Library Gazette

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!

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

After midwinter, I came back to a busy week of teaching. But the presentation that I was focused on the most was for the Teaching and Learning Center. It was the first presentation that I have done with them, and we had 27 people signed up to attend! The group was fairly chatty, so instead of a presentation I facilitated a discussion. In case anyone is interested, here are the materials I created for the session:

The presentation:

And here’s the (non-copyrighted part) of the handout:

View Syllabus Handout on Scribd

It was a fun time, and a nice opportunity to collaborate with the TLC. If you have syllabi questions, please let me know!

On Wednesday, April 2^nd, the Teaching and Learning Center held a session in room 204 on Blogs and Wikis@ZSR. Eight faculty members attended this event where two other faculty members, Professor Christa Colyer of Chemistry and Professor Stephanie Pellet of Romance Languages, presented how they are using Wikis and Blogs from ZSR in their classes this semester.In this one hour session, Professor Colyer showed the blog her first-year seminar has created. Each student posts on recent developments in science that are in the news, then students comment on each other’s posts. In the past Professor Colyer has students keep hand-written journals that they turned in monthly for her review. Doing this journaling in a blog has resulted in longer entries from the students and allowed the students to see each other’s posts and comment, something not possible in a hand-written journal. Kevin and I had met with this class back in January to get them started blogging, but it only required a few minutes and they were off and running!

After Professor Colyer showed her class blog, Professor Pellet showed the wiki her class has created for French 345-Langage et Societe. In this class students work in groups and create content that can be used not only by the class, but by anyone. Additionally, Professor Pellet is exploring options for using this same wiki in future classes, having students update and refine the content. Lauren had met with this class early in the semester to get them started using the wiki and that was all it took to get them successfully using it in class.

The faculty who attended the session asked numerous questions and had an excellent discussion of pedagogical issues regarding using blogs and wikis in the classroom. All in all it was a well-received program and we hope to repeat it this summer and next fall!