library+instruction+technology

Happy Friday the Thirteenth! I thought I would address your worst conference nightmare…wasting a session. It doesn't matter if it's ALA or ALAO (that's the Ohio ACRL chapter), but I usually end up sitting through one disappointing presentation. In this case, the content delivered didn't live up to expectations created by the session title and description. 

The issue with this specific session was the use of the phrase "lessons learned" in the title and the thought provoking questions posed in description. Instead of hearing about lessons learned or best practices or tips or sage advice…I heard an infomercial.  My disappointment stems from the content presented not being scalable or applicable to another institution. Don't tempt us with "How do you prioritize your resources and staff?" to only tell us that you were able to hire more librarians and have money for an information commons. That's great for you, however it's not practical or implementable for the majority of your audience.

The only transferable "lesson learned" (and not even to my local situation) I got out of the presentation is to share laptops between library departments. Do you use laptops for instruction and for lending to students? Great! Work with circulation/access services/whomever controls the lending side to pool laptops during peak times of the academic year. Use the majority of laptops for instruction at the beginning of the semester/quarter (when instruction is high and assignments low). Reverse the distribution model at the end of the semester. Let circulation/access services use your laptops for students to borrow to work on all of those end of term papers and projects. You're probably not doing much (if any) instruction at the end of the term. It's a win-win and a great way to extend those insufficient capital expense dollars.

Feel free to take a look at the PowerPoint slides.  You might get something out of them that is useful for your institution. My lesson learned for you? Go with your gut instinct when picking conference sessions. I'll try to do a better job with all of my schedule conflicts in Anaheim.

If I could do it over again, I would have gone to hear Paul Waelchli and Sara Holladay talk about "Fantasy Sports: The Road to Information Literacy Championships." Paul and Sara win the prize for information sharing! You have to appreciate the amount of time they put into creating an amazing Fantasy Football Toolkit for Libraries. Check it out…

• PowerPoint presentation slides
• Fantasy Football 101 Handout
• Fantasy Football Lesson Plan
• Bridge document linking Fantasy Football activities to ACRL Information Literacy Standards

"Leveraging the Economics of Information and Scholarly Communication Process to Enrich Instruction" was the rest of the title of this session presented by Kim Duckett and Scott Warren from NC State University. Their PowerPoint presentation (1.9MB) is available and you should read through the slides because I can't do them justice in this post.

Kim and Scott started with the argument that our students are not savvy enough to know when they have left our discovery tools to access paid content. Students have not made the connection yet, even though they probably have a similar mental model. Students normally don't consider how much money is spent to provide access to electronic journal articles. They go to the library web site and get access to the content for free (with few or little authentication barriers), so it's just like a lot of other content on the open web.

Strategies they have been using successfully with upper level classes…

Start with what students already know about the peer review process and build on their prior knowledge.  Challenge assumptions by asking:

• Why don't researchers just use blogs?
• Do all papers submitted get published?
• Are all journals equal?
• Do authors get royalties?
• How much does it cost an author to publish?

Examples of sticker shock were used to further challenge assumptions about how much scholarly content actually costs. This naturally leads to a discussion about why publishers charge so much and why libraries provide access to expensive content. They discuss the various stakeholders in the publishing process: author, publisher, database vendor, and library.

Continued discussion of the invisible web follows, where the concept that Google doesn't make a distinction when indexing content if it is free or free. The crawlers are just discovering content and making a pointer to it available for retrieval. Finally, Scott and Kim were able to leverage the existing mental model of online shopping (buying airline tickets at Expedia or Travelocity) to help the student make the connection between discovery and access.

Candice Benjes-Small and Eric Ackermann from Radford University spoke about how they redesigned their assessment process for instruction. They had reached a point where merely counting number of sessions was deemed no longer useful in measuring success.

All librarians had been using a standard student evaluation form that had a four point Likert scale and a single comment box at the end. They found the disconnect between the scores and the comments to be problematic and not useful in making changes. It was decided to modify the evaluation form to ask for qualitative feedback for each question.

The modified evaluation form asks the following three questions

1. I learned something useful for this workshop.

• Strongly Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Disagree: How can the workshop be improved?
• Strongly Disagree: How can the workshop be improved? 

2. I think this librarian was a good teacher.

• Strongly Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching?
• Strongly Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching? 

3. I would recommend this workshop to someone interested in library research.

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree 

They chose a comment based metric methodology for assessment. This is similar to what the University of Virginia Library is doing with their balanced scorecard metrics.  "What did you dislike about the teaching?" was chosen as the question to measure. This would allow for the librarian teaching to have something tangible for improving instructional delivery. A target of less than 5% negative comments was set to be the measure for total success. Partial success would be achieved if 5 to 10% of the comments were negative. 

Advantages

• Evidence based
• Allows for goals to be set and measured
• Flexible to measure what you want to know

Disadvantages

• Time intensive, especially coding qualitative comments
• Difficult to change evaluation forms if you want to go back and measure another goal 

Questions to consider

• What do you want to know?
• How are you going to measure? 
• Are you going to focus on evaluation scores (quantitative) or comments (qualitative)?
• What is the target for success?
• Who is going to compile the results?

Their PowerPoint slides are available.

Amanda Izenstark and Mary MacDonald from the University of Rhode Island discussed how they revamped the library component of their university's First Year Seminar program. They have been doing FYS since 1995. FYS student mentors were not enthusiastic when bringing groups to the library. Content was stale. Librarians felt in a rut. They experienced a large number of cancellations. This prompted them to review their program and decided to make it more interactive for students. They also wanted to include a tutorial as part of program to focus on key information literacy concepts.

They used the backward design model from Making the most of understanding by deign and Debra Gilchrist's five questions (see their PowerPoint slides) to envision the revised program. Their new program included a pre-activity, library visit, and post-activity. They deemed the redesign a success, but decided to modify it based on student feedback. 

Detailed information can be found in their PowerPoint slides.

Anne Pemberton and Rachel Radom from University of North Carolina Wilmington shared their experience in creating and teaching a three credit hour course. The development of this course came out of a request from the computer science department. The Library had (and still) teaches two different one credit hour courses. 

Anne described the initial discussion by the Library staff and the pros/cons of the course having a library (LIB) designation in the course catalog. Anne listed some of the challenges the Library faced getting the course approved by the University's Curriculum Committee. She suggested talking to members of the committee before bringing the course proposal to identify questions early enough to get answers. 

Some ideas given during the presentation that I will probably integrated into the two credit hour course I teach:

• Structure assignment grades so that students with an A don't have to take a final (or do the final project in my class). 
• Assign students to take notes and post them on a wiki or blog. Have students review the notes at the start of the next class and make changes.
• Promote the course on the Library's web site.

Anne posted their PowerPoint slides (4.6 MB) and recommended reviewing her LIB 103 class blog for syllabus and assignment examples. Rachel also has her LIB103 syllabus and assignment online if you are interested.

I was glad I attended this session even though I've been teaching a two credit hour course for the past three years. My biggest challenge (frustration?) teaching the course is getting students to turn in assignments. It was reassuring to hear that others have experience many of the same challenges.

Feel free to take a look at what I used for our Library Research Methods course for this past Fall semester. You may also want to look at the modified syllabus for Spring.  

Laurel Ofstein from DePaul University's Center for Creativity and Innovation was the plenary speaker for LOEX 2008 in Oak Brook, IL. She described the nine dimensions of a creative environment:

• Idea support – are new ideas encouraged or judged?
• Trust and openness – are staff free to share ideas?
• Discussion – are staff comfortable enough to discuss the idea freely?
• Challenge and involvement – do staff feel that they own the organization and have a stake in success?
• Idea time – do staff have time to work on new ideas as part of normal job?
• Humor and play – are staff comfortable enough to be humorous at work?
• Freedom – are staff macro or micro managed?
• Risk taking – do staff feel they can fail and not be punished?
• Degree of conflict – are staff in competition with one another or other groups within organization?

 Laurel suggested a few tactics to focus creativity:

• Work backwards from the end solution.
• Ask the question, "Wouldn't it be nice if…" to help define outcomes.
• Ask the question, "In what ways might we…" to help define options.
• Challenge an assumption by writing down its opposite, identify advantages that could come from the challenges of the opposite assumption, study the challenged assumptions and identify new opportunities.

She recommended the book, Ideas are free: how the idea revolution is liberating people and transforming organizations for further reading.

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.

Sarah Bosarge and Karen Estlund from the University of Utah shared their pilot study findings on student use of mobile and social computing technology for personal and academic use. They did this pilot study to determine what tools students are using. They intended to use this data to decide where to focus their limited resources. Based on their results they plan on developing audio content for their web site and MP3 players to be used in conjunction with their instruction program. 

They have posted a copy of their questionnaire, Power Point slides, bibliography, and other background information on a wiki.

technorati tag: loex2006

This was the best session I attended this year. Robin Ewing from St. Cloud State University and Justine Martin from Minnesota State University at Mankato were an outstanding (and entertaining) duo. Their presentation provided a background on gaming, gamers, learning styles of gamers, motivation, engagement, features of games that make people want to keep on playing and how all of this can be applied to instruction.

People play games because they are engrossing. They have flow, rules, goals, challenges, elements of control, and some have aspects of fantasy. The current generation of students prefers to learn through trial and error. That is how they learn the new games. They don't read the manual. They learn best by doing.

If we are able to take these concepts and apply them to our instruction, then we have a better change of engaging the current game generation. Integrating narrative or creating a first-person scenario is an easy way to start to implement some of these game based concepts.

Examples they suggested we try is to allow students to pick their own topics, don't demo…have a student "drive" the computer, ask students to direct the student "driving" the computer as to what to do next if a search fails, create "power-up" cards [database tricks...truncation symbol...the power of AND OR NOT] that you can give to students who are having trouble or who are doing well.

They developed a great bibliography of books and articles to get up-to-speed on game based learning. They highlighted the books written by John Beck, James Gee, and Marc Prensky during their presentation.

technorati tag: loex2006

Bee Gallegos and Karen Grondin from Arizona State University at the West campus presented on how they are using gaming to engage students. They have used a couple of different gaming techniques.

Fletcher's Great Library Race, was one of the first game based activities they created. This game is an exploration activity designed to acquaint students with the physical arrangement of the building. The game is loosely based on The Amazing Race. Students are divided into teams and assigned roles. They were given a clue and then had to go to different areas to find additional clues. They could ask for help at service desks. The first team to collect all the clues, return, and solve the puzzle was the winner. 

Race Through the Library, is the current game that they are using and improving. This game is board based and used in an instruction classroom with English classes. Students move game pieces through the board by rolling dice and correctly answering questions about the library and the research process.

They are currently developing an online video game .  

technorati tag: loex2006