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.

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.

Every librarian and faculty member should read the CIBER briefing paper Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (2 MB PDF). CIBER conducted this research for the British Library and JISC . The report focuses on information seeking behavior of students born after 1993 (the Google Generation). The paper also ties in research from OCLC's Perceptions studies. You may also want to listen to presentation given and Q&A's when the paper was released on January 16, 2008.

Found via Stephen's Lighthouse. 

This was one of the two "current issues" discussion groups sponsored by ACRL's Instruction Section (IS) at Midwinter. I was planning to go to both, but impromptu Collage training (more on that in another post) changed my plans. The topic for this discussion is very relevant to me as an instructor. IS has an overview page for this discussion (the link should be good for awhile…but I know they are planning a redesign eventually).

Scott Scheidlower from York College (CUNY) lead the discussion. Scott started by reminding us that the student, the institution's disability coordinator, and the instructor/librarian are all responsible for student success.  We must accommodate special requests if possible, except if they are prohibitively expensive. The student's disability must be documented with the institution for the accommodation to be required.

Invisible disabilities are not seen by casual observation. Invisible disabilities can include deafness, dyslexia, color blindness, depression, and mental illness. It is okay for us to ask how to help someone. It is not okay to ask what the disability is specifically.

Scott is a firm believer that we should understand and effectively use Gardner's multiple intelligences to increase student learning. Scott had created 10 scenarios and assigned each table to discuss two. I jotted down notes as each table reported their ideas.

These ideas can be used to improve your teaching technique and handouts for students with/without disabilities:

• speak clearly and depending on the room louder than normal
• face your students when speaking (speechreading aka lip reading)
• make sure you are illuminated in a dark room
• gesture with your hand or with a laser pointer instead of saying "click the search button"
• number handouts instead of relying on color to distinguish the
• use shading or patters on charts and graphs instead of colors
• label colors with numbers
• consistently use the same shape to represent a color (e.g. triangles are red, squares are blue)
• ask a student to take notes and make them available to the entire class
• ask a student to navigate the computer allowing you the ability to maintain eye contact and gesture freely
• accept alternative assignments if possible
• determine if your disability services office provides a scribe service

These ideas can be used to improve the computers in your libraries and your library's web sites:

• install a text to speech screen reader on computers
• install voice recognition software on at least one machine
• use alt text in html pages to be very descriptive of the image being displayed
• don't use frames and limit the use of tables to layout pages

One participant suggested that we find out if our institution was a member of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. She had positive experiences working with "RFB&D" to obtain materials for students.

Scott recommended that we read the following references for more information.

Fabio, D. (1994-2007). Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. In Encyclopedia of educational technology. Retrieved December 3, 2007, from <http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/multiintell/index.htm>

Hernon, P., & Calvert, P. (Eds.). (2006). Improving the quality of library services for students with disabilities. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Hurst, A. (1996). Reflecting on researching disability and higher education. In L. Barton (Ed.), Disability and society: Emerging issues and insights (pp. 123-46). Longman sociology series. London: Longman.

Konur, O. (2006, July). Teaching disabled students in Higher Education. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(3), 351-363. Retrieved January 3, 2007. doi:10.1080/13562510600680871

U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). ADA home page. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from <http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm>

[tags]ALAMW08, Midwinter08[/tags] 

Here's another one to add to your informationista bag o'tricks. Classes draw nigh and people are starting to freak out. A religion paper is due tomorrow and one of the required readings is in a reference book. Unfortunately, someone is currently hiding in the building with the book and their laptop, hidden the book, or walked off with the book (unlikely). 

On a whim, I went to Amazon and found that the AWOL title is available on Amazon with Search Inside. The student looking for the book needed a specific article. We quickly brought up an image of the page he needed to read. He mentioned that he didn't know Amazon offered such a feature.

I don't normally talk about Amazon during instruction. I do sometimes talk about Google Book Search and/or the related copyright issues with GBS. Do you make a point to talk about these commercial discovery tools with classes or individual students?

This was the only invited paper session that I attended. The content was useful. I wish it would have happened a bit earlier in the day. It was given during the last time slot on Saturday and I was mentally wiped out by 4:30. Tracy Mitrano is the Director of IT Policy and of Computer Policy and Law Program at Cornell University. Her talk covered many of the concepts included in information literacy competency standard 5. I found the portion of her discussion on copyright to be the most interesting.

She started by talking about how copyright has not kept pace with technology and how our users want to use and reuse content. The AAP's letter to Cornell about course reserves was discussed along with the development of Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines (PDF). She recommended that we read Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyright Material in the Digital Age from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. A recent public policy report, Intellectual Property And Free Speech In The Online World (PDF), provides an overview of P2P file sharing lawsuits brought by the RIAA and how IHEs are handling the situation.

The remainder of Tracy's talk covered social networking and electronic surveillance (Patriot Act). The social network portion included familiar ground: students putting things on their profiles they shouldn't; criminals using these tools to commit crimes (e.g. pedophiles on Myspace); and politicians over reactions to ban social networking sites. The electronic surveillance section provided a concise review of how we went from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to the USA Patriot Act.  

technorati tag: acrl2007

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. 

The latest edition of the Horizon Report is now available for your browsing/reading pleasure. This is a joint publication from The New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The technologies forecasted along with their time to adoption include:

• user created content (1 year or less),
• social networking (1 year or less),
• mobile phones (2 to 3 years),
• virtual worlds (2 to 3 years),
• new scholarship and emerging forms of publication (4 to 5 years), and
• massively multiplayer educational gaming (4 to 5 years)

The executive summary identifies several trends and challenges impacting higher education. "Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given." [page 4] I agree with this statement, but would like to know who really considers information literacy a given in the first place? We try our best to teach students how to use our resources, but we know we don't reach everyone and even the ones we do reach are not always receptive to learning because it's all free on the web anyway.

The authors continue, "Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college." [page 4] Yep. The continual challenge we face is helping our students straddle the digital and analog worlds during information research. We are also challenged to help faculty understand that their students do not approach research the same way that they did 10-20 years ago when they were in college.

I enjoy reading/browsing this report. However, I am always concerned about how I can really apply any of these technologies locally.

A post over on Search Engine Land comments on a recent eye tracking study of MSN Search conducted by Edward Cutrell of Microsoft and Zhiwei Guan of University of Washington. The survey sample was very small (18 people) but draws some interesting conclusions.

On a post survey questionnaire the participants highly agreed to the statement, “I expect the information I'm looking for to be in the top five results." ( page 8 ) This isn't surprising to anyone working in an academic library. However, it does support the challenge we have in helping our students understand the difference in how a search engine executes a search and presents results compared to a library research database. If this report had a larger sample size and showed the same result, it would definitely support the current discussion and practice of Googlizing research databases.

Cutrell and Guan also conclude that "users trust the search engine more for informational search or invest less scrutiny in judging the results with higher rankings." ( page 8 ) I know that students do not critically evaluate content. I have observed students selecting one of the first five results on numerous occasions. I am still not sure how to convince students to break this bad habit. Once again, this is nothing new but it does support observations and current discussions on the need for students to develop better critical thinking and evaluation skills.