library+instruction+technology

I’ve finished two books in the past couple of weeks that you may be interested in reading.

I had written about Rebekah Nathan’s book, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, in an earlier blog entry. The author takes a year sabbatical from teaching sociology at a state university and enrolls as a freshman at her own institution. The results of her ethnographic study are interesting, though not necessarily surprising. She only refers to using a library on a couple of occasions. She does confirm that students are pressed for time and take “short cuts” to get their work done. She did cover the topic of plagiarism pretty well.

I found the sections where she described how international students viewed their peers and instructors to be very interesting as well. She also went into great detail about how college’s are trying so very hard to create communities and that in the end student’s will develop their own friendships/communities with those people that they live with or have a similar schedule with during their Freshman year. This would be a good book to read to get an “insiders” point-of-view on life at college in the 2000s. Reading this reawaked similar experiences I had at Ohio State over a 12 years ago. So, I guess that even though technology has changed dramatically, the freshman experience still is relatively unchanged.

The other book that I just finished is The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand. I found a brief review of this book on one of the blogs I read. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which blog, so I can’t give credit where it is do. This book outlines the vision for long-term responsibility developed by members of the The Long Now Foundation. In essence, this group is trying to educate people to start thinking in a much longer perspective…thousands of years…instead of a month or a year. Their concept is to build a physical clock that would take 10,000 years to complete a cycle. Along with the clock is the concept of a library that would preserve knowledge and also act as collector of data for long-term research projects.

The book does an excellent job of priming the reader in the basics of accelerated time (Moore’s Law) before jumping into what they are proposing. I find the concept to be very intriguing, especially when they talk about what would potentially be kept in the Library. The main point I got out of this book is that we are better planning for long-term library services than worrying about trying to adapt/deploy/co-opt every new technology that is developed.

Okay, I’m only two weeks late in getting this posted. I wanted to describe the sessions I attended at ALAO on November 4.

Library Instruction Venue: Classroom or Cyberspace?
This session was presented by Pat Antonelli (BGSU-Firelands) and Nashieli Marcano (now Univ. of Akron). Their presentation described their experience taking a classroom based 1 credit hour information literacy course and migrating it into a course on Blackboard. They did a nice job explaining the pros and cons of teaching face-to-face via a course management system. They use the text, The Research Project, by Dawn Rodriguez in the course.

A Natural Fit: Librarians and Learner-Centered Pedagogies
This session was sponsored by the Instruction Interest Group. The speakers were Pam Bach and Barb Macke from the Univ. of Cincinnati. I always enjoy hearing what UC is up too when it comes to information literacy because they have a strong focus on problem based learning. I have attended sessions at other conferences where Barb has discussed some of their activities.

They had this session be very interactive. They divided us up into groups and basically had us go through the first part of a problem based learning activity that they use when their English Comp classes come into the Library. They distributed a handout with pictures from British tabloids of Prince Harry dressed in the infamous Nazi costume. The idea is to engage students in critical thinking to identify what they already know, what more they need to know, and where they might go to find more information.

I always appreciate the hand-outs from this crew too. They had a single hand-out covering the key concepts of problem-based learning. They also brought a packet of different problems they have developed to be used in classes. I found this to be very useful for ideas that we could use here. Finally, they included a detailed bibliography on PBL.

Library Advocacy Panel
The session after lunch was a panel discussion of library advocacy. I was surprised to see so few people attend this session. There were maybe 12 people in the auditorium. The speakers were ACRL President Dr. Camila Alire, Susan Scott (Denison), Ann Watson (Denison), Glenda Thorton (Cleveland State), and Paul Burnham (Ohio Wesleyan). Each panel member spoke about library advocacy from a different perspective.

Dr. Alire spoke about the need for grassroots advocacy and how ACRL is developing more tools to help librarians prepare to be better advocates.

Glenda spoke about advocacy at the local campus level. She discussed a number of things that CSU is doing, including: the creation of a separate faculty newsletter and preparing customized reports for schools/colleges to show the value the library brings to their school/college. She recommended Judith A. Siess’s book, The visible librarian : asserting your value with marketing and advocacy, for more ideas.

Susan spoke about ALAO’s Government Relations Committee and the activities that this group does including the annual trip to ALA’s annual library advocacy day in Washington. She gave a very clear description of the value of both locally and nationally.

Ann spoke about ALAO’s Legislative Advocate Network and how to get more involved talking to Ohio House and Senate representatives. She gave some practical advice about the people to have available for when inviting politicians to campus. For example, their Representative is a Republican so they invited the Young Republican group at Denison to come and meet with him as well as a couple of prominent Republican faculty members.

Finally, Paul spoke about his experience going to Washington this past May. He was the recipient of the ALAO travel grant to go to Washington and lobby the Ohio delegation.

Of the four sessions, I found this one to be the best. It was very practical and I think all academic librarians have to become more aware of the need to advocate for the library. Advocacy doesn’t always mean that you will be asking for or getting money. The reality is though that we all need to be better proponents of our libraries and the value we offer our institutions.

Faculty and Librarian Collaboration for Enhancing Information Literacy Skills
This presentation was done by Cindy Mader and Michael Howser from Miami U. There presentation was informative because they described Miami’s learning community concept. Cindy and Michael are leading the information literacy learning community. They discussed how they got it started and what they have been talking discussing. They used Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum by Irene Rockman last year as a starting point. This year they are reading and discussing Developing research and communication skills: Guidelines for Information Literacy in the Curriculum by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

They also had us do an activity during the session. They gave us some sample assignments and asked us how we could improve them to meet information literacy goals. This is an exercise they use with the faculty in the learning group to help them create better assignments. They wanted to show a video of one of the faculty in the learning community that they developed to recruit other faculty to join. Unfortunately, the acoustics were not good and the video could not be heard. They also provided a nice bibliography of resources on faculty and library cooperation.

I see that Chad (Library Voice) has posted an IM Reference update on his blog today. He has listed some stats comparing usage of IM to the web based chat software during the past couple of months of their quarter.

I should have posted on this a bit sooner…

ALAO’s 2005 Conference was held in Columbus a little under two weeks ago. Scott Walter gave a short report about his experience attending ALAO over on ACRLog.

The keynote speaker was Joe Raiola from Mad Magazine. As Scott notes in his post, I agree that there were many academic librarians talking about Joe on their drive back to the four corners of Ohio. I had two co-workers in my car, and the keynote was the main topic for the 50 mile trip home. All of us felt uneasy with how the keynote was delivered.

I think Joe’s topic on censorship was a good choice for an academic library conference. However, I’m not so sure that his path to get to the point was the best for ALAO. The first part of his keynote was more like being at a comedy club than a conference. I also think he may have overestimated the “open-mindedness” of his audience.

The general consensus on the ride home was that we would have rather had ACRL President Dr. Camila Alire as the keynote speaker. She gave an excellent presentation at lunch, but she had to rush through it to keep the conference on schedule.

We’ll see how it goes next year…

Gary Price posted this tidbit over on ResourceShelf…Google Registers a Few New Domain Names Including GoogleMicrofilm.com [which links over to SearchEngineWatch.

When will they register googlemicrocards.com? We still have some of those…

I would like to say that it is easy to keep up with all of the latest trends in libraryland, but it’s not. I have been reading about and following the trend of using IM in lieu of more traditional virtual reference software for over a year. I remember Chad Boeninger down the road at OU (that’s Ohio University) talking about his experiment using AOL IM with OU’s B-School folks at OhioLINK’s 2004 Reference Rendezvous. [Read Chad's recent post about OU's use of IM.]

In case you are trying to keep up-to-speed with what’s going on, you may want to check out what Sarah is writing over at LibrarianInBlack. She has been posting from the Virtual Reference Desk Conference.

Check out these posts:

• Adoption of Instant Messaging for Chat at a Research Library in Conjunction with the Formal Chat Software Used: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• Instant Messaging: An Alternative Virtual Reference Solution?: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• User Satisfaction and Best Practices: Correlation in Live Online Reference: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• Hurry! Hurry! R u dum? *#%@!: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• Heavyweights Beware: Alternatives to Traditional Virtual Reference Products: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• r u there? Adding IM to an Established Virtual Reference Service: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• IM Working with Trillian: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• Evaluation of a Chat Reference Service from the User’s Perspective: Virtual Reference Desk Conference
• Trillian training

I have yet to be totally won over by eBooks/e-Books/E-books/ebooks (have we settled on a standard yet?). Being an academic librarian in Ohio is fun, because I get to see two competing e-Book models running at the same time. We have our Netlibrary collection and we also have our OhioLINK electronic reference book collection of ABC-CLIO titles.

Our students have not jumped on the e-Book bandwagon as you might expect. Our statistics for e-Book use on both platforms is constant, but not rising fast or furious. I can tell you why…they still want the print!

I know, I know…I’ll wait while you pick yourself up off the floor in disbelief…but the Xbox/iPod/Xanga crew (at least in our neck of Appalachia) still want a tangible item in their hands for that research paper/speech. The first question a student asks when they find one of the e-Books in our catalog is, “Can I print it out?” Of course, I have to deliver the bad news that you can print out some pages (one at a time) but you can’t print out the whole thing and Netlibrary will eventually lock you out for copyright violation if you try to print to much (or “turn the page” too fast).

I share all of this with you because I have been keeping a post from Alane over at It’s All Good about the future of books. Another take on this topic, When Will E-Books Become Mainstream?, was posted by ScuttleMonkey over at Slashdot.

Shelia Webber who is one of the co-bloggers at the Information Literacy Weblog recently posted a link to three presentations given at the Australia and New Zealand Institute for Information Literacy’s Symposium Four. One of the presentations is a case study of integrating information literacy into faculty teaching and another is a case study of integrating IL into a criminal justice course.

Michael Lorenzen over at The Information Literacy Land of Confusion posted on authentic assessment a couple of months ago. I have been thinking about his post and trying to come up with some ideas of how to integrate authentic assessment into our library instruction program. I’m writing about this to keep it in my mind and also because I have been keeping his post “new” in Bloglines and doing some house cleaning.

I did an in-depth session with our Senior History majors at the beginning of the semester. The History department is revamping how they are doing their own assessment. I know they had the students fill out a pre-library instruction survey and then they are going to go back and evaluate their senior research papers to see how they did. In my mind this falls into the authentic assessment category. However, I would still like to come up with some workable ideas for assessing the effectiveness of those one-shots.

I forgot to mention that I migrated off of Blogger and into a WordPress blog on my web site. I should have done this a long time ago. I was a little hesitant, because I didn’t know how hard or easy it would be. I host my web site with Aplus.net. My plan includes 3 MySQL databases. It really wasn’t that hard. The most time consuming part was getting my posts out of Blogger and into WordPad.