library+instruction+technology

It's been an interesting week and it's only Wednesday. I find myself sitting at the Reference Desk twelve hours after arriving to work. Our Director is in Columbus for OPAL (not the one that gets all of the biblioblogosphere hype) and OhioLINK meetings. One coworker is out sick with something that sounds like bronchitis and another coworker is recovering from major surgery.  So, that leaves just two of us and Brian normally works late on Thursdays…so here I am writing this blog post.

I have been able to use this time to catch up on some recent journal articles. Steven Bell has a good article, "Stop IAKT syndrome with student live demos," in the latest issue of Reference Services Review. [OhioLINK link | everyone else link] Steven does an excellent job of laying out the benefits and challenges to turning over the keyboard to a student during instruction.

I don't think we are running into many students that are suffering from "I already know it syndrome" in our classes. If they feel that way, they are doing a good job of hiding their boredom.

Kate and I have been using students to demonstrate searches during instruction this academic year. We don't have student computers (yet) in our instruction room. We reserve computers in the lab on the first floor and have the students work together for about 15 to 20 minutes at the start of class. Then we go back upstairs and ask for volunteers to show us what they searched, what they found, and why they chose certain articles. It has worked out well for introductory speech, composition, and some disciplinary entry level classes as well. We have received positive faculty feedback. We have be doing 3-2-1 assessment and the student comments are positive too. 

So if you're still being the "sage on the stage", you might want to give this a try. 

• OpenCongress
  “OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.” Blog and news content is way off base in places (my representative for instance).
  (tags: reference government congress politics)

My first radio show of the semester is tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. I don't have a theme. All of the songs are sung by women. A potential sub theme in many of the songs is relationships, but isn't that of all songs? Some are repeats from last year. My plan is to start out with the Celtic/Gaelic, on to pop/adult contempoary, then freestyle, and end with dance/techno. Songs include:

• Tori Amos: Spark 
• Sarah Brightman: Deliver Me
• Corina: Temptation 
• Cover Girls: Show Me 
• Enya: Caribbean Blue; Orinocco Flow 
• Dido: Sand in My Shoes; Take My Hand
• Nelly Furtado: Say It Right 
• Imogen Heap: Hide and Seek 
• Whitney Houston: Queen of the Night 
• JoJo: Too Little, Too Late 
• Annie Lennox: Little Bird 
• Madonna: Forbidden Love; Impressive Instant 
• Loreena McKenneitt: Mummer's Dance 
• Sarah McLachlan: Posession; Vox
• Kylie Minogue: Come Into My World 
• Alanis Morissette: Crazy 
• Anna Nalick: In the Rough
• Karen Overton: Your Loving Arms 
• Heather Small: Proud 
• KT Tunstall: Suddenly I See 
• Ultra Nate: Love's the Only Drug 
• Carla Vallet: Streets of Tomorrow

Plan on tuning in if you are in the area or happen to be driving within 30 miles of New Concord on I-70 or I-77.  

Muskingum County is under a Level 3 Snow Emergency. The College is closed. I wish I hadn't been so specific on the Library's home page yesterday before I left. The College use Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Contribute as our content management system. I don't have Contribute installed at home. I do have Groopz installed, so I can cover our OhioLINK chat shift at 1 p.m. 

No, Vanilla is not visiting. College was closed at 12:30 p.m. due to the snow and ice.  The drive home wasn't bad. I stayed off of I-70 and took 22/40 back to the 'ville. I think this is the first time since I've been at Muskingum that we've closed for bad weather. Muskingum County is currently showing pink on the Weather Channel's radar. 

• Digital Audio from Fall 2006 Depository Library Council Meeting
  Digital audio of sessions including keynote, remarks from the Public Printer and Superintendent of Documents, discussions on FDsys, and Web harvesting.
  (tags: government information depository library audio)
• Designing Better Libraries
  New blog with “ideas that librarians can use to design a great library user experience for their communities”…including “instructional design, innovation, technology design, and the application of new media to design.”
  (tags: user_experience design library thought_leader best_practice innovation transformation)

I'm not sure why I'm on a fiction kick, but I have been reading a lot of it since Thanksgiving. If you've got a hankerin' to read about what the future may hold (and not in a shiny v-neck jump suit way), then have I got a Library of Congress Subject Heading for you.  Fire up your favorite library catalog and do a subject search for "Regression (Civilization) — Fiction". While you're doing that, I will share with you a couple of my recent reads. 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy appeared on a number of best book lists for 2006. The story follows the journey of a man and his son as they travel from the north to the south following a nuclear attack on the US. The characters struggle in a world that has been burnt to the ground. Every page has a reference to ash or smoke and the father and son are constantly starving or on the lookout for potable water. However, McCarthy does include some positive imagery on the journey.

Most of the scenes McCarthy created are disturbing (cannibalism or skeletal remains melted into asphalt). I was impressed by his ability to create this vivid images while using so few words.  I wasn't a fan of the ending, but you'll have to read it for yourself and see if you like it.

I discovered The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future by Will Self while browsing the new book shelf at my local public library. I hadn't read Self before, but I remember covers from some of his earlier works. I enjoyed getting lost in Self's future version of the United Kingdom. The book chapters alternate between the future and the recent past, which makes it an interesting read. The chapters set in the future follow a young man who challenges the accepted faith of the country. The chapters set in the recent past show how current events can be radically misunderstood 500 years in the future.

The most challenging aspect of reading Self's book is his use of Arpee, a written form of Cockney English mixed in with a bunch of neologisms. Self includes an Arpee-English glossary. Another challenge is the constant reference to present day landmarks of greater London. I had to rely on Wikipedia and MapQuest to get a mental image of London for parts of the book to make sense.

• Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries
  “The Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries is a practical guide to topical legal questions affecting the information work of libraries in the fast moving digital environment.”
  (tags: copyright librarianship reference)

I'm not going to LOEX this year. I've never been to San Diego, so it would have been a new place for me to visit. I'm spending my conference money on ACRL and maybe ALA Annual.

I just checked the LOEX conference web site and see that registration is full. I've been one of the hundreds hovering over a keyboard in the past on a Friday afternoon in February. If you didn't register when the bell tolled exactly 1 p.m. you were out of luck. Okay, I think last year there was a 16 minute window before the conference was full and the waiting list began. I know a couple of people that were on the list and still able to attend the conference. If you haven't already registered…you may still be in luck.

If you are going to San Diego, make sure to blog about the sessions you attend. I've found LOEX to be a very practical library conference. I come back to work with a lot of great ideas. Feel free to read about the sessions I've attended in the past.

• Free fonts at UrbanFonts
  Lifehacker directs us to some cool free fonts.
  (tags: fonts applications desktop_publishing)
• How Choice, Co-Creation, and Culture Are Changing What It Means to Be Net Savvy
  “Technology and the way information is created, used, and disseminated have changed, as has the definition of “net savvy”.”
  (tags: information_literacy library2.0 academic_library research article)
• Faculty Adoption of Educational Technology
  “Educational technology support plays a critical role in helping faculty add technology to their teaching”
  (tags: faculty educational_technology research article)