Professional Development

My presentation was scheduled for that most hated time….last slot, last day. I was sure it would be me and the two people who couldn’t get flights out until Sunday, but in actuality I had between 60 and 70 people attend and they were an enthusiastic and appreciative group. My topic was two-fold. First I was discussing rethinking the pure annotated bibliography as a final project for library instruction (or any lower level course, for that matter). Second, I was discussing using wikis and Google Docs in our LIB100 classes. There was some familiarity with Google Docs in the crowd but MUCH enthusiasm for my demo and my ability to answer questions. There was also a lively discussion of the annotated bibliography and new ways to approach similar skills with more relevant assignments. So it was a success and I was so pleased to be able to give others some new ideas, as I had been offered so many in the presentations I had attended.

It was a really useful conference to me — it is nice to be in a place where everyone does the same thing. You don’t have to introduce the concept of Information Literacy, and when people say ‘one-shot’ everyone knows what you are talking about. And the sessions gave me a lot to chew on over the summer as I prepare for my ACRL Intentional Teacher Immersion and work on improving our LIB100 and LIB200 curriculum. But for now….that’s all on LOEX….I have bigger fish to fry in the next few days….

This excellent presentation was done by two librarians at NCSU: Scott Warren, the Assoc. Director of the Textiles Library and Engineering Sciences and Kim Duckett, Digital Technologies and Learning Librarian.

What they have done is to expand on our discussion of the economics of information and scholarly publishing for an upper-level english class on communication in the sciences. Here’s what they do:

• Want to convey to students that their tuition $$ goes to things that the general public cannot afford. They are privileged by their association with an institution and a library and that can give them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
• Focus on Discovery (what Google Scholar is for) and Access (what the library pays for)
• Find that students who run into a fee from a Google Scholar link move on to something else until they find something for free.
• They focus on discussing with the students WHY articles, journals and databases cost money — the library is a business — we purchase these things on their behalf (and with their money)
• They provide a larger context to peer review discussion including rejection rates, page rates, ‘not all journals are created equal,’ royalties, ownership, etc. to give them a sense of the culture of scholarly publishing, not just the process
• Ask Why can publishers charge so much? and Why do we pay it?
• Ask If we pay so much, do you think the publishers are giving it away for free on the web??
• Kim uses a great deep web metaphor to explain how Google scholar works vs. online databases

While we already do some of what they are doing in our LIB100 classes — this encouraged me to give it more context — business models make sense to students (they pay, for example, for iTunes songs) so work with that. Especially for our LIB200 classes, this discussion becomes even more important to have.

Good metaphor: the journal is the CD, the journal article is the MP3 of one of the songs….

Robin L. Ewing and Melissa Prescott from St. Cloud State

Web 2.0 Definition (won’t regurgitate this - the basics - Social networking, bookmarking, tagging, communicating, RSS, etc.)

Web 2.0 Surveys 2007

Teens and Social Media from Pew Internet and American Life

Creating and Connecting from National School Board survey

• 64% online teens have created Web 2.0 content
• Approx. 30% of online students have their own blogs
• 22% have uploaded videos they have created

Their own Web 2.0 Awareness Survey

74 students

Awarness of Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, Podcasts, Social tagging, Wikipedia, Other Wikis, RSS

• RSS had not heard of 92%, 0% had ever used
• Social Bookmarking 68% had not heard of
• Other Wikis 45% had not heard of
• Podcasts 51% had heard of but had not used
• 5% had blogs
• 8% had uploaded videos

Audience discussed how their students compare - similar experiences — students are not seeing new technologies as ‘exciting’ the way librarians do….for them it’s like a new feature on a car — or a refrigerator…..

Librarians respond to Web 2.0 — we see it as a way to connect, market, facilitate — but do students want us there?

Wanted to use credit courses to introduce Web 2.0 concepts and applications, identify tools to discuss with them but not have them create the content or evaluate

Devoted the last 5 minutes of each class to Web 2.0 technology - overview and example — used PPT presentations, or Social Bookmarking YouTube videos (In Plain English series)….. sometimes also did in-class exercises

Virtual Library Tour

• Had students take the pictures (check out the cameras from Circ) …..upload to Flickr….. tag….
• Set up a Flicker account for the class
• Assigned them to groups
• Gave each a camera
• Instructor uploaded them to Flickr
• Tagging happened later in the semester
• Now they do a short tour - students upload the pcitures - students add tags and notes — http://www.flickr.com/photos/13167481@N03
• Practice tagging with Google Image Labeler

Social Bookmarking

PPT - definition, video — in class they signed up for account and tagged some sites

Podcasting

Online article — Online May/June 31-31 — Bennington, Adam. 2007. Stick it in your ear: Keeping current with Podcases

Had them listen to a podcast and then evaluated it in class….

Next Steps

Connect Web 2.0 Resources to student research

• Blogs as research logs
• Wikipedia article creation
• 23 Things idea….
• Short readings ‘7ThingsYour Should Know about…..” from EDUCAUSE outside of class and come into class ready to discuss

Implications for IL Instruction

Evaluation of Information from Web 2.0 Sources needs to be considered - not easy to get a checklist format for this.

This was a great session because it confirmed my hunch that students don’t use Web 2.0 the  way librarians use it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant to their research in certain circumstances. I really love the idea of having the students take pictures of the library and then use the concept of tagging to introduce the concept of controlled vocabularies.  I also got some other good ideas about how to approach the topics with students by starting with things we know they do (read their updates in Facebook) and applying that to other Web 2.0 technologies (RSS Feeds).

This presentation, from Elmhurst College, called Laying an Ethical Foundation: Information Ethics as a Good Beginning –

IL in a first-year seminar (new program to Elmhurst) –

• Dean brought it into the curriculum
• Went to First Year Experience conference (in Hawaii!!!)
• Partnered with Student Affairs personnel
• Wanted FYS to be very academic in nature (rather than an extended orientation class)
• 4 pilot classes (Business, Geology, Education, Rhetoric/Composition)
• Rhetoric/Comp Professor was an honors section “Exploring Chicago” — place as text — history/politics/economics/culture/immigrants
• All 4 sections taught at the same time — they would get them together for larger discussions
• For all 4 classes - 5 specific goals
  • Articulate an understanding of the value of a liberal arts education and its synergy with professional preparation.
    • Liberal Arts Articles
    • The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World– common text
    • Class Reflections
    • Final Synthesis Paper
  • React ethically to varied perspectives and experiences to stimulate intellectual curiosity and to expand cultural awareness
    • Attendance at campus events and reaction papers
    • off-campus trips that required critical & reflective thinking about the experience
  • Respond critically to varied texts from different disciplinary speheres of knowledge and perspectives
    • critical examination of readings from many different perspectives
  • Contribute to the campus and/or society through varied means including civic engagement
  • Articulate and demonstrate ways to ethically gather, synthesize and present information in school, work and life
• Last goal was Information Literacy — library partnership
• Focus on access and evaluation in first year programs results in lack of time for consideration of communication and ethics
• College’s mission to teach ethics and values
• Millennial students as creators and users of information
• Goals of the Information Literacy Module
  • Engage students where they are
  • Prompt them to think about information ethics
• 3 blog assignments
  • Academic dishonesty — group discussion, followed by reflective writing
  • Sources of information — critical thinking exercise on web-based resources — analyze Wikipedia and Britannica entries
  • Ownership of information - blog ‘reports’ on events with multimedia component

Results (Librarian Perspective):

• Most students completed blog assignments
• Used information ethically
• Did not comment on each others posts -
• Did not use this blog for other assignments or recreationally
• Resistance to blogging
• Engaged students in learning with librarians
• Embedded librarian in a course
• Introduced information ethics as part of information literacy
• established information literacy as essential skill in gen ed revision
• Importance of integrating information literacy instruction with ocourse content
• collaborative course design
• understanding faculty styles

Results (faculty perspective)

• Very positive
• Supportive expertise
  • In-depth knowledge of most current reference materials
  • Understand best practices regarding ethical use of resources, source evaluation, citation, etc.
  • experience with the latest technology
• Enhanced academic experience
  • Integrated instruction
  • content focused
• Class blog
  • resources materials
  • student postings

Results (student perspective)

• Initially anxious about research and the technology
• Glad (and surprised) to know the librarian knew more about blogs than students
• Learned a lot from in-depth exploration of mis-use of information….. ‘don’t cheat’ does not make students understand the use and misuse of information
• Librarian contact and instruction took away the excuse ‘I didn’t know how to find the research’ –
• Students connected with each other…..through exploring Chicago, etc.
• Time in class might have made students read each others postings
• If more assignments had used them, students may have been more comfortable….
• Blogs did help students synthesize the information…..

Next Year

• expanding to 8 sections then to 28 sections for all students
• assignments will be more integrated with course content
• spread workload out over librarians
• follow up with students over the summer

Q & A

1 librarian assigned to all 4 sections

went to most of the common sessions

did grade blog assignments

workshop for faculty beforehand on blogs

Interesting discussion about whether the blogs should be public……

Arrived at the Doubletree at Oak Brook, IL this morning after a bit of R&R with my sister including an outstanding Comedy of Errors at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre….but now it’s two days of Library Instruction ideas.
LOEX, for those who don’t know, used to stand for Library Orientation Exchange….now it’s more of an acronym (think OCLC) for an organization and an annual conference on instruction and information literacy in libraries. After a good breakfast, we had a wonderful opening speaker, Laurel Orfstein, an instructor in the Loyola MBA school with an emphasis on creativity in business and decision making. The presentation was wonderful and thought provoking - here are the high points…..

• 82% of White Collar workers collaborate on a daily basis
• People don’t REALLY love new ideas - they tend to fall back on old one — the promise of new outcomes rarely outweighs the comfort of old processes….
• Roadblocks to new ideas can come from indifference, outright rejection or killer phrases like ‘It’s not in the budget,” “We tried that before….” “get a committee to look into that” and my favorite ‘But we’ve always done it this way’
• Idea shortages in organizations are often self-inflicted
• Creative approaches to Collaboration….
  • Be open to possibilities
  • Include Different Viewpoints
  • Start with WILD ideas
• Cultures that foster new ideas include
  • Challenge and Involvement: Meaningfulness vs. Disengagement — to what degree are people personally involved in teh business of and in the success of the organization?
  • Freedom - Autonomy vs. Strict Guidelines: to what degree do people have the autonomy to define much of their own work toward the common objective?
  • Idea Time - Slack vs. Tightness: To what degree do people take time to consider suggestions that are not part of their assignment?
  • Idea Support - Resources vs. automatic no: To what degree are new ideas greeted with affirming encouragement as opposed to judgments?
  • Degree of Conflict — Tension vs. Acceptance: To what degree do people engage in departmental ‘warfare’ of spend effort to ‘best’ their internal competitors
  • Discussion - Participative vs. Authoritarian — To what degree do people engage in lively discussion about the issues as aopposed to discussing each other?
  • Humor & Play — Spontaneity vs. Gravity — To what degree do people feel relaxed and are willing to express humor and tell jokes at work?
  • Trust and Openness — Being Frank vs. Suspicious: To what degree do people willing put forward their ideas and opinions?
  • Risk-Taking — Trying things vs. Being Cautious and Hesitant:To what degree do people feel supported to take a gamble when there is ambiguity?
• To encourage creative thinking focus on dreaming of an ideal tomorrow — instead of starting where you are and going forward — start with where you want to be and work out the steps backward from there.
• Ask “Wouldn’t it be nice if…..” to spark creative thinking about change instead of focusing on what you want to change.

We then did an interesting exercise where everyone at our tables wrote three statements about the future of an information literacy program beginning with the phrase “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” then we gathered our responses together and read them outloud. Common themes emerged at our table:

• Need for appropriate instruction spaces
• frustration at faculty
• Desire to meet the students where they are
• Keeping students engaged

All in all it was a very interesting session that gave me some good ideas for analyzing where we are in the LIB100/LIB200 arena and also where we are in the one-shot library instruction space.

I was able to attend a program on Monday! I went to “Once upon a Furl in a Podcast Long Ago: Using New Technologies to Support Library Instruction.” Not only was this program all about some of my favorite topics (technology in education), but it was sponsored by the Women’s Studies Section (my home within ACRL).

The program started with awards. This year’s WSS award for significant achievement in Women’s Studies Librarianship went to Jennifer Gilley, Kayo Denda, Jenna Freedman, and Sharon Ladenson for their 2006 NWSA Conference presentation. This was a presentation at an academic conference for Women and Gender Studies scholars focusing on library research. The WSS award for career achievement in Women’s Studies Librarianship went to Sandy River, long time, active member. In her speech she talked about how WSS gave her a home in ALA and how she has received at least as much from WSS as she has given. Her speech really resonated with me because the WSS committee was the one that really brought me into the fold right away. It’s a great group of people, and they’re doing really great things at their institutions and in ACRL.

After the awards section, the program began. This was an overwhelmingly popular program! The crowd overflowed and the hotel staff had to take down one of the walls to make more room. I took a lot of notes, so I’ll try to keep it to the point (with links for more information) here:

From Joan K. Lippincott:

• We’re at a critical point where we need to fundamentally rethink our services & information literacy
• Emphasize information and content, technology as vehicle
• What about non-traditional students who aren’t connected? They will need to be to function in today’s business world, so we should work to teach them to use these technologies.
  Convergence of literacies: Written Literacy, Information Literacy, Technology Literacy, Visual Literacy
• Pointed towards MacArthur Foundation Project (Digital Media and Learning)
  Areas to consider (New T&L Partnerships): Center for Teaching and Learning, New Media Center, Instructional Technology Group, FIlm or Multimedia Studies Department (on our own campuses)
• Columbia’s Shakespeare & the Book: Study Environment
• Georgetown U, CNDLS
• LINK Dartmouth RWIT: Center for research, writing, and IT (one stop shopping)
• New Resources like PennTags, TeamSpot (at Stanford), Student Multi-media Design Center (U. Delaware), Practice Presentation Room (Georgia Tech)
• We’re changing focus: from teaching about access to library resources to teaching about access to information and tools (Amen!)
• Data for visualization is going to become more important in all fields
• Webcasts, podcasts, blogs, images, etc. are rich resources for students, do we connect them to this type of resource, or limit our reference to library-purchased information?
• Research Channel videos (high level academic content)
• D-Lib article on Wikipedia to extend access to digital collections
• Georgetown portal for community based research (about Washington DC)
• George Mason History Tools
• Showing information
• Digital collections as screensavers on library computers
• NCSU Learning Commons eBoards images
• Changing focus: from teaching policies as rules, to focusing on policy awareness and discussion
• Media Education Foundation’s fair(y) use tale
• UPenn Library mashup Contest in conjunction with LL’s Free Culture
• Creative Commons Licensing (are we teaching our students? grad students?)
• Cornell’s Thoughts on Facebook (are we sharing our thoughts on these issues with our students?)
• Methods: online tutorials, online games, contest, social networking sites, students collect resource before class & jointly critique, simulation, instruction in virtual worlds
  supporting materials: social sites like blogs developed by students, wikis, etc
• Challenges for faculty: interest in inserting skills in faculty curriculum, willingness to collaborate, acceptance of new forms of projects, developing of grading for new forms of expressions
• Challenges for librarians: broaden conception of information literacy, convergence, overall service program, not just classes, engagement in collaborative learning with students, development of new skills, promoting services to faculty
• We must transform information literacy!
• We will have to let go of some things (We can’t keep doing all we’ve done & add new, have to decide what to stop doing)
• Assist in student transition from recreational use of technology to academic use
• Provide with environment with engage students (both physically and virtually)
• Promote creativity

From Dr. Kathleen Burnett:

• 10 years from now the field of librarianship will mostly be digital natives
• “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach .” Mark Prensky
• Digital Natives assume connectivity & see the world through he lens of games and play.
• “Over the past 20 years, young adults have declined from being the most likely to read literature to those least likely. The rate of decline for the youngest adults, aged 18 to 24 was 55% greater than the total adult population. ” Kelly Hill
• “Even if the lecturer is charismatic, holding the attention of students for an entire lecture of fifty minutes or longer is impossible.” Joel Foreman
• “It is clear from talking with them that they already know they don’t want to live and work the way we do. ” Brian O’Reilly (However LIS enrollment is increasing and age of first enrollment is lower than it has ever been.)
• Cited D. Oblinger’s research of learning preferences
• Ideal learning situation: customizable, immediate feedback, constructive to explore learning environments, motivates students to persist in excess of any externally imposed requirements, builds enduring conceptual structures. (Joel Forman)
• Strategies: interaction & feedback, engage, accelerate, experiential learning, increase options, peer-to-peer, more “pull” web based options, more interactive multimedia.
• Suggestions for implementation:
• Podcasts & vodcasts: bring other voices and faces into discussion, or students can create presentations
• Blogs & social networks: support class and discussion, or extend bounds of classroom (invite other participants), or to encourage individual responsibility for information
• Wikis: support collaborative development of info resources and dissemination of information, or to teach consensus building and teamwork
• Games and simulations: explore relationship between physical and virtual, or to teach the concepts of programming or to engage kinetic and spatial learners
• Pew Internet & American Life Project: Web 2.0 Users
• Men and women balanced in Omnivore, Females tend to be Connectors
• This indicates we’re equalizing in terms of computer use skills in some ways

From Kathryn Shaughnessy:

This presentation was based on a specific distance program at St. John’s University. I’m only noting things that would be useful to us, too:

• Used technology to improve library instruct: creation, distribution, and impact
• Used open source alternatives that could be continue to be used after graduation
• Again, brought up the synthesis of literacies
• Technologies of choice: Captivate for tutorials, Audacity for podcasts, Wordpress for blogging, PBwiki or Wikipm for wikis, also RSS, RefWorks, Skype, del.icio.us tagging, and courseware.
• Said that if you only had time to learn one technology in the coming year, she would say “RSS, all the way.” This resonates with my “RSS will change your life!”
• Updated Information Literacy (Modular) Tutorial in Captivate (with images, text, and demonstration)
• Academic Podcasting Initiative
• Uses RefWorks to generate RSS for courses. I wonder if there would be a way to do this for our podcasting pilot using EndNote Web?
• del.icio.us for course bookmarks
• Skype was the second most important technology according to Shaughnessy, certainly could be useful for distance education with our abroad houses (particularly with camera)
• St. John’s uses podlinez to do an audio tour of library that you can dial into on your cell phone

From Heather Tompkins:

• WGS as interdisciplinary: cutting edge, CV not yet developed, falls outside traditional resources, breaks down expert/novice barriers, emphasizes connections and process, considers materials informally published
• She explained social bookmarking as a way to share bookmarks across the library professionally. Do you use del.icio.us or furl? Let me know, i’ll add you to my network! (My del.icio.us account username is laurenpressley)
• Pulls social bookmarks to library page
• Used Flickr to annotate floor maps of the library for her specific disciplines
• Pointed to Google customized search engine
• Pointed to meebo widget and Google Calendar
• There is a potential information literacy tie in: looking at friends’ friends is like citation research, a blogroll is like bibliography, tagging is like controlled vocab, etc.

So, to be honest, I assumed I would know everything that this session would about, and I attended mostly just to be supportive. However, it was a really really good session! The speakers articulated ideas well and shared several new ones!

Not a lot to report here (again, unless you want the inner workings of a committee group). We have a bunch of new, enthusiastic members (YAY!), and are planning on going forward on our Information Literacy Standards project. We want to rewrite the standards for people in Women and Gender Studies. We must be onto something, because a few months after we came up with the idea, we found out that ACRL is planning on working on a project like this for all the represented subject areas. It’s a daunting process, so in the next 3-6 months we’re only going to work on a literature review. And, just so you can know that I’m involved, we’re going to set up a Moodle account for communication and a wiki for document drafts.

Kevin here, in Chapel Hill for the next couple of days at DigCCurr 2007, an international symposium on digital curation.

On the bus ride to tonight’s reception at Wilson Library, I spoke briefly with a librarian from the University of Kansas who described a freshman honors tutorial she teaches. Unrelated to digital curation, the course, which examines the nature of information as information ecologies, pursues the (re)invigoration and expansion of our understanding of “information”, moving it outside the library’s range of scholarly information to encompass genetic material, cultural memory, and questions of history, etc. and supplementing it with concepts from biological ecologies, such as diversity and coevolution. She also mentioned that she uses contract grading, where each student accepts a grade letter contract and the work that the specific contract requires.

Panel discussion: Tapping Student Resources to Produce Multimedia Learning Solutions (Amanda Robertson, Mike Cuales, David Howard, Ben Huckaby, David Shew)

• Explained development of DELTA
• Recognition of top design students, hired them
• Have 9 interns, treat as part-time staff, to support multimedia solutions for professors
• Commit to good training for students in areas they want
• Creative with budget & location for student workers… sometimes hired/paid by department, but supervised by DELTA
• Students bring in good, new ideas about what’s really going on
• Students have good insight into student experience & help build relationships across campus
• Students get good, real-world experience
• Students get to be project managers on small scale projects, get management process experience
• Saves faculty time, lets students work directly with faculty
• Even simple flashcards and glossaries made major improvements
• Students paid 8-12 dollars per hour.  Also gearing up for a credit version (for folks within their own subject).

Plenary session: Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium, (Marilyn Lombardi)

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Alan Kay

• What is the future of online education we want?
• Where is your teenager now?
  • Harbinger of social change
  • Pass around ideas like social items
  • Multitasking
• Online socialization
• Participatory culture
  • Media creators, remixing, passing media along
  • Multimodal interaction (visual, textual, audio)
  • Affinity-based self-organization
    • Fan fiction, online games, carving out own informal learning environments, joining apprenticeships/learning/on their own
  • Distributed cognition
    • Collective intelligence, virtual communities (including research communities), blur line of instructor & student, controlling is shifting from power holders, bottom-up contribution
• Learning
  • Online Learning 1.0: Course-centered: package, deliver, CMS
  • Online Learning 2.0: Student-centered: connect, converse, Sakai/Moodle/eFramework
  • Online Learning 3.0: Context-centered: coalesce, co-create, open source, 3D meta-medium, Croquet
• Context is everything
  • Proximity is important, but can you achieve this online?
  • Learning Commons
• Learning in Authentic Contexts
  • Real world relevance, ill-defined challenges, sustained investigations, multiple sources and perspectives, collaborations, reflection, interdisciplinary, integrated assessment, polished products, multiple interpretations
• Discussed using virtual environments (Second Life)
  • FERPA (may interact with anyone)
  • Use screen names (not real name)
  • Storing lessons, mission critical work on someone else’s servers (not yours or institutions)
  • Reliability? depend on SL servers, what if it’s down at a critical time?
• Recommends going in & playing, getting used to it & piloting programs
  • Then, when institutions are ready to be in there, there will be open-source solutions ready for you
  • Croquet!
    • Open source, scalable architecture, will run on PCs/laptops/PDAs/mobile phones, will run on different OSs
• Croquet
  • Share and co-edit resources in real time
  • Synchronous (how does this scale with DISTANCE learning?)
  • Allows browser in the game, but can be changed collaboratively
  • Allows hyperlinking to a new world
  • Privacy, authentications, etc (personalized workplace worlds, where they can interlock)
  • Visualizing abstract concepts
  • Collaborative white-board, CAD, etc
  • This is a developers’ environment, not an application
    • Very easy to create new objects!
  • Incorporates tagging & metadata for objects
  • Can make it so that some users see more of the world (in same location) as a reward for passing one level
  • Integrated VOIP power (Jabber), showed video of professor talking in corner of virtual world
  • Don’t need an avatar, can be yourself
• Croquet Consortium
  • Will be releasing software developers’ kit 1.0
  • Institutions can consider joining
  • Want: long term viability for platform that we need, not the entertainment industry