green librarian

The Juggling Act - 90/365 by foshydog, via flickr

You know that feeling you have after you’ve attended a good conference? All full of interesting ideas but you’re just not sure where to put them? That’s how I am feeling after attending WILU 2010 hosted by McMaster University.

And just to compound the problem, upon returning to Brock I attended a day on Best Practices in Service-Learning, hosted by our Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies. The plenary speaker was the impressive Edward Zlotkowski.

I definitely noted some synergies between some of the WILU speakers and the concept of service-learning — something I was admittedly skeptical about (though I now see that my doubts came from pure ignorance).

The opening keynote at WILU was James Paul Gee, someone who is thinking about learning and video games. He opened his talk with the suggestion that schools have a “content problem” — too focused on students absorbing and regurgitating content, rather than actual problem-solving.

Gee finds a way out of this mess in the workings of online communities. Using wide-ranging examples including Yu Gi Oh,  fan fiction, Sims, and World of Warcraft, he sees communities of learners, working together to optimize their problem-solving skills. I’ve been pretty fascinated about the power of online communities for a little while (I wrote about one called Kvetch last year). Gee underlines something that I too was so impressed by: the expertise is in the community.

The challenge for us is: how do we (the library/ the institution) engage *this* sort of learning? How do we create environments conducive to these sorts of communities?

Zlotkowski also emphasized the potential for service-learning to offer students valuable problem-solving experience, while embedded in community engagement and further upon extensive reflection and consideration of the broader forces at play.

So these ideas are just bouncing away in my brain. Not sure where they will land just yet…

Several of the sessions I attended at WILU brought similar ideas to the surface.  I’ll share a few ‘takeaways’ :

• Peggy Pritchard’s Embedding an eJournal Project: An amazing use of OJS that got 1st year (!) students deep in a hands-on writing for publication experience, complete with peer-review. A fantastic template that can definitely be picked up by other librarians…
• Birds of a Feather Motivating Students conversation: This informal discussion resulted in some great points. ie/ Artificial = bad. The closer your IL activity to the research process, the better. Recognize motivation as a factor: ask students why they are interested in a particular topic. Treat them as scholars!
• Mita William’s Libraries in games: Mita raised so many questions in my mind about the role of games in scholarship/ libraries and made me want to read up on theories of fun and game design. Just one point she shared (which should be obvious, but wasn’t to me) was that play must be free — it cannot be obligatory (or it will no longer have the qualities of play). Hmmm…

At Brock, the university is gradually moving all web content over to a new Content Management System (CMS) using Drupal architecture. At the same time, everyone has been adapting to the new branding standards and restrictions — you may have seen our new look in full-page Globe and Mail ads or on bus shelters in TO, especially right around when university applications were due.

Anyway, the library just launched our new homepage on April 29th. It’s still a work-in-progress and it will look pretty different by the time September rolls around, but it is a HUGE improvement on our previous web presence.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

My role in this project has been mainly to work on designing the Research Guides within this new system, and develop training for the rest of the librarians to enable them to create their own content and guides. Drupal allows the librarians to get in there and directly edit, create, and publish web content — this removes previous hurdles and delays. But, this also means that every librarian is now a web designer… with all the freedom and responsibility that this entails.

So, I set about creating a training plan and instructional materials — this time for my colleagues.

For materials, the format I used was simple guides with screenshots and call-outs highlighting action and ‘where to click.’ This appears to have been a good choice since some librarians printed out the guides while others just had them open in another window. I covered topics ranging from getting started with content creation and organization, to diving into the HTML code to embed YouTube videos and Meebo widgets.

And turns out, I really enjoy making these how-to guides. I love thinking about a process and boiling it down to the essential steps, and using strong visuals to make it as clear as possible. In appearance, they’re nothing special really — not terribly flashy or exciting — but I think they work… which is the point, right?

This was also a good exercise in forcing me to notice some of my assumptions: I overlooked a few key ‘tips and techniques’ in the early days, not knowing what is or isn’t common knowledge.

In addition, I held drop-in sessions in one of our eClassrooms where anyone interested could work on their content, with someone available to assist and answer questions. It worked really well to have those folks who were more tech-adept sitting side-by-side with others, working through it all.

It’s been an interesting experience — especially since it’s not just providing technology training, but also raising many questions around issues including best practices in writing for the web, student use (or lack of use?) of research guides, terminology choices within research guides, and so on.

For now, it’s an ongoing project. But it’s pretty exciting to see it all coming together!

• I should share a great read on writing for the web: Redish, Janice. Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. Elsevier: New York, 2007.

'teacher, high school yearbook c.1960's' by bunky's pickle, via flickr

I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching & assessment these days.

In the past month I ran two new history seminars — one focused on scholarly versus non-scholarly resources for a Native Studies course, and one on research & primary sources for a History of Technology course. By far the most valuable aspect of these seminars was an assessment form that a colleague, Pam Jacobs, shared with me.

In the fall I tried getting feedback from students using SurveyMonkey to save some trees, but had no luck. It seems to take so little effort for them to scratch down a few comments on a sheet of paper that I hand out in the last 10 minutes of the session. So, tree-killing it is for now — sorry, I need the feedback!

The most interesting responses came from the questions, “Please comment on what you found most helpful / least helpful about the session.”

Six of one. A half dozen of the other.

For the first group, I had a fascinating problem. A considerable number of students listed the least helpful aspect as “what is scholarly vs. popular” … yet also listed the most helpful aspect using phrases such as “the practical analysis of sources,” or “showing the different types of sources,” or “clarifying what qualifies as a scholarly source.” Urk. To me, these students were listing the same thing as the most & least useful element in the instruction. I can only conclude that it’s a language issue. Perhaps I used a slide title like “Distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly” when I should’ve written “How to filter your search results.”

The last question on the form was “Was there something you wanted to learn that was not covered?” A handful of the Native Studies students expressed concern about navigating the primary source collections necessary for their assignment. Since the prof had asked me to focus on analyzing sources, we couldn’t cram all that in 50 minutes. BUT I was able to respond to the students’ concerns by creating a brief screencast focused on this part of their assignment & post it in their Sakai page.

It was very satisfying to be able to follow up with them & feel more like I’d fulfilled their needs. If I hadn’t been able to share that video, I’d have felt that awful feeling like when you sort out the answer to a reference question moments after the asker has walked away. This does not make for a happy librarian.

'345/365 touch-up' by kharied, via flickr

How do I know that you know what you think you know?

With the second group of students, I ran the session five times (ppt is on Slideshare). What a bonus ! I was really able to make small modifications based on the feedback I received each day — not enough to change the real content, but to better customize the instruction for this specific group.

I see countless students at the Help Desk without a clue of how to search for a book in the catalogue or subsequently, find it on the shelf. So, since the students needed a ‘monograph’ for their assignment, I made a point of covering the basics of books.

The response was loud and clear: we know how to find books, lady. A good majority of students listed “basic book search” as the least helpful aspect of the session. It was hard for me not to think, “But do you really know how to find books…? Like, have you heard of subject headings?” Still, I took the note & abbreviated this part of the seminar. Even when I cut the book stuff down to a minute or two, these 2nd year students were not interested in hearing it.

This got me thinking about the challenge of aiming for the middle when it comes to our assumptions about students’ research skills & library know-how before we (individually) get to them. I wished I had some sort of pre-test in the weeks before I ran the session so I could better customize the session. My colleague Pam  has started experimenting with clickers to engage the students and get this sort of info … and I could see this working with larger groups, but when you’ve got 15 students in a small room I feel like clickers would be weird.

And of course, even if I could have a pre-test with a question like “Have you searched for journals in a library database?” the responses wouldn’t actual tell me if a student knew what a database was. I wonder if anyone else has tried anything along these lines …?

The most frustrating thing about library instruction for the average student (I’m speaking from experience here) is REPETITION. We already know this! they scream. So, how to avoid repetition … while at the same time making sure to cover the important stuff (especially for those students who’ve slipped through the cracks)??

I attended a great talk at OLA SuperConference last month (among many others of course). It was session #1206 “Teaming up: benefits of collaborating with library colleagues” presented by Kim Cornell, Lise Doucette, and Dan Sich  of University of Western Ontario Libraries. They talked about how the physical sciences librarians at the Taylor Library moved to a team approach. There were many points in this presentation that really spoke to me: co-teaching, the sharing of instructional resources, and cross-training.

But, they also spoke about mapping out the students’ interaction with the library. So ideally, the librarian could have a sense of what sort of library instruction the average 3rd year chemistry student has already encountered. I know this isn’t a brand new idea, but it really spoke to my recent challenges with the history students.Of course, this may be a little more challenging in the Humanities where students are not on as direct of a path towards graduation. Also, this is not really something that a newbie ‘limited term appointment’ such as myself could implement… but I like the concept.

If we want students to value library instruction, we have to find a way to acknowledge their existing research skills and incorporate that into our lesson planning. How? Well… I’m working on that.

I’m excited to finally share the project that I was developing in December!

this year is going to be different officially launched today, the first day of winter term for Brock students. It is both a library promotions page with a  contest, and a mini-suite of information literacy essentials mainly directed at undergraduate students.

The project originated as a marketing & communications initiative for the new year. Based on an idea from Jonathan Younker, Head of Library Systems and Technologies, Justine decided we should set this up on a completely different website. She has been working with a new Student Advisory Group for the library, and found that when they received information “from the library,” it tended not to catch their attention. Inspired by other brands who have created stand-alone websites that are not overtly pushing the product (a sub-brand? I’m not sure what this is called in advertising lingo), we started looking for hosting sites that might allow us to reach students before they hear “brought to you by the library” and tune out. I took to calling this our not-a-library-website.

Which brings us to Wix. Justine found this incredible site — I’m not sure how. In their own words, “Wix offers you a simple powerful platform to make flash website templates and more” — oh, and it’s free with very minimal ad content on your webspace.  It was great to use their simple drag-and-drop functionality to create a funky site with surprising flexibility. Although I’ve learned now that Flash sites are not friendly with some mobile devices, such as iPhones — darn.

Anyway, I used Camtasia to create three screencasts with content determined by a number of factors: issues raised by the Student Advisory Group, frequently asked questions from the reference desk, and tips we felt could make a difference in an undergraduate student’s research process. I did a bit of research into screencast best practices, which I’ll likely write more about in the coming months. The videos were fun to develop, though creating a tidy Camtasia video can be quite the process. In order to set them up on Wix, the videos had to hosted elsewhere so I created a Brock Library YouTube account and did the necessary file conversion.

The contest asks students to watch a video and tell us “how does this help you?” Justine managed to get a winter term gym membership as a prize, which fit perfectly with our ‘new year’s resolutions’ theme. And now it’s live! We’ve already had 10 unique contest entries so far today with over 100 YouTube views since Thursday, which I’d say bodes well. While Wix can’t give us a count on number of hits, we do have the YouTube views counter & I’ve also been promoting the site using bit.ly which counts clicks.

I’m hoping there will be something to learn about screencast content in the student comments ( very interesting so far! I posted excerpts on the ‘your feedback’ part of the Wix site– these aren’t fake!) and I’ve already learned a great deal in the process of rolling out this project. Definitely a great way to start the school year.

As a final note, in my thinking about video tutorials and info lit, I came across a few fascinating projects. I haven’t had a chance to fully digest these, but I know they will influence my work in these areas.

• Tutorials and Online Learning Guides by NCSU. These folks wrote about the development process here & I really think they’ve got something with this focus on CONCEPTS.
• http://projectinfolit.org/ Based at the University of Washington’s iSchool, these researchers are producing some very insightful documents, including the 42 page report, How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age. I’m still making my way through this puppy.
• Kim Leeder’s post ‘Learning to teach through video’ also offers some interesting thoughts.

A paper that I wrote earlier this year was just published in the most recent issue of Faculty of Information Quarterly. F/IQ is an e-journal started last year by fellow iSchool students — most notably Meghan Ecclestone — and continues to be run entirely by current students.

It’s titled Kvetch: Information Sharing in an Online Wedding Forum. This was my first dive into true social sciences research & information studies ‘in the field.’ I really immersed myself in the project and find myself feeling there’s much more to be said about the topic of virtual communities and information sharing.

For now though, it’s Christmas break! I’ve spent the past week or so working away on a little project that I’m pretty excited about involving Camtasia screencasts. But we’ll just have to wait until the new year to see the final product!

iWhale by Stephen Hackett via flickr

While there are many venues for librarians to discuss the processes of their success in a professional forum, there are few opportunities to collaboratively display and examine the processes behind our most productive failures. All success is built from failure, and the lessons learned from failure are arguably as valuable as what we learn from success.

I’m pretty fascinated by this proposal and I think there’s real potential to learn a lot from each other’s so-called failures. It’s also clearly a delicate thing, talking about failure, potentially fraught with personal risk and sensitivity issues. I look forward to following this event’s development to see what direction they decide to take it.

In the library world, it’s hard to call something an out-and-out failure. In the context of my eBooks presentation, I know that I learned something I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I also know that I can’t take personal responsibility for the ‘no shows.’ It does make me think about assessment of what we do, and how our services evolve based on past experience.

Finally, to finish off on a ‘fail’ note, I wanted to share my eBooks presentation here, so I uploaded it to SlideShare. But SlideShare didn’t like my Notes slides, so I was only able to upload it sans notes.

And this also made me think about my presentation style: I’ve been moving away from text-heavy slides that cover everything-that-you-say to more use of images that help convey a message. In this presentation, I did a mix of “going live,” and slides with images and/ or text. In terms of a lasting record of the content, the PowerPoint document doesn’t really offer too much in a meaningful way. So, by attempting to make a more engaging in-person presentation, I seem to have created a less engaging ‘lecture capture’ product. Below, find my hopefully-somewhat-meaningful presentation.

Note: The presentation was also videotaped which could potentially offer a better online record. I’ll let you know if it turns out…

There’s an interview with me in the latest issue of InsideOCULA!

I attended my first OCULA council meeting yesterday & they are such an interesting and collegial group. It was great to be a part of the behind-the-scenes conversations & get a sense of the amount of planning involved in these projects.

Also in the good news department: This morning I attended a History department meeting to plug embedded instruction services, explaining how library support could take various forms: web guide, screencast, presence in Sakai,  in-class session, etc.

The History prof I worked with earlier this term chimed in with a great testimonial, saying that the session I’d offered his students was very successful. The course mentors had met to discuss the fall term, and agreed that the library session was the most effective piece. Woohoo!

So, I’m hoping this will lead to a few phone calls or e-mails from other History instructors. I would really love some more experience developing tailored library support.

I heard a great idea for engaging/ communicating with faculty  from the YBP rep this week. She mentioned that when she was a liaison for History, she would keep track of History questions that she got at the desk & share a sample with the library rep at the end of term. She found faculty were always surprised at the sorts of questions their students were bringing to us. I bet this contributed to the sense of a need for collaboration between the library and the department. Hm, food for thought!

Sharing by furiousgeorge81 (via flickr)

Last Friday, I went on a field trip to Waterloo.

I was invited along for a gathering of Marketing & Communications librarians (and a couple non-librarians)  — attendees included Guelph, McMaster, Ryerson, Laurier, Queens, and Brock of course! Our host was Nancy Collins, Communications & Liaison Librarian at UW.

It was such an energizing and interesting day! Around the table, we shared ideas, challenges, successes, and less-than-successes. I learned that the group started as a pretty informal network, created by a few librarians in order to connect with others working to define their roles with this Marketing/ Communications job title — one of growing prevalence.

While the libraries around the table are trying to reach their users in many different ways and with unique style, the projects all have the same basic values and priorities. The great thing is that the library ethos prevails: share and share alike. There’s no shame in adopting and adapting the strategies of fellow libraries.  I walked away from the meeting, my head brimming with ideas & possibilities.

Part of my responsibilities at Brock is in the area of Marketing & Communication, and I have been working closely with Justine Cotton, Brock’s Communications & Liaison Librarian. This week, we published the Fall 2009 issue of Library News.

I learned alot writing these little pieces — otherwise, it’s unlikely I would’ve had reason to play around in ODESI, the new interface for the Ontario data repository. The faculty blogging article was also a good project because it got me reading Brock faculty blogs, and thinking a little about the roles that this medium can play in academia.I find it really interesting that McMaster Library is now hosting faculty blogs — true recognition that this can be a form of scholarly communication!

The aspect of marketing/ communications work that I’ve most enjoyed thus far is the opportunity to be creative –  brainstorming all sorts of ways to reach our diverse user groups.  I like working collaboratively, bouncing ideas off of others. I find that crazy or mediocre ideas become great ideas as they ping-pong between group members.

As a true ‘people person,’ I have to keep an eye out for these sorts of projects. I must admit that it can sometimes get a little lonely in my office.

What else am I up to at work these days?

• Taking a close look at a list of periodical indexes in my subject areas & trying to sort out whether there is coverage of this material in our electronic databases … harder than you’d think!!
• Reading up on LibQUAL+. Brock will be issuing the survey for the first time & I’ll be helping to roll it out. (Funny, cuz I blogged about it back in my job-hunting days)
• Trying to figure out the best way to use GOBI to get feedback on titles from faculty members. Oiy.

drop the puck by duluoz cats (via flickr)

I’m still coming down from the I-pulled-off-that-info-lit-workshop high.

This week, I had the opportunity to design a hands-on session ‘from scratch.’ A history professor asked that the students get experience with the research process, and otherwise left it up to me. I really do love instruction, and learning that it was a part of librarianship largely contributed to my decision to pursue this field.

The challenge with this particular course is that it is non-credit, so the students don’t have any assignments to which I could connect the activity. In order to help motivate the students, I included some game-like elements: I called the session, “The best kind of essay … the kind you don’t have to write.”

A few weeks earlier, I had given a presentation to this group on the basics: when to use the catalogue versus databases, tricks to improve search results, tips for history students. This time, I kept the intro quick & dirty and showed students where they could access the overview PowerPoint. I put them in groups of 3-4 and distributed sample essay topics. The students were asked to find the best 2 books and 3 peer-reviewed articles (accessible at Brock) on their topic, create a bibliography, and e-mail it to me by 2:45. This gave them about 25 minutes to complete the task.

Surprise: they played along! Since I couldn’t tempt them with grades or speak directly to their looming assignments, I worried that they would scoff at my request for a deliverable with a deadline. But, they took up the challenge!

I would’ve loved to have just a little more time, say half an hour, to better review the students’ submissions & directly address any trouble they had in finding resources.  Although, maybe it’s better to be short & sweet: I never hit the point where I’d ‘lost’ them, they were working on the bibliography right up until the buzzer.

The other surprise: they were interested in RefWorks and wanted to jump right in & try it. I gave the briefest of RefWorks overviews as I was reviewing finding journal articles: just sped through exporting three citations, selecting citation style, and producing a bibliography. This seemed to impress! And it makes sense really: the point is that RefWorks makes things easier and faster. If I’m going to have to create an account for something, you should be able to tell me what it’s good for in about a minute.

I asked the professor to distribute a link to a Survey Monkey evaluation form, so we’ll see if I get any feedback.

On a parting note, I came across a quotation this week that really spoke to me. In a recent C&RL News article, Bryan Sinclair discusses the concept of the ‘blended librarian.’ He credits Steven Bell and John Shank (2004) with the following definition:

an academic librarian who combines the traditional skill set of librarianship with the information technologist’s hardware/software skills, and the instructional or educational designer’s ability to apply technology appropriately in the teaching-learning process.

I read this and thought, yes! That’s the kind of librarian I want to be.

It’s a real shift going from ‘the eternal student’ (eight years of post-secondary education) to ‘young professional.’ Not only am I adjusting to the 9-to-5 work week, my evenings and weekends are suddenly my own. No more endless reading lists or always-looming assignments tingeing my spare time with guilt.

What, then, to do with this time? I’m finding the evenings to be hardest: get home, make dinner, chat with spouse, clean up from dinner… then what? A few evenings I’ll go to the gym, and on Thursdays I volunteer for askON for 2 hours. I can think of all sorts of lovely hobbies that I could/ should take up, but I do feel a little low on energy at the end of most days & regretfully, I often end up watching an episode or two of The Wire … or The Office … or Mad Men (I could go on).

One welcome distraction was getting excited about comics again — this seems to go in waves for me. So, just thought I’d share my last three reads.

Epileptic by David B.

Epileptic by David B.

Wow, this was an incredible book! I picked it up from the Popular Reading shelves at Brock — I’d never heard of the title or the author before. It was rich, and disturbing, and fantastical, and peppered with wry humour. Epileptic was originally published in French and in a series of six volumes. It’s one of those achingly honest stories. You could try to sum it up by saying it’s an autobiography of the artist’s youth and early adulthood as he and his family come to terms with his older brother’s illness, but that wouldn’t do it justice. Just read it — it will consume you, in a good way.

Black Hole

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Ok, so I’m pretty late in getting to this one. It sits prominently in the graphic novel section of every bookstore & I kept meaning to pick it up, especially since the cover is so eye-catching and strange. I have to say, it didn’t do it for me. The story is very teen-angst-y but in a stereotypical way: I didn’t find the characters believable. The story is basically about a disfiguring STD, ‘the Bug,’ that is afflicting teenagers in a small town. Black Hole seems to be a bit of a big deal in the comics world, but I kept waiting for it to get to the good part. It sometimes made me feel sick to my stomach, which I will put up with (and even appreciate) for a great story, but that’s lacking here.

Burma Chronicles

Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle

I’ve read Delisle’s other travelogues (and mentioned them here before). Burma Chronicles is in very much the same vein, except this time Guy is taking care of his young son while his wife works for Médecins Sans Frontières in — you guessed it — Burma. I love the way this guy writes & draws — I actually laugh out loud. He always provides a self-conscious outsider’s perspective, and I can say that I’ve learned about North Korea, China, & Burma while following this artist’s overseas adventures. Plus he’s Quebecois, so now you have to check him out.

Now that I’ve binged on comics, I’m taking a break to try reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. No pictures in this one, but I like it so far because it’s about Comparative Literature scholars — go Comp Lit!