Colleen Boof, Catherine Cardwell, and Kelly Broughton gave this presentation on BGSU's assessment plan. They distributed a document showing their success measures and priorities pulled from their complete assessment plan . The remainder of the session was a group discussion on how others are assessing their library and services.
Olga Hart, Ted Baldwin, Debbie Tenofsky, Stephena Harmony, and Heather Maloney from the University of Cincinnati shared their experience developing an online game [PowerPoint slides] during the Instruction Interest Group breakout session. I was very interested to see how far they had gotten in the development of their game. I had dinner with Olga and some other Ohio librarians at LOEX in May. Olga had described their library faculty learning community focused on using games as pedagogy during dinner.
The UC team has spent over 200 hours developing their game. Unfortunately we were not able to see a live demo during the session. However, they did show us some screen captures (see the PowerPoint slides). Their game is focused on teaching plagiarism. It is remnicent of the Sims, but requires the students to make choices to move the game forward.
The tools they used to create the game include: Flash for the framework, Poser for animation, and Mimic for audio synch. They recommended that game development requires a lot of time, project management, and resources. Additional best practices and lessons learned can be found in their slides.
Their session handout (not included in the PowerPoint slides) includes the following "sources of inspiration":
Tutorials
Books
Article
Mixing it Up: Using a Blend of Projects to Create a College Transition Program was presented by Mary Lee Jensen, Barbara Schloman and Ken Burhanna from Kent State. Ken talked about Informed Transitions. This is the outreach program that Kent State Libraries has to high schools throughout northeast Ohio. Teachers bring their students into the library to work on class assignments. They general are there for four hours. Mary Lee talked about their Transitioning to College. This is a web site with streaming videos, worksheets, and handouts that can help students prepare for college level research. The content is from the student's perspective. Finally, Barbara talked about Trails (Tool for Real-Time Assessment for Information Literacy Skills). Trails was developed primarily for K-12 information literacy assessment, but it could also be used in an higher ed environment. Barbara suggested that it might be used for assessment of first year students entering college. She also suggested that it should be something brought to the attention of pre-service teachers in education programs. Trails is free and standards based using the 9th grade Ohio Academic Content Statndards and AASL's Information Power.
Simmering Information Literacy Ingredients for Learning [PowerPoint slides], was presented by Colleen Boff and Richard Wisneski from Bowling Green State University. They described the challenges the liaison librarians were having delivering effective library instruction to the College of Education and Human Development. Their solution was to create a curriculum map of all the majors in the college to identify where they could best target library instruction sessions. They applied for and received a grant to develop a tutorial to learn how to conduct research and create citations using APA.
The ALAO 2006 Conference [list of sessions / slides and handouts] was held November 3 in Akron. The keynote speaker this year was Dr. J. Richard Madaus, Executive Director of the College Center for Library Automation in Florida. Dr. Madaus's presentation was good. He spoke about how quickly technology has changed over the past five years and how libraries are tying their best to adapt with limited budgets. He addressed the hesitancy of some library administrators to implement emerging technologies. He encouraged us to experiment and to keep up with new technology and how our students and faculty are using it.
Overall, the content of his presentation was in line with the continual conversation on many library blogs about how to adopt and co-opt technology in the library. I didn't really find anything he said surprising or new to me. I did however, write down a couple phrases he used during the presentation. During one point he mentioned "the illusion of site bound librarianship." This was in reference to how some libraries try to replicate the physical library in a digital environment. This practice does not make sense to our born digital students and even some younger faculty. He also talked at one point about how traditional college students are use to "information foraging." He advised that we need to design our interfaces and web sites to make it easier for students to "catch the scent" of a good information source.
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 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…
Disclaimer: You are reading my thoughts and opinions. These are not the thoughts and opinions of my employer, consortia, professional association, bank, neighbor, dog, God, or country.
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