Library Gazette

On Wednesday, October 7th from 4-7pm members of the Communications department, the Documentary Film Program and the ZSR Library work the WFDD “One Day Wednesday” Pledge Drive! Rosalind Tedford, Mary Beth Lock, Mary Reeves, Chris Burris and I joined a team of students and faculty to work the phones. I even got to talk about my iPhone on the air! We took hundreds of calls and were rewarded with a great dinner from Downtown Thai!

Photo from the WFDD Fall 2009 One Day Wednesday Pledge Drive

I attended the Wednesday, Sept 23rd Campus Climate Survey Meeting in Pugh and since several colleagues could not attend I thought I’d take some notes and post them here!

About 30-35 people attended the session. The review of the instrument described how various work climate elements to provide an overall assessment. As those of us who took the survey will recall, it was based on a 5 point likert scale and had three open items for qualitative data. 1397 surveys were distributed online and in print and 868 were completed. This gave us a better than average (based on the benchmarks) 62 percent completion rate! To ensure annonimity there were options to hide user information such as department or gender. The plan is to do such surveys every two to three years. The organization conducting the survey also does a larger national survey every three years to gather their benchmark data.

The work climate elements in our survey were:

• Affiliation
• Work content
• Career
• Benefits
• Compensation

Together these elements equal the “Work Climate” We had a mean score of 3.54 with a standard deviation of 0.55. We had a 60 percent overall favorabilty, which means 60% of responders averaged a 4 or 5 on their responses.

The full Powerpoint report with data and tables will be on WIN on Thursday, September 24th!

Some of the most positive comments focuses on:

• Fun, challenging work
• PTO, Tuition concession
• Ability to make a difference / to have impact
• Job security and PDC resources
• Beautiful campus
• Less corporate environment

On Wednesday, September 9th, and Thursday September 10th, Barry Davis and I led Google Sites workshops for two sections of Dr. Marsh’s Biomechanics class. Each Fall these two Biomechanics classes are broken into groups that must conduct research and post their hypothesis, methods, results and more on the web. In the past this was an arduous project that required the students to not only master digital video, but also master Adobe Dreamweaver and the basics of good web design!

Now, thanks to Google Sites, which gives users 100MB of web space and an easy to use web interface for web design, the students taking Dr. Marsh’s Biomechanics class this Fall will have the opportunity to create their project as a Google Site rather than using Adobe Dreamweaver. The final hurdle to moving from Dreamweaver to Google Sites was crossed when Barry found a solution for posting Quicktime video using Google Gadgets!

Using Google Sites will allow these students to collaborate on the site, giving everyone the ability to post content. Additionally, students will be able to keep these sites active even after they graduate! Hopefully, the ease of Google Sites will also let them focus on the Biomechanics elements of the project rather than the web design! While some student organizations are now using Google Sites to make their pages easy to update, this project is the first academic use I’ve seen of Google Sites at WFU, but I’m sure it won’t be the last as we see more Google tools used in the classroom, and not just in Lib100!

As the black plastic and noise indicate, the construction to convert the ITC into the IS Service Desk is well under way! The new door to the multimedia lab has been cut and framed allowing the lab to reopen (and offering a great view through the lab windows of the ongoing construction in the rest of the ITC!) Here are a few photos from my iPhone. Better photos (taken by Charles Bombeld, Susan Smith, and others) throughout the building process will be on the ZSR Library Flickr page in the coming weeks!

On Sunday, July 12th, the 34 new student athletes who began classes on the previous Tuesday came to the ZSR Library in small groups of 6-10 students each. They were participating in a program called “Deacon Discovery”, a scavenger hunt around campus to introduce these news students to the various services available at WFU! In the 10-20 minutes I had with each group in Reference, we talked about the services the Library has to offer. We also checked out the Library’s home page and learned how to contact a librarian, find the Library catalog, databases and research guides. After each group was done, they took a picture of me and group in Reference as their scavenger hunt item! It was a fun, fast way to introduce them to ZSR and the services we have to offer!

Starbucks became even more popular than usual on Thursday as the staff with offices in the Wilson Wing of ZSR chose to relocate there due to the power outage resulting from the damaged main transformer for the Wilson WIng. Power outlets were at a premium and power strips became a hot commodity! The study rooms behind Starbucks were put to good use as well!

In addition to room 204, staff found temporary offices in Circulation and room 204 as well as other study spaces throughout the building.

Everyone made the best of the situation and made it a fun and productive day at ZSR!

Lauren Pressley and I led six workshops over three consecutive days this week on web 2.0 topics. These sessions came out of discussions with various members of the campus community who expressed an interest in learning more about everything from social networking applications to creating a podcast. The six workshops were:

1. An Introduction to Web 2.0
2. Social Networking Applications (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn)
3. Google for Collaboration,
4. Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasting at ZSR
5. Using Web 2.0 Content
6. Web 2.0 and Instructional Design

Each session was 90 minutes in length, offering an opportunity to expand beyond the standard lecture format and include more active learning exercises in each session. In the Social Networking Applications workshop I led, the class was given basic instruction on the various applications, then broken into groups that explored a particular application. After exploring that application for 45 minutes the groups gave presentations to the class on that particular social networking application. This gave everyone the chance to explore the application of their choice while still learning about the other applications from the group presentations. The participants were nervous about this format at first, but adjusted quickly as the group began exploring the various applications. Lauren tried a similar model for her session on “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasting at ZSR”, allowing the participants to “play” in our sandbox environment after learning a bit about these tools. For the workshop on “Using Web 2.0 Content” we explored RSS feeds, iGoogle and the actual equipment (camcorders, audio recorders) used to create this content.

All in all it was a successful series of workshop, attended by a variety of staff and faculty. I enjoyed incorporating content from the “Teaching Teaching” workshops Lauren and Roz led in the Spring. We hope to repeat this series of workshops in the Fall semester.

On Friday, April 3rd, the ZSR journal reading group met to discuss the 2009 Horizon Report. The Horizon Report discusses six emerging technologies that are anticipated to enter the mainstream in the next one to five years. The technologies discusses were: Mobiles, Cloud Computing, Geo-Everything, The Personal Web, Semantic-Aware Applications, and Smart Objects. Seven members of the ZSR staff and one member of the Carpenter Library staff had a lively discussion about each of these six issues. Erik led a discussion of the semantic web, helping the group better understand what it is and how it will affect our future. Our discussion of mobiles, specifically the iPhone and the various applications available, made me think the WFU mobileU project was just a bit ahead of its time! Our discussion of cloud computing prompted several of us to mention the recent article about Google’s “home built” servers and their efficiency! All in all it was an engaging discussion all around!

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!

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!