NCSU Course Views Project

Joe Ryan spoke to a group today about his experience developing the “Course Views” project at NCSU. The pages developed for courses are similar to UW’s Library Course Pages, but they were developed from the ground up to achieve some specific goals:

• create a “course view” for every course at the university
• develop a scalable/sustainable system for library course content delivery
• pages customized as much as possible to the course

The course view pages are generated based on a course’s code that indicates department and level. Librarians may then add additional customization. The team developed “widgets” for the various components of the course pages to make the updating process scale up. They also created a course views “widget” that will display in the campus pilot of Moodle for course pages.

I like many things about their approach: the widgets, the descriptive naming conventions, the clean presentation of the information, and the idea that some level of customization can occur through programming. There is a tension between this approach and higher levels of customization faculty want, and some questions about campus process that they are just beginning to think about.

I like their project page a lot, also, we should do that for our projects.  I also met Joe’s colleague Kim Duckett, who also worked on this project, at LOEX.  It’s an interesting library that sounds like lots of fun to work in.

Bringing Information Literacy into the Reaccreditation Process

Many campus committees are engaged in preparing information for the reaccreditation process. Library staff also serve on several of the “Theme Teams” that were charged to explore six themes. Emilie Ngo-Nguidjol convened a small task force of librarians (Eliot Finkelstein, Steve Baumgart, Phyllis Weisbard, Emilie, and myself) to draft an early report on information literacy for Team 4, “Preparing Global Citizens and Leaders of the Future.” Our work is evident in both the Executive Summary and Team Report. Here’s a quick excerpt from the summary:

“Globally-prepared citizens and leaders will acquire or understand the importance of learning new skills, knowledge and values that enable communicating with and understanding others different than oneself. They will understand the importance of sustainable living and possess global information literacy—the ability to know what information is needed, where to find it, and how to evaluate and reflect on contradictory sources of information in an increasingly open, rapidly changing, and complex global
information environment.”

I’m really happy that Emilie led this effort and interested to see where else information literacy (and other related literacies) appear in the process and results.

UC Berkeley Summer Reading List

The 2008 Summer Reading List for UC Berkeley is created by the Library and the Office of Educational Development and includes recommendations on a theme from the campus community. The reading list is not mandatory, but intended to provide a fun and optional activity. “It’s just for you to enjoy as you wish.” This year’s theme is “Bio-Graphy: Writing a Life.” Last year, they tried a web 2.0 approach to the list, publishing it as a blog . Not sure if that will continue, but the optional reading list is a fun idea. I know we have a “one book” program in Chadbourne, but not sure what other similar programs we have.

Teaching and Learning Symposium 2008

The Teaching and Learning Symposium was last week. The first thing I want to share is that the presentations will be archived online. The archive site is still a little glitchy, so I’ll send out a link once the presentations are all there. A few highlights from my perspective:

- In the opening plenary, Adam Nelson talked about three teaching/learning examples in UW-Madison’s past. From a library perspective, the most interesting was the debating societies in 1890s, which engaged important issues of the day, conducted a year’s worth of primary and secondary research, produced substantial published reports, and were extremely prestigious. These were extracurricular clubs that were more popular than football in their heyday. Also included were Meiklejohn’s 1920s Experimental College “Athens-America” curriclum and Otto’s “Man and Nature” philosophy course. Adam was very gracious in thanking the archives for helping to find the really interesting primary sources he shared.

- A Learning Circle on the “Essential Learning Outcomes” we talked about How/where/when we can engage the outcomes. We talked about how to make more explicit what courses and curricula do and what kinds of evidence we can look at to see if students have done this. We agreed that we can’t address all skills (or even one skill comprehensively) in a single course, but students move through the curriculum in many different ways so it’s difficult to build a sequence of experiences. So we’ll need to develop a collection of strategies that allow us to gather the necessary data and students to be more intentional about their college experiences.

- In the closing plenary, John Wiley discussed big forces that will impact the future of higher education: demographics, outcomes assessment, degrees and credentials, productivity of the educational enterprise, and technology. Outcomes assessment was the most interesting to me: Wiley pointed out that we rarely “apply our research prowess to our teaching” to analyze our effectiveness in promoting learning. His conclusions were that “we should be interested” in this question, and that comprehensive outcomes assessment is prohibitively expensive, perhaps doubling the cost of education. It’s hard to make a good decision about how much assessment is enough, in my experience, so it was useful to hear that perspective from the top.

The library was, as in past years, heavily involved in the planning of the symposium and the program. Sheila Stoeckel and I were on the planning committee and the Library was involved in two programs and two post-conference workshops that I’m aware of. I’ll try to share more about these once we have the information in the archive. I would be interested to hear what others found valuable.

EDUCAUSE Review Article on Clickers in Library Instruction

EDUCAUSE has been facilitating many conversations about information literacy lately.  This article in the new issue of the EDUCAUSE Review, “Interactivity in Library Presentations Using a Personal Response System,” doesn’t win any prizes for creative title.  However, the article is very informative and useful and I think they did a great job with the lit review, including items from library and education literatures.

I learned about this article because I set up an RSS feed for items related to “Information Literacy and Fluency” from EDUCAUSE.   There are several other articles that I’m going to tackle next.

“Managing the Rogue Assignment” and research assignment design

I’ve been subscribing to ACRL RSS feeds for awhile, and the ACRLInsider blog includes tables of contents and links to full text for both College and Research Libraries (requires ACRL login for full text) and C&RL News (appears to be free).    This month’s C&RL News includes an article and accompanying author podcast about steps to dealing with “rogue” — poorly planned or constructed — research assignments.   I’m not sure all of the advice would work in every situation, but I believe that research assignment design and consultation is a key area that we need to be more deeply involved in.

I’ve been working with Brad Hughes of the Writing Center/Writing-across-the Curriculum to design and facilitate faculty workshops on library research assignment design.   Brad has agreed to collaborate with us this summer on workshops and other training tools for librarians who would like to be more engaged in and knowledgeable about assignment consultation.   Ideally, we’ll be involved not just in assuring that students are directed to the appropriate discovery tools, but also helping faculty develop learning outcomes and assessment strategies.

LOEX highlights – How best to share what we learned?

I’ve saved my notes for a big posting about the LOEX conference, but didn’t want to let another week slip by without saying something about it. The contingent from our campus included Eliot Finkelstein and Steve Frye (College), Steve Baumgart and Rebecca Payne (Memorial), Sheila Stoeckel and Sarah McDaniel (LILI Office), Electra Enslow (SLIS), and Diana Wheeler (Engineering). We did our best to spread out to cover all the presentations. You can see the full program online, including the presentation slides and handouts where available. LOEX also publishes printed proceedings, which we get in the LILI Office, but it takes quite awhile for them to come out.

Here are a few things that I found interesting:

• At the University of Dubuque, the library co-teaches an information literacy component of a required writing course, teaching students to analyze shared scholarly articles and marshal evidence to support their arguments for a paper assignment.
• At the University of North Carolina -Wilmington, the library has worked with the curriculum committee to create for-credit courses that are listed in the catalog and schedule of classes as LIB. It’s a small campus, but the policy documents are interesting.
• Marquette University discussed their process for creating and filling a new E-Learning Librarian position.
• Temple University talked about integrating information literacy into the curriculum in ARL libraries. They had a nice implementation of LibGuides as course pages and an interesting example from the history department.

I’ll try to share something about the keynotes in a later message. The bigger question, as we all head into professional conference season, is how best to share what we learned?

Aaron Brower talk at the LILI Forum

Aaron Brower, Professor of Social Work and Vice-Provost for Teaching and Learning, visited the LILI Forum last week. Aaron reminded us that his research interests have long been the transition to college and how we might “pre-format” college life to create niches for new students. He discussed some educational research about effective learning environments, including the NSSE elements of effective engagement and the “learning pyramid,” which tells us that people learn best when they are active participants (doing rather than just listening).

In his year-and-a-half as Vice Provost, Aaron has been working closely with Lori Berquam on how we can best characterize the educational mission of the university; how is it unique and special? This echoes John Wiley’s frequent, broader question, “ What’s so special about UW Madison?” and the Wisconsin Idea.  They developed the Wisconsin Experience draft document based on this question. The Wisconsin Experience includes both curricular and co-curricular learning experiences – librarians are in a somewhat unique position since we support a variety of learning experiences for courses and individual students.
For the library, a key element of the Wisconsin Experience is substantial research experiences that generate knowledge and analytical skills. Information literacy is listed among the Essential Learning Outcomes for UW Madison Students and is an essential part of turning research opportunities into effective learning experiences. We reviewed a list of experiences including sustained study abroad, FIGs, Delta, internships, the BRIDGE program, Wisconsin Experience capstone experiences, Biology adaptation of the Leadership Certificate, CALS adoption of the First Year Experience goals, Greater use of peer mentors, TA-ships as professional development, hybrid courses and classroom of the future…

UW Alumni Profiles Project

Thought this excerpt from a press release about 2008 Alumni profiles was interesting…  http://apa.wisc.edu/Alumni/alumni_profiles.html

“Alumni Profiles answer some broad questions about where undergraduate alumni live, if they are employed or enrolled in educational programs, and how much they value their UW-Madison education.   Alumni Profiles are available for schools and colleges and for undergraduate majors.”

Among UW-Madison alumni who graduated within the past 10 years: (a few highlights)

• 88% are employed full-time (81%) or part-time (7%).  Nearly half of alumni have provided detailed employer and job title information
• 80% of those employed say that the skills they developed at UW-Madison in problem solving, written and verbal communication, and other general skills are related or highly related to their current position
• 59% of those employed say that their current position is related or highly related to the major of their UW-Madison degree

Library Instruction / Info Lit Course — interesting projects

Since arriving at UW, I’ve been co-teaching LIS 826, a fieldwork course in library instruction / information literacy. The course actually meets quite a few times during the semester, and in class activities include teaching with peer feedback, guided activities such as designing an instruction session, a workshop on using Captivate to create online instruction, and discussions of shared readings. Students also teach a MadCat workshop, assist with library sessions for Communication A courses, and do a variety of instruction and projects in the context of field placements in individual libraries. It’s really gratifying to see the students get a wealth of practical experience, reflect, and develop as teachers over the course of the semester.

Over the years that the course has been offered, librarians have gotten very good at having students explore new directions and technologies. This semester, some examples have been a project to revise our catalog workshop (Jen Loebsack and Veronica Alzalde at Wendt), a YouTube video on boolean operators (Lexy Spry at Chemistry), and a flash-based online library tour (Electra Enslow at College). Other students are engaged in designing and teaching instruction sessions with the support of their supervisors and being TAs for an online course. I appreciate all that these students do, as well as all the work the librarians put in to provide them with meaningful learning experiences.

Some of these are still in development, but the YouTube video is up! Chemistry Librarian Emily Wixson says, “I asked Lexy to explore the possibilities of using YouTube videos as a means of teaching basic library concepts to high school students. I know that many campus librarians are involved in outreach activities with high school students. You may find this useful in those activities. Feel free to send me your comments and questions.”
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