’re all information literacy related.

Towards the end of the session we discussed how to get more faculty involved in doing these types of projects and joining the group. Two refrains I heard were to (1) help faculty realize that it really is easy to integrate these tools (2) help faculty realize that, if structured correctly, the use of some of these tools will actually save time in teaching/grading the course. These, to me, come down to instructional design issues, so now I’m mulling over how to make this case more effectively, and to a larger audience at the University.

I would love to see more library teachers there next time. I know we’re doing some amazing things with educational technologies in a number of our classes, and this would be a great venue to share ideas, get new ones, and let people know how the library can support this type of work. If you’re interested, here is the next meeting information:

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY DISCUSSION GROUP MONTHLY MEETINGS
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Time: 11:00 A.M.
Location: Teaching and Learning Center, Room 330, ZSR Library

On Friday, January 30th, the ZSR Library hosted its eighth game night and third tournament! Susan Smith, Tim Mitchell, Barry Davis and myself worked the event. John Vientos, an intrepid Information Systems staff member, also volunteered and worked the event! This game night and tournament was different from previous events as we used only the west side of the atrium and the adjacent study rooms. For most of the evening we had fours screens going in the Atrium and one study room in use. Using only half the atrium gave the event a more intimate feel. There were 33 participants over the course of the evening, (about 9 kids and 24 students) and we even had some participation by ZSR staff who brought their kids!

Super Smash Brothers Brawl was chosen by the students as the game for the tournament and Barry Davis did a masterful job managing the tournament play and the brackets! The Super Smash Brothers Brawl Tournament winner was Brandon Turner! (His name will go on the tournament trophy in the lobby!) Both the students and staff at the event seemed to have an entertaining evening!

We have recently added a new page to the library website: Professional Achievement, a running list of staff publications and presentations. While many of the items can also be found in the most recent annual report, we hope the list continues to grow, to highlight our contributions to librarianship. So send us your latest and watch the list grow.