University Academic Planning Council

One problem with writing here about committee meetings is finding out what information can be shared. At the end of the University Academic Planning Council discussion of essential learning outcomes for UW Madison Students, Provost and UAPC Chair Pat Farrell said, “Share these documents with anyone who might be interested…. no secrets here!” So I’m happy to be able share the documentation I have from the meeting:

• Essential Learning Outcomes (infolit-l only)
• 2008 Preface to the University Assessment Plan
  
• Convergence (now available electronically! infolit-l only)

The purpose was to make UAPC part of the conversation while outcomes are still being shaped, at the ground level, and discuss how an articulation of learning outcomes can be helpful in decision-making. This is a very influential group of deans and administrators who oversee academic programs and centers across the university.

Will we still be teaching “finding”?

This is a topic that I’ve been grappling with lately, and I know that others have too. It seems like in library instruction we mostly start with “finding” for a variety of reasons: finding has been difficult, finding is the “library part,” finding connects users to our collections, and finding is where we can show off what we know best. Of course many of us spend time on other skills in library instruction sessions – topic formation, evaluation, citing. And some of us work, usually in collaboration with faculty, to promote other skills such as analysis.

But in my recent experience, our (perceived?) focus on finding creates some negative publicity for library instruction programs. Why are we so focused on teaching people to search when library interfaces are becoming easier to use, people will be discovering all content through Google, and so on. These all seem like valid questions, and my initial thoughts have been that if finding really does become such a non-issue, there will certainly be plenty of other areas where learners need our support, like evaluating the results of a Google search.  But I also think that there’s plenty of research that people are not so good at finding, so we really need to look into the “finding is easy” assumption first.

A very interesting post on ACRLog refers to some new research by the very famous web usability expert Jacob Nielsen on this topic. According to Nielsen, users face three problems: inability to revise their strategy, inability to understand search results and evaluate for potential usefulness, inability to sort through search results. I’m still figuring out the distinctions between the last two, so go to the source for the full story. The ACRLog post includes some other interesting leads as well.

“College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks”

Primary Research Group has released a report, “College Information Literacy Efforts – Benchmarks.” The report got a posting in Wired Campus, which is widely read in higher ed, focusing on credit classes in community colleges (up 38% last year) and all types of institutions (5% offer a credit class). It’s interesting that this mode of instruction has increased so much in community colleges, but doesn’t seem that prevalent in higher ed as a whole.

The executive summary of the report has a few nuggets that I found particularly relevant:

• “over 23% of the sample required information literacy training integrated into basic writing or composition courses.”
• “Nearly 48% of the colleges sampled offered interactive tutorials in information literacy topics to students. Just a third of bachelors-granting colleges offered such tutorials, while 6 out of 10 research universities did so.”
• “The vast majority of the sample, nearly 84%, reported that the library was not really involved with computer technology training on campus.”

The full report is $75… maybe we will get it or we can order it through ILL…. Thanks to Karen for prompting me to look into this more deeply.

Scholarly Publishing, Reading, and Library Professional Organizations

Slightly off-topic, there is an interesting post on ACRLog reporting the results of an informal survey on the journal-reading habits of academic librarians who read ACRLog. The short summary is that many of the unrepresentative sample who responded (I responded) “read” journals, primarily College and Research Libraries followed by Journal of Academic Librarianship and portal. I “read” these by skimming the table of contents and reading one or two articles at a surface level. I really like the idea of having a learning community/journal club so that we can read a few things more in depth, and maybe that’s something we can set up in the future. A few of the librarians participate in reading groups in their subject areas.

The comments on the ACRLog post include a lively discussion of why we (librarians, ACRL) do not make our content open access when other professional organizations share much more (e.g. EDUCAUSE), particularly when we are so engaged in promoting open access.   Some content, including the very impressive Studying Students: A Research Project at the University of Rochester, is free from ACRL.

L&S TA Training

At the University Assessment Council Today, Brian Bubenzer talked about the training of teaching assistants within L&S. There are approximately 1,300 TAs in L&S; approximately 1/3 never had a TA as an undergraduate. The duties of TAs range widely: stand-alone, lab, discussion section, or grader. Faculty perceptions of TAs vary widely by department. Brian identified three main phases of TA development and corresponding types of training TAs are interested in:

1. A very short phase of self-doubt and dependence where TAs are interested in “first day tips and techniques.”

2. A longer phase of experimentation and greater independence where TAs are interested in advanced pedagogy.

3. The last year of graduate school where TAs are thinking beyond our campus and interested in resume building activities.

UW’s August TA training event has existed for decades, but more work is being done to evaluate the effectiveness of the training provided and make improvements. Focus groups were conducted with the assistance of the Survey Center. Among a variety of useful observations from these sessions, it was learned that regular, formal training sessions over course of semester are most useful.

I was liaison to the GSI (=TA) Teaching and Resource Center at my previous job, and this is very much in-line with what I learned about where to place the library’s instructional support. At the big, August events, breakout sessions I planned on research-based learning were poorly attended. When we conducted them later in the semester, there was more interest, usually from a cross-section of people in “phase 2″ (interested in pedagogy) and “phase 3″ (trying to develop materials and knowledge for the job market).

Sharing Good Practices among Universities

This week, I’m in Berkeley participating in a workshop about the Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship for Undergraduate Research. I worked on this project for several years, and will be leading a session about assessing student learning and participating in the rest of the workshop. The purpose of the event is to share what we learned with a team from Cornell that’s planning a similar program, and it’s a great opportunity to learn about initiatives at other universities and to reflect on campus collaborations to promote information literacy. I guess it’s a bonus that we can include UW Madison in this conversation.

The first session of the workshop was about the campus environment — what was it about the campus culture that allowed us to collaborate to promote research-based learning, and what cultural barriers or challenges did we encounter? The speakers were Berkeley University Librarian Tom Leonard and Vice Provost Christina Maslach. They talked about the idea that there are many “creation stories” for our relatively successful initiative, but that these things develop more organically from formal and informal conversations and recognizing opportunities, rather than from a planned sequence of initiatives.

The second session was about collaboration between faculty and academic support units to support curricular innovations. The Mellon project had formal teams (faculty, educational technologist, librarian, pedagogy specialist, etc.) that met throughout a fellowship year. We tried a formal project management structure, but that was difficult to reconcile with the campus culture.

Even though this initiative was a huge (all consuming?) part of my work life for years, I’m learning a lot through hearing others talk about their experiences and from responding to the Cornell team’s thoughtful questions. This reflection stage often gets glossed over. I’m taking a lot of notes and asking questions in order to find good practices we can apply in our own programs.

Academic Technology Brownbag

I spoke at the academic technology brown bag today. I put together a presentation on information literacy and opportunities for collaboration that I hope to share with the librarians soon — maybe at a LILI Forum. I talked about the future of information literacy and possible library/academic technology collaborations. For one part of the presentation, I discussed Craig Gibson’s “Prisms around Student Learning” talk at an EDUCAUSE ELI Focus Session last year; this was something that Ron Cramer referenced in his conversation with us at the March LILI Forum. Here’s the slide I created — extracted from Gibson’s content with a few other ideas sprinkled in. Gibson’s idea here is that information literacy has been through multiple phases — bibliographic/library instruction, library-centric information literacy, and collaborative information literacy, and that a new sociocultural phase is emerging. This was only one small part of his presentation; more detail is available in Craig’s slides and podcast on the EDUCAUSE site (link above). Craig won the 2008 Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award from ACRL IS this year. Looking forward to sharing the full content of my talk soon.

Breakfast Meeting on Essential Learning Outcomes – history in the making?

This morning, I was a facilitator at a meeting on essential learning outcomes sponsored by Vice-Provost for Teaching and Learning Aaron Brower, the University General Education Committee, the Offices of the Dean of Students, the University Assessment Council, Academic Planning and Analysis, Orientation and New Student Programs, L&S, and L&S Academic Affairs. Phew! I serve on UGEC and the Assessment Council. The purpose was to invite selected faculty who teach large Gen Ed courses and courses that serve large numbers of new students to discuss the question: what do we hope our students will learn which transcends content (essential learning outcomes).  We addressed the question in a few different ways.

Aaron Brower opened the session by saying that this was the first time faculty had been asked to address this question, so history in the making. Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor talked a bit about LEAP and then we addressed the question in two table groupings: one across disciplines and a second with people in the same subject area (STEM, quantitative reasoning, communication, humanities, or social sciences).

At my first table, there was a real feeling of shared responsibility for developing the skills that help students succeed: everything from learning to take notes to how to analyze readings. There was also a sentiment that large GE courses can get students engaged, but cannot hope to equip them with the methodologies of the discipline they are taught in. Instead, they should enable students to approach a subject (science, political science) critically over the course of their lifetimes, and also understand the “limits of a discipline.” The second table I facilitated was the people who manage and teach courses that meet the Communication requirements. I have frequent conversations with this group, and we already have a framework of shared learning outcomes. The discussants felt that other faculty should understand that these courses do have their own “content,” and should not become the place to teach all baseline skills. We also talked about intentionality; how we share learning outcomes with students.    While information literacy was not discussed explicitly, most of the conversation was about “learning to learn,” so directly related to our work in this area.

It was a brilliant group of people, so facilitation was a very easy job. I agreed with Aaron Brower that it was a(n) historic moment — working together to make our goals for student learning explicit. I look forward to sharing the notes and handouts when they are posted. I asked for permission last week but it was felt that they were “not ready for prime time.” I think we can begin to examine them in meetings to inform our own planning, but it’s not a good idea to post them in this public forum until they are made available publicly.

Uncovering assumptions about the Research Process

People sometimes ask me what we’re reading in LIS 826, the information literacy practicum that includes a number of class meetings and readings. This week, we’re reading an older article that does a good job of introducing the idea that faculty have a different take on undergraduate research. Faculty do care about supporting undergraduate researchers, it’s that they see research through the lens of their own experience as expert researchers in a specific subject area. This seems like an important idea to share with new librarians if we want to prepare them for faculty/librarian collaborations.

Leckie, Gloria. “Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering Faculty Assumptions about the Undergraduate Research Process.” JAL May 1996 201-208. http://tinyurl.com/yutcwl

RSS for National Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L)

I just learned that the Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L) is now available as an RSS Feed! I moderated this list, formerly BI-L, for several years, and it’s a great source of news, expertise, and job postings. Many people stop subscribing because there tend to be some long, mailbox-clogging debates, and an RSS feed seems like a perfect solution to this problem.