Professional Development

On Wednesday, March 25th, 7 members of the ZSR Staff, Rosalind Tedford, Mary Beth Lock, Lauren Pressley, Kaeley McMahon, Sarah Jeong, Christian Burris and myself loaded up in the WFU Student Life van and headed up 421 to visit the ASU Library and Information Commons in Boone. We arrived and started a tour around 10:30am. Four members of the ASU staff (see list below) who were members of the”Library Internal Building Group” led us all over the building. After an amazing tour (see highlights listed below) we were treated to lunch by our host and had a discussion about the lessons they learned in this building process. After lunch and discussion we resumed our tour and by 3:30pm were back on 421 to WFU! Our ASU hosts were just amazing as was their facility. To see pictures of the ASU Library and Information Commons, check out the library’s photo set from this trip!

Below is a list of tour highlights, positives outcomes from the building experience and lessons learned. The seven staff who attended collected these items together in a Google Doc to make this a truly collaborative report!

Present from ASU

• Ann Viles- Associate University Librarian
• Lynne Lysiak- Head of Systems
• Pat Sweet-Facility Manager
• Lori Davis- Position in Technical Services

(All Four were on the “Library Internal Building Group”)

Library and Building History Highlights

• 1996-Planning began
• Funding received in 2000/2001
• Funding included building and Parking Deck
• Building completed in 2005, deck in 2006 (Architect-Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott)
• ASU uses the Innovative Library System

Tour Highlights

• Aluminum table in the conference room made for a very nice light movable piece of furniture, but makes the wireless mouse and keyboard unusable.
• They had 26 study rooms. Booked study rooms with III Millennium client with an opac interface
• Chairs in the conference room were stackable and colorful, light and wheeled.
• Floors had outlet junction boxes built in with covers that were flush with the floor when not opened. Made for flexible use.
• They shared students from circulation to reference desk and back.
• Had “stacks workrooms” on each floor where books that were picked up from study tables were scanned in to have a record of “in building use.”
• Movable shelves for microform cabinets!
• DVD collection was in open stacks, retrievable by patrons. Shelved in assession number order.
• DVDs, microfiche, children’s books collection, periodicals, all together on the lower level. All periodicals, both current and bound, were shelved together using compact shelving.
• Computing stations were facing each other but off set in a herringbone fashion. Made great use of space and students weren’t looking directly at each other.
• Computer lab tables had great cord management, and the chairs were light, comfortable, wheeled and cheap. Flooring in labs/classrooms was also raised to allow for flexible room configurations.

Positives Outcomes

• Lots of light, lots of study space
• carpet squares
• Ref collection shrunk by 50%
• The atrium was glassed in. This really cut down on noise but still allowed for beautiful and open views.
• The shelving in reference was half regular stacks height. This gave users plenty of flat surfaces to spread out or to write on. This also meant that everyone had a clear view of the area. Library staff could see anywhere if there was a problem, and students could see the desk (to know if the librarian was available, etc) from anywhere in the room.
• They have a building manager and really recommend this role.
• The library houses a large lecture hall that can be used by other campus groups during specific times. There are 120 theater-styled seats that are ADA compliant and each has an outlet.
• Sign displays are all easily changeable. (They really recommend temporary signage for the first few years as it takes a while to determine the best location for things.)
• The reference desk was designed for students to come around to the back to work side-by-side with the library staff member.
• Student employees are cross trained and have periodic group training sessions on specific skills (a database, a new technology, etc). These sessions are held three or four times in one week so that there are several chances to attend.
• There are 29 active group study rooms with various levels of technology. A few have international satellite for foreign language programming. A few have smartboards, but they have taken a beating as some used them as whiteboards.
• One computer classroom has 34 computers set up so that the front of the classroom is to the side (rather than in front of behind the monitors). There are two projectors so that everything is visible from any point in the room. There are two smartboards. The computers run software to allow instructors to restrict what students can do or to push screens to all computers.
• There is a server room in the library that runs things like the clocks (set by GPS) and security cameras. (The ILS server is housed elsewhere.)

Lessons Learned

• Be Wary of Value Engineering (cost-cutting)
• Getting lots of pressure to be open 24hours. The atrium was designed for that, but not the rest of the building. (going 24 with 4 security guards and 1 library staff.)
• Management support of campus using library classrooms created more than expected amount of work, training faculty, management, scheduling.
• Volume of patrons, 600,000 when opened, now 860,000
• Would run fewer Ethernet jacks (900 wired jacks)
• Some critical folks did not get to review particular designs
• Follow behind the engineers (what standards are they using?)
• They recommended to us to look into the Brooklyn College Library. It’s in a Carnegie library building and has some similar renovation interests.

If you have any questions about our visit, just ask one of us who attended!

Top Technology Trends

I started off the day bright and early, attending the Top Technology Trends committee meeting. It was different than the one I went to a year earlier. Since it is Midwinter, it was more informal, with the technology gurus seated around a table having an informal discussion about technology trends. Those of us who went to observe sat in chairs around the edge of the room. Since not all committee members were able to be here, a valiant attempt was made to connect one member virtually via Skype. It didn’t work seamlessly, but it was a nice touch since, after all, it was a technology session with a room full of geeks. What struck me was that instead of hearing much talk about far out “new” potential technologies, the greatest portion of the 2 hours was spent discussing topics we are all grappling with: liability and security concerns regarding storing documents remotely (ie on Goggle servers), implications for equipment and services when the Web becomes the operating system and the application server, and why our organizations are so far behind in providing adequate server space for their constituents when Goggle will give gigs away for free. A most interesting exchange concerned the difficulty these folks are having at their home institutions getting their IT units to provide locally housed and controlled wiki and blog space (Yea, ZSR for being ahead of this trend!)

Two interesting concepts that Karen Schneider discussed were the “architecture of participation” and the “architecture of aesthetics.” The first refers to the whole Library 2.0 movement of user involvement and empowerment and how many commercial vendors (ie Library Thing) get it, when major library vendors (OCLC was mentioned) still don’t. The architecture of aesthetics is her way of describing that users are making it known, in many different ways, that aesthetics count. Of course, the most current example of this is the IPhone. That sparked a discussion of ebooks and their aesthetics and functionality. And, Erik will be thrilled to hear this, a big discussion took place about what Erik coined “federated services.” (No, Erik they called it “seamless fulfillment”, but they were talking about exactly what you recognized a need for 2 years ago: the technology and interface that allows a user to request some service or item in a single place without him having to know at all what will take place behind the scenes to fulfill his needs). Other familiar topics included copyright, digital storage, preservation storage, the coming of age of open source and what users want from libraries! Finally, in the last 10 minutes they did a lightening round where some hot new trends were mentioned oh so briefly: location awareness, cloud computing, green computing and surface computing. Hopefully, these are discussed in more depth in the LITA blog where the trends are posted.

Library 2.0 Publication Podcast Interview

This morning I had a new conference experience. Most of you know that Erik, Caroline and I recently authored a chapter in the new ACRL book “Library 2.0: Initiatives in Academic Libraries.” The publisher invited authors who planned to attend ALA Midwinter to be interviewed about our projects on a podcast. It will be linked from the ACRL site and from the project wiki. I was joined by Dawn Lawson from NYU, who used Facebook for outreach to East Asian Studies students. It was an enjoyable experience, although I’m sure either Erik or Caroline would have been better spoken. The interview was conducted by David Free (coincidentally the editor of C&RL News where Lynn’s and my South article will soon appear!). Kathryn Deiss, ACRL’s Content Strategist joined us and hosted the interview in her hotel room.

This afternoon was my one committee obligation. As you may recall, I’m on the Instructional Technologies Committee which is charged with writing 2-3 “Tips and Trends” articles each year. I volunteered to partner up with another committee member to write about the use of Facebook in Library Instruction. But unlike others in our library, my committee is fairly one dimensional, meaning we get all our business conducted in one two hour session. It was interesting to learn that our chair’s plan to have a mid year conference call to supplement the face-to-face meeting today was turned down by ACRL powers because there are strict procedures for asking for extra meetings and adhering to a strict notification procedure 10 days prior to holding such a meeting. Geez…..

I just finished up my day with a lovely visit with our regional representative from ExLibris, John Straw. I wanted to start the conversations we must soon have about Meridian’s future, EnCompass for Digital Collections’ future, and Voyager’s overall viability in the ExLibris product line. I did find out there is discussion of porting Voyager to Linux and saw a very quick demo of the new WebVoyage interface for 7.0. We talked about lining up times to preview DigiTool and Verde. I did nab 2 pens and one mint life saver. Let’s just say that the schwag Giz is so fond of was scarce in the exhibit hall today!

Finally, here’s my people siting report: I literally ran into Debbie Nolan in the exhibit hall. She had larengitis so I had plenty of opportunity to fill her in on all the activities at ZSR. She sends her greetings to all of you. I also made a visit to the Alibris booth to say hi and check up on my new duathlon partner Billy O’Banks (AKA Bill Kane). He reported he has been in a tapering training mode in his travels the past week, but will back to the training grindstone this coming week. Lastly, Mary H. and I plan to meet up with Lauren for dinner, and she is picking out the restaurant. Seemed only fair since Mary and I will eat anything.

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!

I had a very early start this morning. I delivered Ron to my sister’s place in Springfield, got to hug my granddaughter (who is coincidentally up north to meet relatives this weekend), rushed back, caught the yellow-line Metro and was only 10 minutes late for my first session: Leading Technology-Driven Change: Theory & Practice. You can see from this picture what happens when you show up late to a popular session:

View from the Floor

The speakers talked about their individual approaches to using leadership to guide change. They were: Joyce Ogburn from University of Utah, Felton Thomas, Jr. from Las Vegas-Clark Co. Libraries and Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist from ACRL. I’m just going to list a few jewels (IMHO) from their talks, which were all quite informative and inspiring.

Ogburn:

• Universities are “untidy organizations” that operate on “delayed confounded feedback.”
• A quote from Patricia Battin: “Past strengths will become our liabilities.”
• Effective leadership’s challenge is to enhance your mission rather than the mission being defined by the technology.

Thomas:

• He quoted our old friend David Seaman on our profession not exactly being agents of change: “We’re moving the profession one funeral at a time.”
• On leaders carrying the burden of change: “It’s like going hunting and carrying the dog.”
• He is a big proponent of scenario building and did this for their “Model Efficiencies & Emerging Technologies (MEET)” project to maximize service efficiencies via RFID self-checkout and automated materials handling.

Deiss:

• Change is about 2 things: managing the action and managing the emotions that come with the action.
• From David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: We all have a need to categorize (not just librarians!). The old model is “everything has its place.” With the explosion of technology, this has become “everything has every place.” The goal needs to be how to deal with this change and imagine new ways to structure ourselves and our services to reflect this new reality.
• On “choice overload”: in the presence of too many choices, most people will choose nothing, like a deer in the headlights. People are stunned by the extraordinary possibilities of too many choices. A leader’s role is to get people to focus on what they need to see rather than being paralyzed by seeing too many things.

I could go on, as I thought there was much offered in this session to think about, so if this topic interests you, let’s get together when I return and talk about it more in depth! (Sticking to my goal of not having my readers’ eyes glaze over from too much text).

Session Two

Erik steered me to this one which was several long blocks away at another hotel. And do you know that when deciphering the street names in program map without reading glasses, H Street looks just like M Street? Anyway, I finally made it (on time). The session was given by OCLC about their new WorldCat Local project, their new “discovery to delivery” service. OCLC is working with several libraries (U of Washington, Peninsula library system, State of Illinois, Ohio State University) to test a version of OpenWorldCat that is customizable by libraries and integrates with their ILS to reflect holdings, availability and includes keyword searching of library holdings, databases with OpenURL link resolution for fulltext access, access to local collections (currently CONTENT dm, but soon, Dspace). This was an exciting presentation to see as it’s what Erik’s been envisioning for some time. Their initial pilot partner, University of Washington, has it up and running (since 4/30). What I like is that it is attempting to provide a service that users have been asking for, one without silos, that gets them to their materials no matter where those are. It looks promising so far.

After this session, I had to hoof it to a third location many blocks away, so I consulted my map again (this time with my glasses on) and found I could stroll past the White House on the way. My White House experience changed my negative attitude toward the spread out nature of this conference, because I wandered into an adventure when I got there. It turns out a group was holding a protest. It was complete with cordoned off streets, mounted police, bullhorns, snipers on the White House roof and a batch of well behaved protesters against torture from the organization Tassc International. I lived in this area for my first 30 years and this was my first D.C. protest experience. Well worth the side trip!

Protest at the White House

OK, I’ll stop here and will report on the afternoon’s activities later. I’ve exceeded my self-imposed word length blog posting limit……

For those who have been following the evolution of Library 2.0, a lot of this will be familiar… so I am just going to include links to most of what was covered:

• Tim Bucknall highlighted the OCLC findings
• Patrons want self-sufficiency, satisfaction, and seamlessness
• Danny Nanez highlighted Michael Habib’s Academic Library 2.0
• 
• Discussed Blackboard, pathfinders, chat reference
• MyWelch: a blackboard interface for library services
• Students as creators of content
• Ann Arbor Library is innovative
• Ann Arbor Catalog
• University of Minnesota Website wiki is EXACTLY what we’re trying to do
• Gaming in Libraries (Amy Harris & Scott Rice)
• The idea is to make the library fun
• Overview of millennials (PDF)
• Discussed their game night, citing Giz & WFU; they include cards & board games
• Photos on Flickr
• Info Island on Second Life
• Another option, Active World, can link to web content, create floor plan of the library & link to real library resources
• UNCG Info Lit game, teaches info lit uses AJAX, is ADA compliant, and is free under CC License
• Tim Bucknall discussed the future of the ILS/OPAC, cited Roy Tennant presentation from SOLINET
• Federated search beyond just our catalog (journals, websites, etc)
• “Will ILS return to original function as inventory–rather than a search–tool?”
• Google Books (which I love, as you may know)
• Adding MARC records isn’t scalable when we have full text from all these major research libraries (via Google Books)
• People don’t want MARC records, they want to search full text
• Will probably turn to local data & inventory, where catalog is just a piece of search
• Says, “Why don’t we have a Digital Guilford where people can search local documents.” Sound familiar?
• Terry Brandsma discussed AquaBrowser as an enhancement to the catalog
• Examples of AquaBrowser: Queens Library & Arkansas State Library-Beebe
• AquaBrowser doesn’t require MARC records, could include journal articles, websites, etc
• Discussed Endeca as a more efficient catalog; developed for retail/business
• Examples of Endeca: NCSU & McMaster University
• Discussed WorldCat as way to search beyond just local holdings & searches across books and articles
• University of Washington is using WorldCat as their catalog
• Discussed SirsiDynix Enterprise Portal Solutions (EPS) as a way of forced clustering before searching
• Examples of EPS: Arcadia, Boston Public Library, & Cerritos College
• Discussed faceted and visual browsing including SirsiDynix & KartOO Visu
• Tim Bucknall and Lynda Kellam discussed Breaking Down Barriers
• Tim pointed out that libraries have traditionally tried to set itself apart from the internet & say “that’s bad, we’re good.” Now we’re realizing that users will be in that other space, & we need to put our content there.
• We can do this using: OpenURL, COinS (we have it, thanks to Kevin!), Bookmarklets, & Blackboard
• Pushing specific content to subject area classes in Blackboard
• Lynda demoed this content push to Blackboard; there is a “My Library Resources” option in the course
• Don’t have to reauthenticate once they’re in Blackboard
• Can also be pushed to open course websites (not necessarily Blackboard)
• Banner extract of classes is added to a library database, liaisons then can interact with databases & add appropriate resources to their courses
• Tim followed up on the Blackboard push project, they wanted to get down to just one click, so it required a different technology
• Want to use this technology in other ways: news, new resources, reminders, contact links, course guides, mobile, etc. Much more targeted!!
• Richard Cox worked on the technology behind this
• Tim answered questions: WebFeat was discussed… a little clunky/slower, limited searching, but is a big step forward from current EZ Search

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

Formal presentation: Promoting Higher-Level Processing: Evidence-Based Support for Student-Created Digital Learning Objects (Robert Crow)

• Test to see if elaboration is working
• Can learn through different modes: image, text, etc,
• Learning Objects
  • Any entity, digital or non-digital which can be used, reused, or referneced…
  • Deliverable over internet
  • Merlot used eSkeletons as an example
• Based on Elaboration Theory
  • Essay writing activity
  • Narrated PowerPoint, Camtasia, podcasting, use many modalities
• Grading was a challenge. Crow’s way of dealing with it was to grade by slide.
• Did a study correlating experimental and control groups with overall GPA, etc.
  • Used tests on concepts to get numbers
• Best correlation, Yes, having students construct learning object was a valid way to get them to hold onto concept over a longer period of time

Formal presentation: Effective Practices for Online Instruction (Laura Rogers)

• Focus on constructivist principles
• Want a lot of interactive, thoughtful conversations, thinking transformed through interaction
• ePedagogy interest group in TLT
  • maybe an eLearning coach for faculty?
• Demo-ed Second Life