Keeping up with what’s going on at UW – RSS Clipsheets

Many of you probably already know about this one, but just in case…

At the leadership institute I attended last week, I learned that there was a tool for keeping up with news from UW-Madison and the UW System that I was totally unaware of — the daily clip sheet.   These are the old clipping files that are now maintained online and available as RSS feeds.

The UW System Clipsheet includes “Summaries of news stories of interest to the UW System.”  Some recent items included an article on Damon A. Williams, our new vice provost for diversity and climate, and financial aid.

The UW Madison’s University Communications Clipsheet, “Selected highlights of stories featuring UW-Madison which have appeared in the media.”  Recent clips included articles on John Wiley, research on girls’ math scores conducted here, and student’s use of food pantries.

If someone’s looking for a project, I wonder how (other than long instructions) we could help them link to the articles from some of our online databases?   I’ll ask around, but let me know if you have ideas.

Lunchtime Listening — “More Information, Less Knowledge”

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the webcast, “More Information, Less Knowledge?” It was hard for me to concentrate for the full hour, my mind must be warped by Google and multitasking!

Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” was one of the panelists. He said, “one thing we know from neuroscience is that the human brain is very adaptable. … Reading .. and other patterns of thinking aren’t hard wired into our brain, they’re learned behaviors …. New technologies can change, at a very deep level, the circuitry of our brains…. Although it’s too early to have proof that that’s happening with the Internet at a biological level, there are some important clues out there that the internet is beginning to have an effect on cognition and memory ….”

Who has responsibility for learning experiences outside the classroom?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article about the debate about who has ownership over learning experiences outside the classroom.  The trend has been that Student Affairs professionals and other campus groups manage these experiences, but the National Association of Scholars has issued a statement that faculty should reestablish ownership.  On our campus, you can see the great things student affairs professionals have done (often in partnership with faculty and other groups) in the new Center for the First Year Experience.  The library participates in the planning and delivery of these programs in a variety of ways, and I would say that student affairs people are doing an amazing job leading and delivering these key, large-scale programs.  If you’re interested, the debate is raging in the comments area of the online article.

Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute

I’ve spent this week at the EDUCAUSE Learning Technology Leadership Institute, which is in Madison this year.  This is an intensive leadership program similar in structure to the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Immersion.  EDUCAUSE also has programs for managers and senior leaders.  We spent the week in presentations, facilitated sessions, finding out our personality types and their implications for working in teams, and working in a large team on a case study.   Right now I think the most important things I learned are:

• As a librarian, it was gratifying to confirm in discussions that I have learned a terrific amount about instructional design, teaching and learning initiatives, college campuses, working in teams, and project management.  It was nice to see that the expertise is comparable to that of people who identify as leaders in Learning Technology.
• Instructional technologists have some methods for dealing with project management that we should adopt.  Some examples are project charters and use case studies.  I’ve been thinking about a use case for our Library Course Pages, and now I know more about how to approach that.
• I like working in teams, but I’m not too sure about the whole personality type thing.  As usual, I ended up doing part of the presentation, which was fun.
• It is interesting and very instructive to hear the perspective of high-level IT folks on campus politics and a variety of projects and technologies.  Aaron Brower and Ron Kraemer came to speak with us today, and I learned a great deal about their strategies and work styles.
• It is really interesting to connect with instructional techology people as peers over a period of time.  I will be sure to call on many of these people in the future.

We’ll see what we learn on the last day, which is set aside for reflection.  It is really incredibly exhausting to participate in an immersion program as a local, and I know the other Madison people also feel it.   When you go home, your real life is still waiting, along with those 600 emails.

I was glad Kathy Christoph recommended the program and Ron Kraemer decided to sponsor the attendance of members of the ComETS Steering Committee.

Google “Controversy”

A post in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog, “Librarians Accuse Google of Using and Discarding Them” has generated quite a bit of commentary/controversy. The issue the article focuses on, that Google has discarded libraries by abandoning its librarian-focused initiatives and presence at our conferences, doesn’t seem all that significant to me. But the comments are kind of amazing! Along with the serious debate about the issue at hand, there’s quite a bit of venom directed at the author, some lighthearted comments (do we really need those light-up icecubes they handed out at the booth?), and a lot of red herrings. One person suggested that the problem stemmed from the fact that the librarians who had signed contracts with Google did not have faculty status. I’ve had faculty status before, and I’m sure I wasn’t smarter or more qualified at that time (I also don’t think I was more respected).

We have been having some really interesting conversations about Google in some of our working group meetings. For example, in our meetings about the CLUE tutorial, we are more certain than ever that Google keeps getting better, that it is no longer useful in any way to set ourselves up in a dichotomous relationship with Google, and that Google is a point of reference that resonates with our audience. Some of our old examples that use Google in contrast to databases are no longer correct or relevant, some of our old metaphors (e.g. the phone book) have been made irrelevant by Google, and some of our suggestions about the most efficient/effective searching need to be carefully examined. I think most librarians I know are in this same boat… we don’t see ourselves as being in competition with Google, it’s just another piece of the information universe to keep up with.

Custom Textbooks

A department we work closely with in the Communication A requirement has plans to use a custom textbook this fall for the first time.  The rationale is that they have many sections and the shared readings allow instructors to customize within certain boundaries.  We’ve also had the opportunity to include certain handouts, which is a great way to further our integration into the course.  The other reason for having the custom textbook is that it raises revenue for the program, although I’m not sure how much.

There is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the ethics of this practice.  These textbooks are hard to resell, and it’s customary to include required workbook pages that make it necessary to use a new textbook each year.

Some interesting issues for library reserves as well…

ALA Annual Conference

I don’t get to learn much at ALA these days because I spend most of my time in committee meetings.  Here are a few interesting things I did, though:

• Attended both Instruction Section Discussion Sessions, one on online instruction and one on “Using the Social Web to Enhance and Promote Information Literacy These are huge discussions where you learn a lot about what others are doing, and a digest with summary is posted on the web after conference.
• Attended a kickoff meeting of the ACRL Instruction Section/ALISE Joint Working Group on curriculum.  This committee resulted from an action plan I submitted to ACRL and was made possible by the approval of the ACRL and ALISE Boards.  The group will explore good practices for preparing LIS students for careers in instruction/information literacy in academic libraries.
• Started my year as Chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, which will be a big job!  If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, let’s talk